Apartheid
The theory of apartheid, based on the utterances of some innovating thinker ("philosopher") denies racial equality. Its promoters want "the superior race" to run the world while "weaker inferior races" serve them.
Such a notion is, of course, totally incompatible with any philosophy of man that professes principles of "freedom", individual and/or social, as basic. Further, it prevents any growth in the weak. Most modern investigators regard the doctrine of the superiority of one race of humans over another as unfounded and artificial superstition, when viewed in the light of history and of scientific research.
"No pure race exists. No scientific evidence proves the race theory definitely. An "Aryan" race is a myth. History does not relate the actuality of a race which called itself "Aryan". The "Aryan" family of languages is a fact. But there are many instances of different racial stocks employing the same language for communication." ("History of Religion", p.219.)
National Socialism's rise was part cause of World War II. Hitler's Germany's ideology was "One race shall rule" — of course the "German Nordics"—who were to found a strong centre of government in mid-Europe. Its brief brutal regime, by means of Congresses at Nuremberg and elsewhere, and fanatic racial propaganda, drew the loyalty of German nationals who made great, if illusory, profit from their dominance of the neighbouring lands.
Dr. Gustaf le Bon in his "Bases of the Spirit of Dictatorship" (p.194) writes: "Racism played a major social role, regarded as pivotal by politicians, so that after much bloody conflict it settled to an armed peace which burst out again in devastating violence. Behind all this was the idea that the strongest nation, and that most secure from danger, is that with the largest territories and most numerous population, whereas it is just these nations that live nearest the verge of overthrow."
Today the most advanced nations consider "white" superior to "coloured" and cherish racial superstitions. In the cradle of civilisation "sin" is called "black" : and coloured people are bereft of many human rights and liberties. In some states of the U.S.A. no black man may marry a white ; and schools, colleges, hospitals segregate black and white. So do many associations, hotels, restaurants, public transport lines, and—most shameful of all—even some churches.
"In 1954 the Supreme Court made integration of schools obligatory. But white schools only accepted 4 blacks per 100 students, and the entry
of some even of them into their schools was only achieved by force and the use of troops." ("Tehran Illustrated News", No. 1174.)
The whites resorted to brutal atrocity in their struggle to hold back the blacks, reminiscent of the worst barbarities of the Middle Ages.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has not had the power to enforce its principles of racial equality. In the space-age earth is torn by racial conflict based on the colour of men's skins. Stahwood Cobb ("Lord of the two Ka'abas" p.198) writes: "I am against Kipling's sentiment; `East is East and West is West, and never the twainshall meet'. Why not? What human difference exists between one man and another? Christ taught us two millennia ago that virtue and humanity are linked with good intents, good works and love. But 20th century people know better, and say that superiority depends on skin colour! Hitler is called bad for exalting one race: but today's scene is peopled by little Hitlers. Take S. Africa. Take our own America. Apartheid and discrimination everywhere! Take Viet Nam. Was there not a racist element in our pressure there, on the basis that 'the Western white race is superior to the Asian yellow'?"
South Africa, where blacks outnumber whites by 7 to 1, has made racial discrimination its law—apartheid makes whites, blacks, Indian immigrants, coloured, live in separate communities. The identity cards state which group they belong to. The separation applies in buses, trains, churches, restaurants, telephone-kiosks, hospitals and cemeteries. Interracial marriages are prohibited. A black may not work in a white area nor take up a job of high intellectual or scientific level. Menial tasks are reserved for blacks. Small wonder that sometimes half a million are in prison! White judges preside over cases involving blacks.
"Keyhan" (the Tehran Daily) (No. 7013) reported that a black girl, born in the house of a white S. African family, was only allowed to remain in her father's home as a maid, according to the S. African law, or else go and live in the black section of Johannesburg. The father preferred to move house and home to a land where his daughter could live with her parents, as she should, rather than bow to the inhuman law enforced by the highest instance in S. African law.
"March 12, 1960, Sharpville was one of several S. African cities where demonstrations protested against the law that all blacks must carry identity cards and show them whenever ordered. Sharpville police fired on a peaceful demonstration walking past the police H.Q., killing 69, and wounding 180." ("Ettela'at" (Tehran Daily) No. 13149.) What is such repression but the enforcement of slavery?
