“Is it allowable to celebrate a holiday that commemorates the independence of my country?”

The Answer:

“A holiday [that commemorates] the independence of a country is not a [religious] holiday. The holidays which are forbidden [for Muslims] to observe are those with religious overtones [such as Christmas and Easter*] not the festive gatherings people observe due to certain events. Therefore, people are allowed to celebrate wedding anniversaries, birthdays or any occasion as such celebrations are not related to religious holidays. It is imperative that we work to remove the confusion surrounding this misunderstanding and the doubts that have affected many people [regarding this issue]. [Because of this misunderstanding] people find hardship and difficulty in their religion. Especially when a religious minded person holds [such non religious celebrations] to be from the major sins or rejected acts when, in fact, they are not.

Understanding an Important legal maxim [The origin of things is permissibility unless there is a text to the contrary]

The origin of things is permissibility so there is no problem with you attending such an event. The school of Ahmed [Hanabliah] allowed the celebration of al-’Atirah which was a sacrifice, during the month of Rajab, observed by the people who lived prior to the advent of the Prophet [may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him]. Although the school of Imam Malik [Malikis] considered it disliked, since it was a practice from those days, the school of Ahmed allowed this practice since there was no text [from the Qur'an, Sunna or Consensus] that explicitly forbade it. Thus, this practice remained upon its original ruling, permissibility [here the sheikh is showing us how the scholars utilized the legal maxim mentioned above]. So, if people gather together to sacrifice there is no objection for them to congregate, celebrate, enjoy themselves and commemorate the independence of their country. Therefore, there is no hardship in celebrating such occurrences.

With regards to the statement [of the Prophet may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him] that “Allah [The Exalted] has given you better than those (feasts): Eid al-Adha (Sacrificing) and the ‘Eid al-Fitr”, then “those feasts” were those with strict religious over tones: one a Christian holiday and the other a pagan one. In addition, the Prophet [may the peace and blessing of Allah be upon him] mentioned that the Islamic holidays were two: ‘Eid al-Fitr and ‘Eid al-Adha. But it is not understood from this that he [may the peace and blessing of Allah be upon him] forbade people from gathering and celebrating [other non-religious occasions]. Even if a person considered [such gatherings] disliked there is no need for him to bother others by making things difficult that were not prohibited by the Qur’an, the Sunna, the consensus [of the scholars] and where no agreement was reached within the schools of Islamic law.

This is because ease in matters [such as these where there is no prohibition and the origin is that of permissibility] is a must, and those statements that create hardship and burden [related to such matters], that are not based on explicit texts [that prohibit them], are weak. Thus, there is nothing that prohibits us from facilitating such matters for the people and giving them some breathing room because ease and facilitation are from the foundations of Islam: Allah says, “And He did not make any hardship for you in religion.” [Surah al-Hajj 78] and “Allah wants to lighten your burdens.” [Surah al-Nisa V. 28] and “Verily, with hardship there is ease. Verily with hardship there is ease.” [Surah al-Sharh V. 5-6]. The Prophet [may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him] said, “Facilitate [things] and do not make things difficult. Give glad tidings, and do not cause others to flee.” In closing, we reiterate that the foundation of Islam is ease and the independent interpretation of the legal sources [ijtihad of scholars] is respected but is not [equal to] texts from the Shari’ah [Qur'an and Sunna].”

May peace be upon you
Dr. Abdullah Bin Bayyah

*according to the Maliki school it is disliked to offer congratulations to other faiths during their religious holidays. Thus, it is a permissible act. See Sharh al-Saghir of Sidi Ahmed al-Dardir and Fiqh al-Malikiyyah wa Adilatuhu by Habib Tahir. [translator]

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What is shari’a ruling regarding a women going to hajj without a mahram?

Answered by  His eminence, Dr. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, head of the International Union for Muslim Scholars: 

“The original rule stipulated in shari’a that a woman is not to travel alone.  Rather, she has to be accompanied by her husband or any other mahram of hers.  This rule is supported by narrations of Bukhari and others that Ibn-Abbas (RA) said, that the Prophet (SAWA) said, “A woman should not travel except with a mahram, and no man should visit her except in the presence of a mahram.” 

Abu-Hurairah related the following on behalf of the Prophet [sa], “It is not permissible for a woman who believes in Allah and the Last Day to travel for one day and night except with a mahram.” 

