Christianity and Islam in Africa
The Christian religious establishment has no fears of Judaism, Hinduism or Buddhism, since these are religions of national groups which exert little influence outside their native environment. So the only danger which they feel to be menacing is Islam. For it has an ideology and way of thought which they know, some as friends, some as enemies. The "Suddeutscher Zeitung" reported the Pope as saying to the bishops assembled at the Vatican Council 1 : "Islam constitutes a more serious threat in Africa to Christianity than does Communism."
Although Islam's missionary efforts are practically nil, its sheer breadth of culture and emotional power win many converts in a number of places, particularly in Africa, where oppressed blacks find its inclusive brotherhood so attractive a refuge that the Church cannot fail to take note of the numbers which it draws.
"Belgian Institutes" reports that, at the start of the 20th century, there were 4,000 Muslims in one province of the Congo, and that by the 1960s in Maniyema and Stanleyville and Kivu this number had increased to 236,000.
The Paris periodical "Peru" quotes Marcel Corder, European expert on Islam in Africa, as saying : "Islam, once the religion of chiefs and princes, has recently become a faith of the masses, who like rushing floods are on the move toward a better, quieter life ; and, carried on this tide, the realism and urgency of Islam spreads from the north of Africa to the south with irresistible speed."
"The Revue de Paris", assessing Islam, paganism and Christianity in Africa, says: "Islam is advancing at a phenomenal rate, winning on the average half a million new adherents annually, not on the ground of its ancient roots, but of the new conditions of life developed in the last century, so that a conservative estimate might reckon 50% of black Africans as in some measure Muslims ... In 1950 four graduates of EI-Azhar opened Muslim schools in Mabaku, which were making lightning progress until the French government stepped in and swiftly closed them down."
Dr. L. V. Vaglieri, Professor at Naples University, writes: "What is the reason why, despite the considerable freedom allowed to non-Muslims in
____________
1 The Vatican Council draws Catholic leaders from every continent to Rome, where it is held about style='font-size:6.0pt;line-height:110%; once a century. Its object is to settle issues which may have arisen in any part of the world. At the last vatican Council 7,000 Church leaders assembled under the chairmanship of the Pope. Its discussions on church affairs occupied three series of sessions, each two months long, at a total cost of some 650 million Italian lire!
Islamic communities, and the total lack of any Muslim missionary work nowadays, and the general weakness of all religions everywhere, Islam has nonetheless been making great advances in Asia and Africa in recent years? Today it is not the sword which compels acceptance. Indeed, many lands once ruled by Muslims are now under non-Muslim governments which push their own religions at the Muslim populations—yet in vain! What is the power hidden in this faith? What in the inmost nature of humanity finds contentment and satisfaction therein? What profound element in the human spirit is moved to respond to Islam's call with so enthusiastic and glad a shout of 'Here am I'?"
Christians stop at nothing in their efforts to destroy Islam. Professor Muhammad Qutb writes: "A shipping line of English origin runs establishments in South Africa. It once employed many South African Muslims on its ships, but, being a Christian company, decided not to employ Muslims. To achieve this end it paid part of its employees' earnings with alcoholic drink. Since alcohol is forbidden to Muslims, nor may they sell it, they lost this part of their wages. A Muslim lawyer learnt of their plight and advised them to refuse to receive this form of payment, unknown anywhere else in the entire world, and to take the company to court if it objected to their protest. The company, as soon as the protest was made, promptly made it a pretext for firing every Muslim from their employ." Philanthropy indeed!
Muslim missionaries face a wide-open door in Africa. The people of that continent are ready to embrace Islam with heart and soul if we would show any sort of zeal in carrying the message to them. For all Africa is seeking a religion that can harmonise the spiritual and the material, promote social equity and equality, and call all mankind to peace, to quiet and to truth.
Modern Christianity cannot, because of its own poverty and deficiencies, meet this longing. The Church itself is a divisive factor, supporting discrimination, not allowing black and white to worship the same God in the same building at the same time! In fact, the Christian attitude to the blacks is inhuman.
