By the scholar Muhammad al-Khidr Husayn (d. 1377 AH), may God have mercy on him
If those endowed with wisdom and decisive speech were asked to prescribe ways giving people the finest vantage point from which to understand true justice and perfect morals, and limits comprehensively preserving human rights, whose reforms would embrace them through the passage of time and shelter them wherever they lived, that knowledge would elude them and their minds would stumble at the boundary of their limitations, even if they gathered in one place and supported one another.
However broad people’s perceptions and elevated their thoughts, they cannot encompass the demands of social life or discover everything humanity needs for civil existence. The reason distinguishing them from other animals and making them a repository of knowledge and a centre of wisdom reaches only the general principles of things, without perceiving all their particulars. It can scarcely grasp every individual interest and conceive every individual harm. For example, it may know that believing the truth, acting justly and remaining chaste are good, yet fail to recognise that a particular belief is true, a particular action just or abstaining from a particular thing chaste. It resembles a jurist who knows the rulings governing events but lacks exceptional ability to apply the appropriate ruling to each case, or a physician who knows medicines and their properties but lacks skill in treating each illness with the suitable remedy. This is what is called application.
For this reason, God did not consider reason alone sufficient to establish the case against people. He excused those living between prophetic missions for their lack of guidance. He says: “Messengers bearing good news and warning, so that people would have no argument against God after the messengers” (al-Nisa’ 4:165). He says: “Had We destroyed them with punishment before it, they would have said, ‘Our Lord, why did You not send us a messenger, so that we might follow Your signs before being humiliated and disgraced?’” (Ta Ha 20:134). And: “We do not punish until We send a messenger” (al-Isra’ 17:15).
Just government can therefore reach its fullest aim only by grounding its rulings in the One whose knowledge encompasses everything. Were you to examine ancient and modern histories carefully, you would be filled with certainty and add faith to your faith in this truth, clearer than daylight. Only someone whose insight is veiled by the dust of foolishness doubts it, so that the rays of truth cannot reflect in its mirror.
Solon, the Athenian lawgiver, considered how to enact a law for his people that would dispel the darkness of oppression and prevent every crime. He conceived of striking their ears with the law’s terror, intensifying punishment by prescribing death for every offence, small or great.
This philosopher failed to perceive that making death the punishment even for a single lie, besides its excessive severity and destruction of lives, is a deviation that kills ambition and dyes hearts with cowardice and fear. A nation clothed in terror and humiliation will never prosper.
Plato, Socrates’ heir, was moved by concern that his people might catch corrupt morals from foreigners, and decreed that his country’s doors be closed to them. This was unsound policy for several reasons. Among them, a nation preserves its independence only by staying alert to other nations’ intentions and discerning their hidden movements, which requires interacting with them and exchanging information.
Another of this philosopher’s errors was to regard commerce, the axis around which a people’s progress turns, with contempt, because he considered it a lowly occupation. His law therefore prescribed punishment for any Greek aspiring to turn its wheel.
Aristotle, the father of philosophy, thought all crafts and trades base pursuits, and prescribed depriving their practitioners of civic rights. Were a nation to adhere to such laws even for a few days, it would fall into the lowest depths of misery.
The legislation that directs people to sound paths and defines individual and collective rights can be explored in its depths, and its subtle problems clarified, only by religion. Religion is a divine institution that leads people by their own choice to order their worldly actions and qualify for closeness to God in eternal life. For a person of greatness it has a bestowed authority and sacred sovereignty before which they fall in awe, their noble soul desiring no departure from its shelter. But for a feeble-minded, dull-witted person it is difficult to follow.
By a person of greatness we mean one whose knowledge of religion’s detailed rulings is complete and whose examination has reached far enough to see how they are derived from their fundamental evidences. Their soul thus becomes fully confident that religion is a just judge, whose ordering alone leaves sound effects among creation.
Who is the dull-witted person?
It is anyone belonging to the group that has wallowed long in the swamp of ignorance, then risen like one driven mad by Satan’s touch, to strip off the garments of well-founded religion and replace them with absolute freedom: “These are the ones who purchased error in exchange for guidance. Their trade brought no profit, and they were not guided” (al-Baqarah 2:16). Giving people unrestricted scope to act as they wish and believe whatever occurs to them, unbound by religious arrangements, is a great corruption affecting individuals personally and nations collectively.
Consider the Arabs before Islam, divided in their doctrines and diverse in their directions, each following the force of their own impulse, with no religious restraint to check them and no dominant authority able to curb their unruliness. You will see that absolute freedom and disturbing barbarism are inseparable siblings. Then turn to the prophetic mission and the era of the rightly guided caliphs. You will find no cause of Islam’s extension to the earth’s extremities and their firmly established, cohesive dominion other than their application of the principles revelation planted in their minds.
Someone wishing to escape the bounds of the blessed law said: “Why do some of its rites have no intelligible meaning?”
We say: “Conjecture!” [1] God has given immature folly no path to appreciating His law’s secrets. Religious obligations are of two kinds: acts of worship and ordinary dealings. In ordinary dealings, which sustain the laws of civilisation in this worldly life, the Lawgiver has extensively explained their particular reasons and wisdom, expressly or by indication. Examples include: “In prescribed retribution there is life for you, people of understanding” (al-Baqarah 2:179), and: “Satan seeks only to cause enmity and hatred between you through intoxicants and gambling, and to turn you away from God’s remembrance and prayer” (al-Ma’idah 5:91). The hadith states: “A judge must not judge while angry.” It also states, as printed in the source: “The speaker does not inherit,” and other examples.
As for acts of worship, such as prayer, fasting and Hajj, their foundation for the person obligated is devotion. Their general wisdom is submission to God’s commands and singling Him out in humility and reverence. The Lawgiver may explain a particular reason, but drawing near to God through something whose wisdom He has not disclosed more strongly demonstrates complete servitude and sincerity towards Him. Performing acts of devotion whose fitting wisdom we understand is not free of some admixture of intending their resulting benefits. Although this does not invalidate the act, it slightly diminishes its purity. If someone who does not adhere to religious law asks, “Why does noon prayer have four units and sunset prayer three?”
Silence them with the force of this wise point. If an adherent of religious law asks, say: “God and His Messenger know best.”
Source: Al-Sa‘adah al-‘Uzma magazine, issued by Shaykh Muhammad al-Khidr Husayn in Tunis, issue 17, published on the first of Ramadan 1322 AH, as reproduced in Encyclopaedia of the Complete Works of Imam Muhammad al-Khidr Husayn, compiled and edited by lawyer Ali al-Rida al-Husayni, Dar al-Nawadir, Damascus, first edition, 1431 AH/2010, Al-Sa‘adah al-‘Uzma volume, 12/2/97–101.