Harry Harwood, in his book on "Freedom", writes: "True, slavery in the old form is abolished; but it lingers on in the form of class enslavement in our society, with the endeavour to keep the blacks on the lowest rung of the social ladder."
Landslide in Family Life
The family is the community in microcosm. It is the root from which nations grow. It is the basic unit of society. Its climate must be love and its soil character. In it human life begins—and ends! It must be happy, a citadel of heart-warming peace and quiet, where affection reigns, which runs on oiled wheels of confidence and trust, security and sincerity. The more firm its spiritual and moral edifice, the more sure its joy and happiness in today's troubled, explosive, insurrectionary atmosphere. Every human being has a greater need than ever for a home and family which will provide a haven of quiet and a refuge for thought and reflection.
The West pursued a simple agricultural life before the industrial revolution. In those days the family was a centre of consideration, caring and constancy. Men went out to the fields to work for a living. Women set the care and upbringing of their little ones above all else. The family circle bounded the lives of all its members.
But industry needed hands. One of the first effects of its need was the dispersal of men, women and children to industrial centres, government offices, commercial houses and other large institutions. Conurbations grew in which the sole object of existence was to increase the outward comforts and luxuries of life.
This break-up of family life weakened the marriage bond. Gentleness and affection grievously diminished. Women felt lost without the single-minded devotion to their family and the upbringing of their children which had been their sole preoccupation in previous epochs. They spent their energy in exhausting factory work. The dual role of factory worker and mother proved too much. The necessary time, the adequate opportunity, for leisure of heart, for ordering family life, was missing. She must clock in at the fixed time at work; and housework lost its charm in the weary hours of exhaustion which were all she had left to give to it.
Further, the new "freedom" was so limitless that it uprooted family life, casting chastity and decency to the winds, leaving disaster and division to replace the morality of family and social unity, which had relied on religion and conscience for their sanctions.
The mounting tide of divorces is sweeping the civilised world on a dangerous course, yet it is helplessly unable to stem the flood.
A petty difference in taste between husband and wife is found sufficient ground for ending a marriage-contract. Minor conflicts and incompatibilities are all treated as evidence that a marriage has irretrievably broken down and that a family unit should be split. The
storm-clouds of passion and prurience, with hurricane force, blast the tender growths of family oneness; and the most sacred inheritance of the centuries falls victim to the violence of the most unstable and ephemeral desires. Yet a modicum of common sense could solve the tiff and quench the fire, while tolerance and unselfishness would stabilise the relationship on a sure foundation of principle, justice and love.
An Iranian living in Germany told me that in the last few years all his neighbours, without exception, had ended their marriages in the divorce courts!
The Iranian national daily "Keyhan" (No. 6926), reported that marriage guidance councils had been set up all over East Germany to check the flood of divorces and broken families. Doctors and lawyers, too, had joined the campaign. Newspapers were devoting column after column to the matter. The rising curve of divorce statistics was blamed primarily on the wives' employment in industrial jobs which kept them outside the home. Sheer economic need drove 70% of married women to take a job simply to gain an adequate family income. Of these 60% had children. The toll of the double call on her energies by job and family householding on a woman's nerves naturally is so severe that she and her husband quarrel constantly, until their morale cracks and divorce seems the only solution for an intolerably strained situation.
Tolstoy wrote: "One main cause of the upsurge in the divorce rate is women's excessive freedom of choice, which the capricious and touchy feminine nature cannot carry. Of course it is also true that the machine-age does produce nervous strain, and throws men and women into relationships of intimacy and familiarity which easily cross the bounds of legitimate companionship, and may arouse jealousy within the family ; while women's employment outside the house rouses a host of further problems."
Statistics in New York and Washington show that divorce amongst intellectuals (sic!) outnumbers those amongst all other classes; while those in Hollywood were so shocking that the authorities refused to publish them.
"Keyhan" on 28 Farvardin 1339 reported that divorces in the past year in England were a record total-50% due to unfaithfulness, 50% to other causes.
America's "Wake Magazine" reported that the divorce rate had increased 1,000% in the last ten years.
French courts heard 9,785 suits for divorce, 8,000 on the wives' initiative.
World War I, and World War II still more, increased youth's rejection as an expression of "freedom", of traditional moral standards, and divorces increased in consequence. G. de Pels in his book "Matrimony and Modernity" says : "The excess of divorces over first marriages is due to the effects of World Wars I and II."
