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WHY IS ISLAM?<br />
As we have seen, the religion of Islam takes as its starting point<br />
human beings such as they are. Accordingly, Islam has no need of<br />
a doctrine of redemption; no need of monasticism; no need of a<br />
<strong>com</strong>plex theology based upon the idea of a unique manifestation<br />
of the Divine Word; no need of a church to intercede with God<br />
for human beings and no need of a clergy; no need of a sacerdotal<br />
caste; no need of a covenant theology or of a doctrine of a chosen<br />
race; no need of a Dualistic or Trinitarian theology; no need for<br />
pantheism; no need for deism; no need for arcane philosophy; no<br />
need for fantastic mythologies; no need of unspeakable mysteries<br />
for adepts; no need for basing itself on the existential suffering of<br />
human life; no need for basing itself on an ethic of social harmony<br />
in a particular society; no need for basing itself in a particular historical<br />
time or geographic land, and no need for basing itself on a<br />
subjective individual state or an objective degree of reality—like<br />
various other religions in history and presently—and it certainly<br />
has no need to claim to worship God through icons, relics, idols,<br />
statues, miracles, sacred animals, subtle beings or angels. The religion<br />
of Islam simply bases itself on reality as it is: humankind as<br />
it is, and God as He is, and everything else follows from these two<br />
axioms.48 This is the reason Islam is what it is; it is the reason for<br />
Islam; it is the answer to ‘Why is Islam?’: Islam is what it is because<br />
it responds—and corresponds—perfectly to human beings as such,<br />
so that they worship God as such, in all and with all that they are.<br />
48 ‘Islam is the meeting between God as such and man as such.<br />
God as such: that is to say God envisaged, not as He manifested Himself in a<br />
particular time, but independently of history and inasmuch as He is what He is<br />
and also as He creates and reveals by His nature.<br />
Man as such: that is to say man envisaged, not as a fallen being needing a miracle<br />
to save him, but as man, a theomorphic being endowed with an intelligence capable<br />
of conceiving of the Absolute and with a will capable of choosing what leads to<br />
the Absolute….<br />
To sum up: Islam confronts what is immutable in God with what is permanent<br />
in man.’ (Frithjof Schuon, Understanding Islam, [World Wisdom Press, USA, 1994]<br />
pp.1–2).<br />
47
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