Lumumba, Congo leader now dead, once told a Paris newspaper: "I could never understand why we were taught in our schools that Christian principles merited our respect, while outside our schools Europeans acted in ways entirely contrary to those principles and trod all civilised humane precepts underfoot. The way the Europeans treated the blacks gave the lie to all that their schools taught."
It is not only in Africa that Christianity is being challenged by Islamic advance. In America Islam bids fair to win the allegiance of the black population. Every effort is made to suppress Islamic agencies. The Senate requested the president to ban the Black Muslims and make their activities illegal. But preventive measures only increase Black Muslim membership and strengthen the enthusiasm of their activities. They now run 70 branches in 27 states. Islamic cultural centres exist in Chicago and Detroit: while Islamic centres and mosques have been built in numerous other cities of the U.S.A. The Muslims run a newspaper called
"Muhammad Speaks". They stage protest-demonstrations at which they carry banners inscribed: "There is no God but Allah: and Muhammad is His Prophet."
Black Muslims perform their religious duties with exemplary enthusiasm. Their womenfolk wear the veil. They try to buy only meat slaughtered in accordance with Muslim law, stamped with the "Moon and Star" guarantee. The fact that certain individuals have made personal fortunes by monopolising sales of proper dress, foodstuffs and other Muslim essentials in exploitation of the new piety; the fact that a few extremists have resorted to irreligious violence; and the fact that many of the new converts have still only a rudimentary grasp of the theological truths underlying their faith — these facts do not negate the blessings already brought to the converted masses. They are ills which will be cured as instruction and practice deepen the newfound faith. For Black Muslims eagerly learn Arabic and insist on schools and colleges teaching their children Arabic to enable them to read the Qur'an in the original. Amongst them thieves may be executed. Even enemies admit that Islam has brought a change of heart to Black Muslims.
Christian missionaries in Africa do not attempt to assist the Africans to progress to equal the whites. They wish them to remain subject to the white church and state. As Professor Westermann "Imperialism and the Gospel" writes: "Conversion to Islam raises the convert's social status, increases his self-respect, shows him his possibilities, teaches him to be a world-citizen, defines his relations with Europeans in dignity. The black man who previously carried garbage on his head gains in Islam a status which wins respect, even amongst Europeans. But a black man who abandons paganism for Christianity sees himself in a different light from the Black Muslims, since the foundation of our society is different from that in which Africans were brought up. They see the outward benefits of our civilisation, but cannot grasp its inwardness because we have not given them the requisite training to do so. Nor have they grasped their own distinctive contribution and specialties, because we have not understood our duty to study the black cultural background, and to help the Africans progress on lines that are a natural continuation of their historical development to date. Comparing the African background with our own as superficially as the African regards our way of life, we offer our fellow-Europeans an unflattering and one-sided picture of the black man. We present him as an inferior European. But Islam presents him as a black African to be respected as such by himself and by others. Islam gives him a natural equality which we fail to see. He is a human being with his own history and tradition. But Christians, who think of their present level of culture as natural to man, treat black converts to their religion with the condescension due to poor savages living amid rubble and rubbish. They provoke the blacks to vindicate their superiority. Here the Black Muslims offer them their chance, while black Christians are pushed back into inferiority. For this reason American Negroes surge towards Islam and away from Christianity.":
Anti-Islamic Propaganda
Church leaders face the advance of Islam apprehensively. To prevent the harmony of Islam's truth reaching men's ears, Christian leaders use smear tactics in a world-wide propaganda of calumny and denigration which stops at nothing.
I saw an example of this on German TV. A Yemeni Muslim described the mosques of Yemen and the worship in them. Then the TV interviewer gave a detailed description of the region's poverty and distress. He blamed Islam for acting as an obstacle to the progress of the Yemeni people. "A bigoted adherence to the tenets and principles of Islam," he said, "kept the Yemen in primitive backwardness and weakness, lingering two centuries behind the forward strides of civilisation in the rest of the world." This he called an example of "Islam's failure to keep pace with the changes most of mankind are enjoying."