Abu-Sa’id reported that the Prophet (SAWA) said, “A woman should not travel for two days except she is accompanied by her husband or a mahram.” 

Ibn-’Umar reported, “She should not travel for three nights except with a mahram.” 

Apparently, different narrations are due to the context of the questioner.  So, answers were given according to each  question.  Abu-Hanifa, however, considered the narrations of Ibn-Omar as more probable.  His believes that a mahram is considered a necessity only within the distance of qasr (shortening of prayers).  This is according to the narration of Ahmad. 

These ahadith are about all kinds of travel, whither an obligatory travel such as for a visit or trade or seeking knowledge or else. 

This ruling is not because shari’a mistrusts woman as some people may fancy.  To the contrary, this is a precaution for the sake of her reputation and dignity.  Shari’a seeks to protect her in case the sick at heart should seek to harm her.  It is to protect her from transgressors, brigands, especially in an environment in which a traveler crossed deadly deserts in a time that security and civilization were yet to prevail. 

But what is shari’a ruling if a woman did not find a mahram to accompany her in a legitimate travel, whether obligatory, preferable, or allowed travel and she had some trusted men or women or the way was safe? 

Scholars investigated this issue when they came across two problems: the obligation of women to perform hajj vs. the Prophet’s (SAWA) prohibition of a woman’s travel without a mahram.

1. Some of them adhered to the superficial meaning of the reported ahadith.  Thus, they prohibited woman from travelling without a mahram, even for fulfilling the obligation of performing hajj.  
2. Some of them like Abul-Walid al-Yajy, a maliky judge, excluded elderly women from this prohibition.  “This is a specialization of the general when looking to the meaning,” said Ibn-Daqiq al-Eid.
3. Some of them excluded a woman accompanied by trusted group of women.  Some said it suffices to have a company of a Muslim, and trusted woman.
4. Some said it suffices to make sure that the road is safe.  This is what the great scholar Ibn-Taymeya preferred.  Ibn-Muflih said in al-Furu’, “A woman could perform hajj without a mahram as long as she is safe.”  “This applies to all kinds of travel (for good cause).” he added.  This is also what Al-Karabesi cited from ash-Shafi’i in the section of “Voluntary hajj“.  Some of his followers said that it also applies to all kinds of non-obligatory travel, like visiting somebody or for trade.  Al-Athram reported that Imam Ahmad said, “Having a mahram is not a prerequisite for obligatory hajj,” he added, “this is because a woman can go to hajj with women (in general) and also with anyone she feels safe with.”

Ibn-Sirin said, “She should go with good Muslims.”

Al-Awza’y said, “She should go only with persons of good reputation.”

Malik said, “She should go with a group of women.”

Ash-Shafi’i said, “She should go with a free, Muslim, and trusted woman.”  Some of his followers said, “She could go alone in case she is secured.”

Al-Hafidh Ibn-Hajar said, ” In the Shafi’i madhhab it is known to put the presence of the husband, mahram, or trusted women as a prerequisite for a women to perform hajj.” Some others say, “Only one trusted woman is enough.” 

“She can travel alone if the road is safe.” This is another opinion cited by al-Karabesi.  He corrected it in al-Muhathab. 

If this applies to hajj and umra, then it should apply to all kinds of travel as it has been reported by some scholars, because the main aim is to protect women and secure them.  Therefore, as long as the road is safe, and there are trusted women or men, she can go without mahram.  

There are two evidences that a woman can travel without a mahram as long as she is safe and accompanied by trusted people:  

First, it has been reported by al-Bukari in his Sahih, that Omar (RA) gave permission to the wives of the Prophet (SAWA) to perform hajj.  He sent Othman Ibn-Affan and Abdul-Rahaman to accompany them.  Omar, Othman, Abudl-Rahman along with the Prophet’s wives, all approved it.  Nobody of the companions denied what they did.  This is considered unanimous resolution. 

Second: what has been reported by Bukhary and Muslim regarding the hadith of Adyy Ibn-Hatim, to whom the Prophet (SAWA) talked about the future of Islam and how it will spread throughout the world.  Among of what he said was, ” … you will certainly see that a lady in a Howdah traveling from al-Hira, heading for Makkah, without her husband, fearing none but Allah…”

This hadith implies not only that what the Prophet (SAWS) said would happen, but also that is it permissible.  It was mentioned within the context of praising the widespread of Islam and the security it would provide. 