"The Reader's Digest", Persian Edition (No. 103, Year 25), reports a request to the French government by the French Family Federation that divorce be prohibited in the first three years of wedlock. England has
enacted the same law with two exceptions only: extraordinary brutality by the husband, or extraordinary corruption in the wife.
In the U.S.A., 3,000,000 children's parents are separated (Tehran Weekly Journal "Ettela'at" (No. 1206)). Lawson writes: "Anyone with a grain of philanthropic sense must feel the pain of these terrifying figures and seek to cure them. Since most separations are due to the women's initiative, both cause and cure must be found in them."
Alas, Iran's own Westernised classes are afflicted with the same divorce-disease. In the last decade in Tehran alone over 1,000 divorces have occurred because of quarrels over money, and been reported in the papers. Many more went unreported. Of 15,335 weddings in Tehran in 1339, 4,839 ended in divorce — almost one in three. 86% of these divorces were demanded by the wives—all Westernised materialist intellectuals (save the mark!). It is a warning of a menacing peril which must be averted. The type of "civilisation" which destroys the family cannot be left as it is if we are not to see division cleave our people asunder and unbridled passions annihilate our culture. It must be replaced by the practice of Islam's stabilising and constructive social lore.
Love of Animals
Certain Western nations are dog-lovers to the point of madness. An Iranian scientist who took his medical degree in Germany wrote: "My landlord loved his dog, kissed it and cuddled it. I tried to warn him of the danger of infection with hydatid cysts. He dismissed my remarks as unfounded, so I fetched him a medical book, which he studied with dismay, and then asked me: 'If contact with a dog is so dangerous, why do physicians and university professors keep dogs in their homes?' I replied that there are many habits professionally recognised as harmful to health which medical men indulge in because they like them, making a mockery of commonsense, science and reason, preferring to risk their welfare!"
Iran's National Society for the Protection of Animals, in its journal, quotes an American magazine, which sent a questionnaire to all its dog-loving clients (mostly women), asking:
- 1. Do you like your dog or your spouse best?
2. If you and your dog were both hungry, with insufficient food even for one, would you give that little to your dog, or eat it yourself?
3. Does your dog sleep in your bedroom?
4. If your dog died would you shed tears?
5. Do you credit your dog with a personality above animal level?
6. If your dog bit your child and your child hit the dog with a stone and both were howling, which would you rush to comfort?
7. If your dog and your husband both fell sick simultaneously, which would you call the doctor to first?
8. Does your mind frequently wander to thoughts of your dog while you are working at your office?
- 1. Close on two-thirds loved their husbands when the husband loved the dog. A number roundly stated that their dog was everything for them!
2. 60,000 said they'd give the dog the food, since it mattered less if they starved to death themselves than if the dog should fail to survive.
3. 49,000 had their dog sleeping in the bedroom. "He's better than anyone else," wrote the women.
4. Two-thirds would shed tears if the dog died, and give it a funeral ceremony.
5. Practically all replies regarded their dog as more than an animal, with a spiritual personality.
6. We'd try to quiet both."
7. "First the vet, then the doctor."
- 8. "Of course our thoughts frequently turn to our dogs while we're away at work—or anywhere else, for that matter. The dog plays too important a part in life for anyone not to keep on thinking of it."
"Time Magazine" is quoted in "Ettela'at" (No. 13241), thus: "Some of our great cities are literally 'the dog house' — e.g. London, Tokyo, Mexico City. In these, dogs are so numerous that they cause discomfort and dirt everywhere. They bite children in growing numbers and make confusion more confounded. Tokyo has 280,000; Los Angeles 300,000; New York 500,000; London 700,000; Mexico City over a million. Dogs are making a mess of the world."
The French periodical "Animal" reported that American dog-owners spend $300,000,000 annually on beauty goods and garments for their pets. In New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, beauty-shops for dogs do a roaring trade. Their attendants have to take a six or twelve-month course for a "Diploma of Dog-Beautician" to get the job! Most cities have at least one dog cemetery with funeral-rites for dogs.
Meantime, five million unemployed suffer neglect and indigence.
Of course, Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals are maintained by humane and tenderhearted people. Should they not extend their humane care to their own kind? Dr. Alexis Carrel rightly voiced the protest of all sane people against the contradictions tolerated in this world. "This should ye have done; and also not have left the other undone." Meaning "Do the lesser humane work (i.e. for animals) without neglecting the greater humane work for people."