Imagine the effect of such poisonous propaganda, backed by skilfully selected film, on European minds, either uninformed, scantily informed, or wholly misinformed about the nature of Islam! Surely such distortions are a betrayal of humanity.
These propagandists should be asked: "If the Yemen's lack of progress in material living is to be accounted for on the background of their religion, why is the south of Italy so backward when the Pope reigns supreme there? Why do so many leave southern Italy to seek menial employment in wealthier lands? Why is Christian Greece so far behind many Muslim countries? Why did Greece, which before the rise of Christianity pioneered man's upward road, itself go downhill towards ruin after accepting Christianity, until it came under the Turkish flag and started to rise again? Or again, why do the non-Muslim peoples of Asia suffer miseries far worse than any Muslim land knows?"
In Bosnia, where Muslims, Orthodox and Catholics, live cheek by jowl, the Muslims are the better off. In Russia Muslims are no whit inferior to their Christian neighbours. Chinese Muslims are ahead of Buddhists there. Singapore's Arabs enjoy greater material prosperity than any other of that island's inhabitants, including the British.
Most Westerners present Islam in a false light, repeating baseless fabrications which betray blank ignorance of Islam's principles: and churches encourage such errors.
Muhammad Qutb "Islam and Misconceptions of Enlightened Thinkers" (p.298 Persian ed.) writes: "I spent some hours discussing Islamic matters in Cairo with a U.N. delegate. Suddenly he exclaimed: `All very fine! You have made a powerful case for the rightness and truth
of Islam. But I can't give up the benefits of modern progress. For instance, I like flying in supersonic planes. . . .' He added a few other technological advantages until I broke in, astounded: 'But what's to prevent you enjoying modern comforts?' He replied: 'Well, I thought you Muslims advocate a return to tent life in the desert, and want me to go back to nomadism and wilderness-living like a savage!"
In Germany I lodged in a hotel where the manager was a man who had studied in English and French universities, gained high degrees, and even studied Arabic. He said to me: "As a Unitarian I know my God well and have implicit faith in Him. But I cannot accept the God whom the religious establishment bid their followers serve and worship in their buildings. It seems to me wholly alien to the rationality of a Creator to expect His creatures to follow a path which runs directly contrary to enlightened thought and to human nature itself." He added, with the depth of his feelings written all over his face: "The worship of the One God must decide man's destiny, eradicate the evil consequences of misleading ideas, and raise human culture to pure monotheism."
This highly educated European knew nothing of Islam's creed of the pure unity of God, nor of the basic difference between the Holy Qur'an on the one side and the Old and New Testaments on the other. He imagined that the Qur'an resembled Torah (O.T.) and Gospel (N.T.) in its presentation of God. So I gave him a book in German on Islam to enable him to learn its principles.
It is unfortunate that some of our compatriots commit acts when abroad which Westerners attribute to Muslims in general, and on them judge Islam, whereas the perpetrator acted (a) as an individual, and (b) contrary to his religion. Indeed, my hotelier, on the ground of the behaviour of a few Iranians, had refused to accommodate any more Iranians, and only made an exception in my case because an old and trusted friend of his insisted. Even then he only agreed to a stay of a few days. In the course of that visit he gained confidence in me, solely because he never saw me overstep the bounds of decency and right, and not because I made any extraordinary effort to win his regard. He praised me (modesty forbids my quoting his exact words), and even demonstrated his emotions and affection with presents. Sometimes a guest came to his full hotel, to whom he gave my room, while offering me his own private room instead, leaving his desk in it, open and piled with documents of value!
Finally the day came that I had to go elsewhere. He took down my new address, and from then on, whenever Iranians asked him for rooms, he at once telephoned me and asked for my character guarantee. I went bail for their good conduct, to save fellow-Iranians' difficulties (for foreigners on their first visit to a foreign city, unless they have had the wisdom to reserve ahead, find much trouble in discovering accommodation in the early hours of the night).
One night the hotelier rang and asked about some newly arrived Iranians on their first visit to Germany. I gave my customary guarantee of their character. But next morning he rang me, and in a voice which betrayed his disquiet and dismay, complained: "Those people you vouched for last
night proved shockingly bad guests." I shamefacedly apologised, and decided : "Never again!"
