solely on a moral basis, and that true and lofty morals are inspired only by faith in God, but even the unity and cohesion of jarring human elements, without which it is impossible for any civilization to survive, is best brought about by the unifying force of religion. It is often said that religion is responsible for much of the hatred and bloodshed in the world, but a glance at the history of religion will show that this is a monstrous misconception. Love, concord, sympathy, kindness to one’s fellow-man, have been the message of every religion, and every nation has learnt these essential lessons in their true purity only through the spirit of selflessness and service which a faith in God has inspired. If there have been selfishness and hatred and bloodshed, those have been there in spite of religion, not as a consequence of the message of love which religion has brought. They have been there because human nature is too prone to these things; and their presence only shows that a still greater religious awakening is required, that a truer faith in God is yet the crying need of humanity. That man sometimes turns to low and unworthy things does not show that the nobler sentiments are worthless, but only that their development has become a more urgent necessity.
If unification be the true basis of human civilization, by which phrase is meant the civilization not of one nation or of one country but of humanity as a whole, then Islām is undoubtedly the greatest civilizing force the world has ever known or is likely to know. Fourteen hundred years ago it was Islām that saved it from crashing into an abyss of savagery, that came to the help of a civilization whose very foundations had collapsed, and that set about laying a new foundation of rearing an entirely new edifice of culture and ethics. A new idea of the unity of human race as a whole, not of the unity of this or that nation, was introduced into the world — an idea so mighty that it welded together nations which had warred with one another since the world began. It was not only in Arabia, among the ever-bickering tribes of a single peninsula, that this great “miracle”, as an English writer terms it, was wrought8 — a miracle before the magnitude of which everything
8 “A more disunited people it would be hard to find till suddenly the miracle took place. A man arose who, by his personality and by his claim to direct Divine guidance, actually brought about the impossible — namely the union of all those warring factions” (The Ins and Outs of Mesopotamia, p.99).