Childhood Traumas
The physical and biological equipment of a woman fit her for certain creative functions in life, peculiar to her sex, which she is called to fulfil. Her capacity for motherhood carries with it certain emotional, mental and nervous conformations of spirit. She is formed to care for and to bring up children with supreme art and heart. The meeting of an infant's many wants, and the careful nurture of its delicate instincts in the secure climate of a loving home, is, amidst the raging passions and deadly violence prevailing in our modern world, the most vital and basic task offered to any human being. No nursery school, no infants' creche, however well-equipped or psychologically planned, can supply a mother's place. A child deprived of mother-love suffers psychological injuries.
Western women, busied with jobs outside the home, have abandoned nature's destiny; and diverted the wonderful talents innate in the feminine personality into unnatural and disastrous sidetracks. The materialisms of East and West are alike incapable of changing the ingredients of human nature. Both have removed woman from the role for which she was designed. Untold malformations result —in personalities, in communities, in moral conduct. Juveniles brought up without the proper home-environment suffer incurable traumas. Nurseries run by people whose only motive is to make a living and who lack the passion to bring children up, treat their charges from the start as potential rebels, and thereby rob them of patience and of self-respect.
Dr. Alexis Carrel wrote in his "Man, the Unknown" (publ. Harpers, New York : 50th edition p.270): "Modern society has committed a serious mistake by entirely substituting the school for familial training. The mothers abandon their children to the kindergarten in order to attend to their careers, their social ambitions, their sexual pleasures, their literary or artistic fancies, or simply to play bridge, go to the cinema, and waste their time in busy idleness. They are, thus, responsible for the disappearance of the familial group, where the child was kept in contact with adults and learned a great deal from them. Children brought up in schools with a crowd of other children of their own age [Carrel writes `young dogs brought up in kennels with others of the same age do not develop as well as puppies free to run about with their parents'. Translator] do not develop as well as those living in the company of intelligent adults. The child easily moulds his physiological, affective, and mental activities upon those of his surroundings. He learns little from children of his own age. When he is only a unit in a school he remains incomplete. To reach full strength the individual requires the relative
isolation and the attention of the restricted social group consisting of the family."
Tehran weekly "Ettela'at" (No. 1206) quotes a foreign report that in America 25% of women in divorce suits suffer from mental ailments, while 150,000 children per annum fall victims to the ills consequent upon a divided home. Women, after a day's work, go home tired out; while home-life itself is so painful for many that they take tranquillisers or other pills, and frequent psychiatric clinics, in search of relief from nervous debility. Youth psychiatrist Dr. George Mally says: "Many psychological ailments in young people are due to memories of babyhood for which their mothers bear the blame. Lying, torturing dumb animals, delinquency, appear in young people who have lacked a mother's care."
Where affection and love between father and mother is weak, children feel less sense of duty to parents. In some families the members never see each other for years, and children by the age of 17 turn surly and rebellious. Some parents turn the children out of the home to fend for themselves at the earliest age allowed by law. Others allow the children to continue to live at home, if they contribute the expenses of their board and lodging, and replace any crockery they break at once out of their own pocket. Such treatment is worse for girls, who tend to seek solace for the loneliness caused by lack of parental care in undesirable friendships with boys.
Conurbations where machines do so much of the work have banished the ancient warmth and joy of heartfelt affection in family and neighbourly relations. Townspeople forget what tenderness, unselfishness, fellow-feeling and sympathy are ; and come to count those they call "friend" on the fingers of one hand. Civilised living has dried out the wellsprings of humanity with its "new order". On the assembly-line, cooperation is enforced by legal and financial sanctions. But the team-work of heart, by which one person voluntarily helps another who is in difficulties, vanishes amongst the depersonalised crowds of unneighbourly neighbours. "Bear ye one another's burdens", which for our tribal forefathers was normal living, has nowadays become something which few people will do unless they are paid for it.
While I was a patient in that German hospital, my visitors, though few, were more numerous than those who visited native German patients, much to the hospital staffs surprise.