Here, we want to add two important rules:

First, rulings regarding human interactions are meant to take into consideration the meanings and aims behind them.  Unlike the rulings of worship, whose origin is to worship and submit to Allah, without thinking about their implications.  This was clarified  and assured by al-Shatiby.

Second, whatever has been prohibited for itself could be permissible only if there is a necessity.  Whatever has been prohibited for the sake of preventing evasive legal device (sad al-zara’i), could be permissible only if there is a need for it.  Surely, women’s travelling alone was prohibited for the sake of preventing evasive legal device. 

Moreover, travel in our time is different from what it used to be in the past.  For then, travel was full of danger.  People had to cross deadly deserts, sometimes encounter robbers or brigands and the like.  Nowadays, however, we travel by ships, airplanes.  Usually, these vehicles take large numbers of people. This is what eliminates the fear for a woman travelling alone, because she will not be alone in any particular place.   

Therefore, there is no harm in a woman performing hajj (without mahram), as long as the circumstances are settled and safe. 

May Allah grant us success. 

Al-Qaradawi website

Translated by Sr. Marwa

www.suhaibwebb.com ]]> http://www.suhaibwebb.com/blog/general/what-is-sharia-ruling-regarding-a-women-going-to-hajj-without-a-mahram-dr-yusuf-al-qaradawi/feed/ http://www.suhaibwebb.com/blog/general/shaykh-allamah-al-hajj-tawfiq-al-azhari-revisiting-the-neglected-legacy-of-indigenous-imams-in-america/ http://www.suhaibwebb.com/blog/general/shaykh-allamah-al-hajj-tawfiq-al-azhari-revisiting-the-neglected-legacy-of-indigenous-imams-in-america/#comments Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:00:01 +0000 Suhaib Webb http://www.suhaibwebb.com/blog/?p=5113

Shaykh Allama Al-Hajj Ahmad Tawfiq, the founding Imam of the Mosque Islamic Brotherhood, Inc., was born in Newberry, South Carolina on September 20, 1936. He came to New York City at the age of eight and attended schools in New York City. He was athletically talented all of his life. As an adolescent, he played football for DeWitt Clinton High School, and enjoyed swimming. As an adult he took to long-distance running and excelled in martial arts. He also possessed a musical talent that he developed through studies at the Manhattan School of Music, where he became proficient on the French Horn. Shaykh Tawfiq played with the Prince Hall Symphony Band and later conducted the Cairo Symphony Orchestra.

He was an American of African descent who also traced his lineage to Osceola, the Seminole warrior chief. He embraced Islam as teenager, and this became the focal point of his life for almost thirty years. Shaykh-‘Allama Tawfiq, served as a non-commissioned officer in the U.S. Air Force. He later became a member of the Muslim Mosque, Inc., the organization founded by the late Al-Hajj Malik Shabazz (popularly known as Malcolm X). In order to help raise the level of Islamic scholarship among Muslim Americans of African decent, he went to study at Al-Azhar University, the oldest and most prestigious institution of Islamic education in the world, in Cairo, Egypt. While there, Shaykh-‘Allama Tawfiq studied Islamic and International Jurisprudence. He also attended The Academy of Islamic Research in Egypt, The Sadiyya School of Semitic Languages, and the Goth School of German Languages. He studied several tongues, including Arabic, Swahili, Hebrew, Spanish, French, German, Chinese and Japanese. A gifted liguist, he distinguished himself as a speaker, teacher and translator of Classical Arabic.

While a student at Al-Azhar, the Shaykh-‘Allama conceived the establishment of the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood. When he returned to the United States, he and several associates formed the congregation and the organization known by that name. The mosque is located in Harlem, and is known for its contributions to the establishment and development of Islam in North America, and the improvement of the quality of life in the Harlem community.

Shaykh-‘Allama Tawfiq’s goal was to present a true picture of Islam in the United States, at a time when it was greatly misunderstood. He strongly advocated the establishment of an indigenous Muslim intelligentsia, and he is the father of the movement to do so. His vision included the establishment of instructions that reflect the culture and dignity of the religion of Islam. His commitment was to the upliftment of the American of African descent through the teachings of this increasingly popular faith. He viewed Islam as the means by which many of the social and psychological ills of his people could be cured. He devoted his life to those ends, and it was his sincerest desire that Muslims leave this profound legacy to their children.

