A Critical Exposition of the Popular 'Jihád'/Introduction/39

by Moulavi Gerágh Ali

[Sidenote: Finality of the social reforms of Mohammad.]

39. (1) Mohammad had to deal with barbarous nations around him, to be gradually reformed, and besides this the subject of social reforms was a secondary question. Yet it being necessary to transform the character of the people and to reform the moral and social abuses prevailing among them, he gradually introduced his social reforms which proved immense blessings to the Arabs and other nations in the seventh century. Perhaps some temporary but judicious, reasonable and helpful accommodations had to be made to the weakness and immaturity of the people, as halting stages in the march of reforms only to be set aside at their adult strength, or to be abolished when they were to begin to emerge from their barbarism under its influence to a higher civilization. Consequently gradual amelioration of social evils had necessarily to pass several trials during progress of reform. The intermediate stages are not to be taken as final and irrevocable standard of morality and an insuperable barrier to the regeneration of the Arabian nation. Our adversaries stick indiscriminately to these temporary measures or concessions only, and call them half measures and partial reforms made into an unchangeable law which exclude the highest reforms, and form a formidable obstacle to the dawn of a progressive and enlightened civilization. I have in view here the precepts of Mohammad for ameliorating the degraded condition of women for restricting the unlimited polygamy and the facility of divorce, together with servile concubinage and slavery.^[1] Mohammad's injunctions and precepts, intermediary and ultimate, temporary and permanent, intended for the removal of these social evils, are interwoven with each other, interspersed in different Suras and not chronologically arranged, in consequence of which it is somewhat difficult for those who have no deep insight into the promiscuous literature of the Koran to find out which precept was only a halting stage, and which the latest. It was only from some oversight on the part of the compilers of the Common Law that, in the first place, the civil precepts of a transitory nature and as a mediate step leading to a higher reform were taken as final; and in the second place, the civil precepts adapted for the dwellers of the Arabian desert were pressed upon the neck of all ages and countries. A social system for barbarism ought not to be imposed on a people already possessing higher forms of civilizations.

Footnotes

1. "The cankerworm of polygamy, divorce, servile concubinage and veil lay at the root. They are bound up in the character of its existence. A reformed Islam which should part with the divine ordinances on which they rest, or attempt in the smallest degree to change them by a rationalistic selection, abetment or variation would be Islam no longer." Annals of the Early Caliphate by Sir W. Muir, page 458.