The present world crisis gives Muslims a prime occasion for opening the hearts of the civilised world to the inspiring tenets and programmes of Islam. The conditions for making this holy creed known in wide circles are propitious. True, it is the congruence of a religion with the inmost needs of human nature which insures that faith's spread, but circumstances and environmental needs merit study on a world scale also, for discernment of psychological moments favourable to its proclamation. This study and this proclamation we have not yet, alas, undertaken as we should. Yet without it, individual moves, inadequate actions, hit-and-miss efforts, planless propaganda, unco-ordinated institutions, can never achieve a satisfactory result, nor advance far into territories where opposition is traditional and deep-rooted.
We err in not grasping the supreme importance of intelligent propaganda with sound organisation. Despite the admirable force inherent in Islamic culture for a revolutionary advance, and its specialised lore of society, the factors that should realise this have vanished from our midst. For all our heritage of the soundest canons and most rewarding ideology, our plight is desperate, and of itself leaves a wide field of action open to Islam's foes.
Morals in the West
Life is for Westerners "machine-made". It has lost spirit and warmth. True, many material discomforts, deficiencies and difficulties have been overcome and banished by "civilised" devices. But the social life that results shows no evidence of the glory of the spirit of man.
The glaring divisions and dissatisfactions of modern civilisation must be patent to the merest dunce. The inventions and discoveries made to ease life and advance civilisation fail to ease man's disillusion and disquiet of mind. Social difficulties and dangerous crises may have been averted, but this has not sufficed to confer happiness and joy on the generality of mankind.
Over and above his varied physical needs, man has a moral urge and a spiritual yearning. The attraction of physical delights is no greater than the pull of ethical impulses and intellectual quests. To confine men's minds within the four walls of materialism is an unforgivable sin.
"The pursuit of happiness" is rightly included with "life and liberty" among "man's inalienable rights". The first step towards happiness involves preoccupation with the perfecting of personality, and not of the material environment alone.
Parallel with his astounding advances in industrial and scientific technology, man must equally advance his inner resources, his spiritual powers and his force of soul. These have been allowed to fall behind. There can be no true human perfection without equilibrium in life's inner and outer aspects—both. If they are in imbalance, "civilisation" offers no base for hundred per cent happiness.
Modern ethical and social shortcomings demonstrate that the factors which produce human perfection have not been allowed the attention they warrant. Humanity has erred in failing to recognise and study the factors of happiness and well-being.
History contains no nation so impregnated with total corruption in every department of its life that no single sound section remained. So it is with the West today. Alongside moral corruption, good qualities still exist. There are many who faithfully follow the precepts of honesty, decency and right. But these virtues do not make up for the sins and wickednesses that abound.
Such virtues may be approached from different angles and practised on different grounds. The West's moral capital has been removed from the Bank of Faith where it belongs. Divorced from its source in religion, it depreciates both in intrinsic value and in interest returns. Where the prevailing motive is profit, righteousness and goodness are judged by their material profitability. Small wonder that they decline in the West!
Sex in the West
In sexual conduct the West has stepped outside all moral bounds. In life's beginnings everyone knew in his heart that purity and continence in sex matters have a moral value of their own, and that transgression leads to moral degradation. But this truth has either been gradually forgotten, or else deliberately obliterated from men's consciences by subversives.
Purity has lost its esteem, and been discarded by society, while all sanctions for control of morals have been abandoned.
A friend told me that he heard a girl ask for advice on one of Germany's regional radio stations. saying: "For some years I've gone steady with a boy, but in the course of time tired of him and decided to take up with another boy. Can I keep them both? Or should I give up the second relationship and stick to the first?"
The Radio Counsellor replied with the guidance (sic!): "Until the age of 28 you are at perfect liberty to enjoy the company of, and have intercourse with, one friend or several, without any ties or conditions, so have no scruples or worries in doing what you like!"
Where are we when the media, and other authorities, whose duty it is to protect public morals and ban pollution, themselves recommend fornication, and under the pseudonym of "a special relationship before marriage" promote promiscuity ; or posing as "champions of freedom" cast off morality and preach revolt against decency and self-esteem and properpride?
