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Submission to the good Will of God, together with the obedience to His beneficial
Law, is the best safeguard of peace and harmony. It enables man to make peace
between himself and his fellow men on the one hand, and between the human
community and God on the other. It creates harmony among the elements of Nature.
According to Islam, everything in the world, or every phenomenon other than man is
administered by God-made Laws. This makes the entire physical world necessarily
obedient to God and submissive to His laws, which, in turn, means that it is in a state
of Islam, or it is Muslim. The physical world has no choice of its own. It has no
voluntary course to follow on its own initiative but obeys the Law of the Creator, the
Law of Islam or submission. Man alone is singled out as being endowed with
intelligence and the power of making choices. And because man possesses the
qualities of intelligence and choice he is invited to submit to the good Will of God and
obey His Law. When he does choose the course of submission to the Law of God, he
will be making harmony between himself and all the other elements of Nature, which
are by necessity obedient to God. He will be consistent with the truth and in harmony
with all the other elements of the universe. But if he chooses disobedience he will
deviate from the Right Path and will be inconsistent. Besides, he will incur the
displeasure and punishment of the Law-Giver.
Because Islam means submission to the Good Will of God and obedience to His
Beneficial Law, and because this is the essence of the message of all God-chosen
messengers, a Muslim accepts all the prophets previous to Muhammad without
discrimination. He believes that all those prophets of God and their faithful followers
were Muslims, and that their religion was Islam, the only true universal religion of
God (Qur’ an, 2:128-140; 3:78-85; 17:42-44; 31:22; 42:13)
To sum up this discussion, it may be helpful to reproduce my statement which
appeared in the Observer Dispatch (O. D.) of Utica on December 4, 1972. The
statement shows how much distortion and confusion there is in this regard. The partial
overlapping and repetition may be forgiven because of the extreme sensitivity of the
issue and the need to reiterate the Islamic point of view:
A particular news item (O. D., Nov. 25) is alarming. It invites sympathy for the
misinformed public and pity for many a school teacher or man of the pulpit. It calls
upon every man of good will and conscience to stand up to his moral obligations.
Marcus Eliason reported from Israeli-occupied Jordan that “ The Moslems,” among
other things. “ worship Abraham as Ibrahim…”
It is incredible in this day and age, in this small world of ours, to read in fresh print
that the Muslims worship Ibrahim. It is more incredible yet that this news comes from
sources presumably knowledgeable and is passed on to a public entitled to know.
For centuries, many Westerners held and propagated the idea that the Muslims
worshipped Muhammad, whose religion was called Mohammedanism and whose
followers were known in the West as Mohammedans. Then it somehow become
apparent to those Westerners that the Muslims worshipped Allah, a “ deity of sorts.”
And now this new discovery that they worship Abraham as Ibrahim.
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