From the late 1960s through the mid-1980s, Shaykh-’Allaama Al-Hajj K. Ahmad Tawfiq established a standard amongst Muslim Americans of African descent of delivering weekly khutab (sermons) in both Qur’anic Arabic and English. He was a visionary leader who regularly taught and published English translations of the proper ‘Aqeedah (binding beliefs and practices) of the Ahlus-Sunna wal Jamaat (”The People of the Sunna and unified Community”), some 30 years before the coming of the Salafi movement to America. They appeared regularly in The Western Sunrise, an independent newspaper published by the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood. When Minister Malcolm X formed the Muslim Mosque, Inc. after embracing the Sunna, K. Ahmad Tawfiq became a member. As such, he received a scholarship to study at Al-Azhar University. He began his studies there in September, 1964, the same year as Akbar Muhammad, the older brother of Imam W.D. Muhammad and a professor at the State University of New York. Upon Shaykh Tawfiq’s return to the United States two years after the martyrdom of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (May Allah grant him the promised reward of all true martyrs, which is paradise), Sister Betty Shabazz asked him to tutor their three eldest daughters (see Ilyasah Shabazz’s book, Growing Up X, pp. 57-59). He taught them Arabic and Islamic studies as well as African and African American history. He extended his teaching of these subjects to his people and others.

In 1977, Shaykh-’Allama Tawfiq produced an album of Qur’anic recitation (Sura Yasin and Sura Yusuf). This was the first time a recording of this type had been done by an American. It was distributed throughout the country and is now available on CD. In 1979, dedicated to “giving a true presentation of Al-Islam to American society,” Shaykh Tawfiq began the now-common practice in New York City of representing Al-Islam in large public events that were both civil and religious in nature. His student, Imam Al-Hajj Talib ‘Abdur-Rashid, continues this practice today. His da’wa (i.e. propagational) efforts were relentless. He spoke regularly in venues ranging from community-based forums to college campuses, religious seminars to radio and television programs, teaching and clarifying Al-Islam during a time when the organization known as the Nation of Islam was at its height.

Years before tariqas from abroad became prevalent in the United States, the Shaykh-’Allama taught his students the value of tazkiyya (purification of the soul) and athkaar (dhikrs) centered on the Asmaaul-Husna (99 names of Allah), from that which has been transmitted from Almighty Allah (Glory be to Him) and His Messenger Muhammad (May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him). In 1975 he recorded live with his congregation, awraad (Islamic litanies), expressive of this dimension of worship.

Shaykh-’Allaama Tawfiq was known and respected as a leader in both Muslim and non-Muslim circles. His leadership and vision resulted in the inclusion of the Muslim holy days of the ‘Eidul-Fitr and ‘Eidul-Adha to the City of New York’s official calendar and cancellation of alternate side of the street parking for these holy days.

Source: Mosque of the Islamic Brotherhood ]]> http://www.suhaibwebb.com/blog/general/shaykh-allamah-al-hajj-tawfiq-al-azhari-revisiting-the-neglected-legacy-of-indigenous-imams-in-america/feed/ http://www.suhaibwebb.com/blog/general/summer-nights-class-update-for-today/ http://www.suhaibwebb.com/blog/general/summer-nights-class-update-for-today/#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:42:49 +0000 Zubair Khan http://www.suhaibwebb.com/blog/?p=5108 The Lessons for the Student from Allah’s Blessed Names class being taught by Shaykha Muslema has been postponed until next week. The Fiqh of Fasting (Hanafi) is still on for tonight and will begin at 8pm Central time inshaAllah.

The timing for the Lessons for the Student has been changed to 9:30pm Central time starting next week. Please email webmaster.suhaibwebb@gmail.com if you have any additional questions.

Sincerely,
Webbmaster

If you were asked to drop the Friday sermon, what topic would you choose? What topic do you feel is most important to your community and the people around you?

SDW

Suhaib Webb will be there on July 11th.

Topic: ”Ethics and Religious Guidance in the Light of al-Qarafi’s al-Ihkam.”