Let me add a true story from my own experience. Some years ago a German university professor accepted Islam under the tutelage of the Hamburg Islamic community. Later the new Muslim fell ill and was hospitalised. When the Islamic leader heard of this, he straightaway went to visit the professor in hospital. He found him unexpectedly dejected and downcast. After a long silence the professor broke out with a sad tale : "Today my wife and son visited me. They had learned that I had an incurable cancer, and said they had come to say 'goodbye' for the last time as they understood I have only a few days more to live. It's not the fact that I am dying that gets me down, but my wife and my son's heartlessness." "Never mind!" said the Imam, "Islam's your family now.
And we believers will come and sit around you here and see to your every need until the end and after. To do this is for us a winning of merit in heaven, a sacred duty, a divine command and sincere expression of our brotherly love." This news made the patient's face light up. Thereafter he gradually weakened and died. The Muslim community undertook his funeral and escorted his body to their cemetery. Whilst the cortége was proceeding with due solemnity, a youth rushed up and angrily demanded the professor's corpse. They asked "Why?" He said: "That's my father you are burying—illegally, for I sold the hospital his body for 30 marks some days before he died!" The scandalised Muslims stood firm. After some heated altercation the young man had to withdraw his demand. Asked later what his job was, he replied: "I work days in a factory and evenings in a dog-beauty-parlour." To such depths can family love, human feeling and a sense of proportionate values sink in a society that is "civilised"!
Conclusion of Part I
Mankind's downhill rush from moral levels plunges into a materialist flood of social unrest and sedition. The greatest thinkers realise that some way must be found to end the avalanche if the world is not to collapse from its own depravity. Thinkers, as one man, declare that only in a revival of faith and morality can there be found a safe ground on which to build the new society, A change of heart in countless individuals must precede, and lay the foundation for, family, community, financial, national and international renewal. It is a hopeful sign that the masses of ordinary people submerged in the sea of troubles caused by materialist, heartless, machine-made living are beginning to realise the inhumanity and hopelessness of such a way of life and type of society.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower, as U.S. President, voiced this realisation in powerful words: "Our affluent society rests on shaky moral grounds. We reach the moon and pollute the earth. We long for peace and go to war. An age that has split the atom must heal the splits in humanity. Empty hands must be filled with work, empty stomachs with food, and empty hearts with satisfaction. To cure the moral crisis that blights our world, each of us need only look to ourselves. If we each listen to the still small voice of conscience we shall soon perceive that simple basic things, like goodness, purity, unselfishness, love, integrity, are our greatest and most priceless treasure. Seek affluence in these, and the tragedies of misused material affluence will end in happiness for all."
Dr. Alexis Carrel in his "Way and Rule of Life" (pp.15 and 34): "We need a world in which every person can develop their innate talents to the full, with no separation between material and spiritual. We have learnt that life cannot be lived right without a guide and a compass. But too few are alert to the grave perils which await human life if we do not follow that guide's directions. Too many are guided by their fleeting passions, intoxicated by the materialist ease which technology provides, unwilling to renounce even a small portion of those comforts, pursuing pleasure, bobbing like corks on the flood of lust for gain and fun which will soon drop us all over the falls. Instead of letting the assumptions of an orderly universe, on which science bases its work, shape our human institutions, and bear us upward towards supreme truth, we have poured them into the moulds of ideologies which can never satisfy our real need. Putting the material first, modern man sacrifices spiritual to economic affluence, and abandons peace of heart for hedonism. We think 'freedom' includes independence of nature's laws. Liberalism and Marxism preach doctrines which neglect the fact that man was not made only for 'production and
consumption'. He was designed for pure love, religious feeling, intellectual treasures, creative imagination, self-sacrifice and heroic living. To live solely for economics is to amputate a vital part of his personality, and this is why both liberalism and Marxism not merely neglect but actually destroy and cast away the basic elements which nature itself included in man's composition."
To eradicate the causes of these tragedies and miseries, the modern world's sole hope is a return to Divine Truth as revealed by God's inspiration through His Prophets. The next sphere for exploration must be that interior space which is within the mind of man. For this we must first disperse the storm-clouds of passion which darken it : we must loose the fetters of lust which bind the human spirit : we must expel the corruption and filth which confine him in the valley of the shadow by means of a cleansing revolution which refines both thinking and living. Only so can man regain true humanity and enter into his rightful heritage of those spiritual values which should be his distinguishing characteristic, by means of which alone the deep inward happiness Man was made for can grow and expand to all his fellow humans everywhere.
In Part 2 we will see what Islam has to offer as signposts on that road to a God-given destiny for the world.
