country there can be no peace as long as a just solution of the two great problems
of wealth and sex cannot be found. Europe has gone to two extremes on the wealth question — Capitalism and Communism. There is either the tendency to concentrate wealth among the great capitalists, or by community of wealth, to bring the indolent and the industrious to one level. Islām offers the true solution by ensuring to the worker the reward of his work, great or small, in accordance with the merit of the work, and also by allotting to the poor a share in the wealth of the rich. Thus, while the rights of property are maintained in their true sense, an arrangement is made for equalizing conditions by taking a part of the wealth of the rich and distributing it among the poor according to the principle of zakāt (or poor-rate, an obligatory charity) and also by a more or less equal division of property among heirs on the death of an owner. Thus, writing towards the close of his book, a European orientalist remarks:
“Within the Western world Islām still maintains the balance between exaggerated opposites. Opposed equally to the anarchy of European nationalism and the regimentation of Russian communism, it has not yet succumbed to that obsession with the economic side of life which is characteristic of present-day Europe and present-day Russia alike. Its social ethic has been admirably summed up by Professor Massignon: ‘Islām has the merit of standing for a very equalitarian conception of the contribution of each citizen by the tithe to the resources of the community; it is hostile to unrestricted exchange, to banking capital, to state loans, to indirect taxes on objects of prime necessity, but it holds to the rights of the father and the husband, to private property, and to commercial capital. Here again it occupies intermediate position between the doctrines of bourgeois capitalism and Bolshevist communism.”11
Similarly Islām’s solution of the sex question is the only one that can ensure ultimate peace to the family. There is neither the free-love which would loosen all ties of social relations, nor the indissoluble binding of man and woman which turns many a home into a veritable hell. And, by solving these and a hundred other problems, Islām — as its very name indicates — can bring true happiness to the human race.
11 H.A.R. Gibb, Whither Islām, pp. 378–379.