Will Durant, the sociologist, wrote in his "Pleasures of Philosophy": "City life prevents men from observing the seasons, while sexual passions increase and conditions make indulgence easier. A civilisation which makes marriage economically impossible before the age of 30 drives a man to sexual deviation, weakens continence, and reduces purity from its original esteem as a virtue to distant lip-service as an impractical dream. Art enhances human beauties. Men cease to count their sins. Women, claiming equality with men, fall prey to passions. Love affairs unlimited and premarital cohabitation become the rule rather than the exception. The streets may be free of prostitutes—but not through fear of the police! It is because women have bankrupted prostitutes by taking over their business for free!"
Human nature is made to desire control of its powers, so that they are employed justifiably. To trespass on ground abhorrent to humanity's essence cannot fail to raise a crop of undesirable growths. To trample the laws of his own being underfoot in the name of freedom can never yield the peace of heart and joy of mind men seek.
Western permissiveness has made licence public. Has this unbridled riot of wantonness subsided? Crime, rape, neurasthenia, riots, strikes— what generates all these but this same sexual "liberty" and licence?
Sweden has given total sexual freedom for a quarter of a century. Such savagery now prevails amongst its youth that professors and responsible authorities suffer from it. A Parliamentary commission was set up to study this outbreak of savagery and its insurrectionary perils. The Swedish Prime Minister frankly said: "We shall need at least a generation to redress the disasters caused by an error lasting twenty years."
Freud examined man's animal nature and traced all human actions to font-family: "Bookman Old the sex urge. He thus divorced sex from ethics. Chastity went by the board. No one could think up a frontier to stop its downward rush. In its train it dragged many human values. Thus, "The Reader's Digest" reports : "West German statistics show that occupying troops of the victor nations have fathered 200,000 bastards, 5,000 of them black, on German women, all now in care at the German government's charges. And this is 10% of the total number of illegitimate children now a charge on the government, not to speak of the unknown number unborn through contraceptives or abortions. Of East Germany we have no facts, but it is more than probable that the problem there, if not worse, is no better. Nor do other Western nations lag far behind Germany. Most painful is a report from Northampton, in Mid-England, that illegitimate births are of all living births, and that this started when Northampton went over from agricultural to industrial employment." ("Divorce and Modernity", p.34.)
The psychologist, Dale Carnegie, writes in his "Mirror of Success": "Statistics published by an American foundation show that husbands who were known to be unfaithful to their wives were of all classes and all ages. Some 50% of all husbands are unfaithful, some regularly. Most of those who remain faithful do so perforce, through fear of disease or lack of opportunity. Telephone-tapping in New York over a short period revealed that New York wives are equally promiscuous."
"The Encyclopaedia Britannica" (Vol. 23, p.45), says : "Of all U.S. hospitals, 650 specialise in V.D. and half as many more sufferers from V.D. apply for help to their G.P. or local specialist." Kinsey's book on "Habits of Sexual Behaviour" (p.304), shows that 3,000-4,000 infants annually are born in the U.S.A. with venereal disorders. And the proportion of deaths in the U.S. from these diseases is greater than the total mortality rate of all other illnesses added together—except for T.B.
The Tehran Daily "Ettela'at" (Tehran Journal) No. 10414 reports from "Psychology" of December 1960: "The number of illegitimate 95%; births in the U.S. has increased so rapidly that it is a headache for the 95%; American government. The statistics for 1957 show more than 200,000. 95%;illegitimate births in the U.S.A. — an increase of 5% over twenty years."
"Black, White" (No. 380), reports : "The annual abortions in the U.S.A. exceed 1,000,000. 65% are due to free relationships outside wedlock, and 50% are of unmarried teenage girls."
Dr. Molenz of South London said, according to the Tehran Daily
"Kayhan" (No. 535): "Of every five girls attending church in England, one is pregnant. Criminal abortions in London reach 5,000 per annum. One living birth in twenty is illegitimate. Despite the annual improvement in the standard of living, this number increases year by year. Illegitimacy is most prevalent in well-to-do families; and girls in rich families are more prone to become unmarried mothers."
