Purpose of Islam
Question:-
Many people these days have abandoned religion because they cannot see that it has any purpose whatever.
Answer:-
The purpose of Religion is to "bind back to one's source" or to what is the same thing, to obtain Salvation i.e. to be saved or resurrected from spiritual destruction.
The words Soul and Spirit refers to the Real "I", and to its characteristics:- Consciousness (awareness), Conscience (motives, not those socially conditioned into them, but things such as sympathy, natural fellow feeling) and Will (the ability to act deliberately rather than instinctively or by conditioned reflexes and habit.)
But even if the critic does not understand the meaning and significance of the terms used and supposes the doctrines to be superstitions, he should be able to establish by examination that Religion has at least some of the following functions:-
(i) To make sense of the world we live as to causes, meanings and purposes.
(ii) To justify moral and socially beneficially behaviour. This allows people to obey not just through external compulsion and fear, but by their own will. That which is imposed tends to disable, is negative i.e. it forbids and limits instead of being positive by providing incentives. It might be tyrannical, ineffective, counter-productive, and might even be counteracted through concealment or clever argument.
(iii) To provide a social binding force. Religion provides common concepts, ideas, attitudes, values, manners, activities, emblems, festivals and other social occasions and institutions. It creates charities and provides mutual help.
(iv) To create stability by providing comfort and strength in periods of adversity and bereavement etc. and gratitude and sobriety in periods of good fortune and joy.
(v) To promote balance and healing, physically, mentally and spiritually. To remove the debilitating effects of inner contradictions and guilt and to create and enhance faith and confidence. All parts of human beings - the physical, the mental and the spiritual - are inter-connected electrically and electronically through the nervous system and chemically through the endocrine system, all parts affect each other. There is also electrical, electronic, chemical and biological connection between people in the community and probably also through the forces at the Quantum or sub-quantum level.
(vi) To provide a purpose for life and channel human energies in useful directions or towards beneficial goals, which might otherwise be squandered uselessly.
(vii) To remind us of a greater transcendental world, and to provide techniques to reach it - to aid human development and evolution. Aspects of the religious discipline, for instance, do the following:- (a)Increase self-control as through fasting and charitable works that overcome selfishness, (b) Cultivate conscience which refers to motives and includes feelings of sympathy, empathy, of responsibility and appropriateness.(c) Enhance awareness of things higher than sensory and material world or that of ordinary worldly ambitions. All Sciences, Philosophies, Art and Social and Political Reforms come out of religion and generally require a religious like sensibility.
(viii) To create inner and outer Unity. To provide a framework in which all experiences, motives and actions are placed in a self-consistent manner in harmony with the world process. Thus allowing the formation of an integrated stable psychological entity leading an intelligent, conscious way of life as opposed to an accidental, impulsive, mechanical or automatic one. One that is also responsible and at-one with the world it lives in, with which it interacts and is mutually dependent.
The purpose of Islam is :-
(1) Firstly, to provide a self-image for man as an agent of God and an objective goal or purpose in life - a teaching to expand our consciousness which has become narrowed down due to sin (attachment, fixation, subjective desires,) and thereby expand our horizons, motives and actions also.
(2) Secondly, to create and establish a discipline by which the goal can be achieved. But this is not merely a means to an end. It exists to get people to behave in a manner as they would behave were they already regenerated.
(3) Thirdly, to create a social system and life style in which the goal and discipline are integrated and facilitated. This, too, is not just a means to an end. Human beings are to be knitted together to become a single organism.
The Value system by which we are required to live can be divided into seven levels, though these are inter-dependent to a large extent:-
(1) Justice (here Law applies - actions have consequences, there is equivalence between the action and the consequence, there is equality in that the same law applies to all. This does not mean all are similar but that things are treated according to their similarities and dissimilarities),
(2) Love (compassion, kindness, benevolence, charity, forgiveness etc.)
(3) Truth (awareness, understanding, knowledge of facts, methods and values, inner and outer, material, social, psychological spiritual.)
(4) Surrender - The recognition that things belong as part to the whole; that we are not independent of Allah; self-identification with the universal purpose of Allah. The practice of surrender is a means to Unity.
(5) Universality - Religion is a single universal phenomenon. Sectarianism is sin. Allah has sent Messengers to guide all peoples with the same message but this may be formulated in different languages or conceptual systems and different sets of practices. It is not just human beings, but all creatures, including winds, animals, planets obey the laws of their own nature as made by Allah.
(6) Spiritual Evolution. Evolution affects individuals, groups, all systems and the whole Cosmos. There are stages of development.
"What ails you that you fear not the greatness of Allah? Seeing that He has created you through various stages. Do you not see how Allah has created the seven heavens, one above another in harmony……And Allah has made you out of the earth as a gradual growth, then He returns you to it, and then will He bring you forth a new bringing forth." 71:13-18
"And the soul and Who fashioned it, and enlightened it with what is wrong and right for it! He indeed is successful who causes it to grow (or purifies it)! And he indeed is a failure who corrupts it!" 91:7-10
"And We have created above you seven paths; and We are never heedless of creation. " 23:17
"Ye shall surely travel from stage to stage!." 84:19
(7) Unity (The unity of God, of the Universe, of mankind, of religion, of life, of knowledge etc.). All things come from Allah, a Unity, and must return to Unity. Allah is the goal towards which things tend and towards which we must strive. In fact, things were always a Unity, but we owing to our disintegrated and restricted consciousness could not see it, and in order to deal with things divided it into parts.
Separate articles have been written about each of these.
There is also a distinction between actions (governed by law and ritual), motivations (governed by faith, love and hope) and righteousness (which refers to states of being) - i.e. between:- (1) islam, (the discipline) (2) iman (faith) and (3) ihsan (righteousness).
"It is not righteousness that you turn your faces to the East and the West. But righteous is he who (1) believes in Allah and the Last Day, and the angels and the scriptures and the Prophets; and (2) gives his wealth, for love of Him, to kinsfolk and to orphans and the needy and the wayfarer and to those who ask, and to set free slaves; and observes proper worship and pays the poor-due, and those who keep their treaty when they make one, and (3) the patient in tribulation and adversity and times of stress. Such are they who are sincere. Such are the God-fearing." 2:177
The actions lead to faith and faith leads to change in the state of being which leads to paradise. On the other hand it is the nature of the state of being which determines the faith which leads to appropriate action.
The purpose of Religion is implied in the name of all true religion, Islam. It is "Surrender to Allah". The Quran tells us that the Spirit of Allah is within us:-
"So when I have fashioned it (man's body), and breathed into it of My Spirit, then fall you down before him, prostrating yourselves before him (in obeisance)." 15:29
"Then He fashioned him and breathed into him of His spirit, and made for you the faculties of hearing, and sight and hearts (feeling); little is it that you give thanks." 32:9
"And certainly We created man, and We know what his soul suggests to him, and We are nearer to him than his life-vein." 50:16
The purpose of religion is, therefore, Self-realisation. This has several implications:- (a) We are spiritually at-one with the Spirit of Allah; (b) as all human beings contain this spirit, we are also spiritually at-one with all human beings. But particular, those who realise this or acknowledge that it is so are at-one with one another. (c) As it is this Spirit which also carries all the attributes, virtues and powers of Allah, then self-realisation bestows these on us. (d) Self-realisation is return to Allah and brings harmony, peace and joy.
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