These facts suffice to demonstrate modern civilised man's enslavement to his sexual instincts. Sexual indulgence has reached such a pitch that many moral and human values best learnt in family life have been forgotten, so that people no longer acknowledge any bounds or limits governing conduct.
Some years ago Tehran newspapers reported that in Idaho men exchanged wives for three-week periods, and gave each other presents to "seal their friendship". An outcry arose and the group was indicted in court in order to safeguard future generations and punish fornication.
So -much for misconceptions in one area of human life, the sexual.
Social Drop-outs
In every nation it is the thoughts of their learned men and the way of life of their leaders which shape the convictions of the public and the thinking of the individual by direct influence. "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Corruptio optimi pessima." If the ruling class who are trustees and guides of society promulgate filth, what can be expected of the lower orders? If the salt has lost its savour, what will salt the mass? Lustful desires are natural in man. The example set by the leaders who give such desires free rein overrides all moral precepts. A person raised in the school of unbridled self-indulgence conceives of total personal freedom as unrestrained permissiveness. In this the ideas of chastity and purity have no place; only the impulses of the feeling of any moment decides action.
Those who throw moral standards overboard raise a hedonist insurrectionary posterity, helpless and hopeless in the face of elemental carnal urges, turning a deaf ear to the calls of duty sounded by reason and conscience.
Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson of the Mahatma, declared in 1962 in the U.S.A. : "A painful future awaits America, since youth there is sunk in sensuality, unwilling to perform their duties. Of seven young men called up for the draft, six fail their medical because of capacity deficiencies and weakened spirit caused by dissipation."
Khrushchev likewise in 1962 forecast : "The U.S.S.R. faces dangers ahead because of the grip that sexual passions have fastened on our youth."
Strange that this age of scientific and industrial progress is being driven to its knees by youth's preoccupation with the sexual problem, at the core of a technological society depersonalised by the heartless monotony of a machine-made environment.
The Beatles are one phenomenon the age has thrown up — indisciplined, inelegant, imbecile, they draw youth in crowds. Next the hippies, like tares in a cornfield of culture, revolt against the dry materialism of the established environment. Rejecting ethical values and spiritual sanctities as ungrounded superstition, they deride rational living, drop out of society, and run riot; until, when they need a moral standard and spiritual refuge, they find themselves destitute and forlorn.
Such social phenomena, results of youth's emotional derailment, reflected in pollution and corruption, show that modern civilisation, which treats people as cogs in a machine, can never satisfy the innate longings of human hearts, with their spiritual sensitivity and humane
sentiments. The rise in the suicide rate is further evidence that material comfort and ease do not suffice.
Germany's annual "Police Report" (p.1974), lists 10,000 suicides in West Germany, while over 6,000 men and 7,000 women made unsuccessful suicide attempts.
In France, prime home of intellect, 35,000 suicide attempts are recorded annually.
The consumption of hard drugs amongst American youth is so terrifyingly high that recently New York police found the corpses of 38 youths, aged from 16-35, dead through drug-taking. Some of the victims were drive to such desperation by inability to get drugs that they slashed their wrists. Heroine addicts are the most numerous-- 100,000 in New York alone -- one addict in every 70 inhabitants! Among the rich of the U.S.A., addicts rank high. A New York doctor said that one of America' smost famous actors injects himself with ten doses per 24 hours at $60 the dose! "Many deaths of high ranking personalities, officially attributed to heart failure," he adds, "are, in fact, fatalities due to drug addiction." (Ettela'at No. 13015.)
"The Spirit of Man" (p.32), says: "In the U.S.A. a major crime is committed every 25 minutes; and every 24 hours 3 murders, 5 indecent assaults, 30 major thefts and 3,000 petty larcenies. Four billion dollars is spent on combating crime and upholding law, and of this $100,000,000 is disbursed in New York alone."
Such is the life-style, self-emasculated, yet boasting its brains and culture and elevation, which people seek to emulate, and choose as their .life-model!