Interesting Reads:

Our Secularized Civilization

by Reinhold Niebuhr

One of the foremost philsophers and theologians of the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr was for many years a Professor at Union Theological Seminary, New York City. He is the author of many classics in their field, including The Nature and Destiny of Man, Moral Man and Immoral Society, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, and Discerning the Signs of Our Times. He was also the founding editor of the publication Christianity and Crisis. Niebuhr warned in 1926 against ecclesiastical and cultural shortcomings which a generation later were to be widely and ruefully acknowledged. This article was published in theChristian Century, April 22, 1926. Copyright by The Christian Century Foundation, used by permission. Current articles and subscription information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This article was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.

Recent events in Europe reveal what unrepentant tribalists Western people are and how little they have learned from the great tragedy. They seem to lack both the imagination to realize the folly of their ways and the humility to conceive of their folly as sin. While we in America affect to pity Europe, the sense of moral superiority, which is always the root of pity, is based on illusion. We are no more moral than Europe, but our tremendous wealth and our comparative geographic isolation save us from suffering any immediate consequences of our moral follies. However active the institutions of religion may be in our national life, there is no trace of ethical motive in our national conduct. To the world we appear, what we really are, a fabulously wealthy nation, intent upon producing more wealth and seemingly oblivious to the consequences which unrestrained lust of power and lust of gain must inevitably have on both personal morality and international harmony.

The fact is that the social life of the Western world is almost completely outside of ethical control. A political leader of Gandhi’s type would be unthinkable in the Western world. While it may be true that all groups are naturally predatory and have never been effectually restrained by moral scruples, yet there is a measure of indifference to and defiance of moral law in our modern world which compares unfavorably with the best in either our own or oriental history. The fact is that we are living in a completely secularized civilization.

The secularization of modern civilization is partly due to our inability to adjust the ethical and spiritual interests of mankind to the rapid advance of the physical sciences. However much optimists may insist that science cannot ultimately destroy religion, the fact remains that the general tendency of scientific discovery has been to weaken not only religious but ethical values. Humanism as well as religion has been engulfed in the naturalism of our day. Our obsession with the physical sciences and with the physical world has enthroned the brute and blind forces of nature, and we follow the God of the earthquake and the fire rather than the God of the still small voice. The morals of the man in the street, who may not be able to catch the full implications of pure science, are corrupted by the ethical consequences of the civilization which applied science has built. While pure science enthroned nature in the imagination, applied science armed nature in fact.

It is a part of the moral obfuscation of our day to imagine that we have conquered nature when in reality applied science has done little more than debase one part of humanity to become purely physical instruments of secular purpose and to cause the other part to be obsessed with pride in the physical instruments of life. The physical sciences armed nature — the nature in us — and lured us into a state where physical comfort is confused with true happiness and tempted us to indulge our lust for power at the expense of our desire for spiritual peace. We imagine we can escape life’s moral problems merely because machines have enlarged our bodies, sublimated our physical forces and given us a sense of mastery. The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self-mastery. So a generation of men is being bred who in their youth subsist on physical thrills, in their maturity glory in physical power and in their old age desire nothing more than physical comfort.

Vaguely conscious of the moral inadequacy of such an existence, men try to sublimate it by restraining their individual lusts in favor of the community in which they live. Thus nationalism becomes the dominant religion of the day and individual lusts are restrained only to issue in group lusts more grievous and more destructive than those of individuals. Nationalism is simply one of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life’s ethical problems. Delegating his vices to larger and larger groups, he imagines himself virtuous; the larger the group the more difficult it is to fix moral responsibility for unethical action.

It would have been too much to expect of religion that it find an immediate antidote for the naturalism and secularism which the modern scientific world view has created. It was inevitable that the natural world, neglected for centuries, should take vengeance upon the human spirit by making itself an obsession of the human mind. But it cannot be said that religion has been particularly wise in the strategy it developed in opposition to naturalism. Religion tried to save itself by the simple expedient of insisting that evolution was not mechanistic but creative, by discovering God in the evolutionary process. Insofar as this means that there is room for freedom and purpose in the evolutionary process, no quarrel is possible with the defenders of the faith. But there is, after all, little freedom or purpose in the evolutionary process — in short, little morality; so that if we can find God only as he is revealed in nature we have no moral God.

It would be foolish to claim that the defense of a morally adequate theism in the modern world is an easy task; but it is not an impossible one. Yet most modernists have evaded it. Modernism on the whole has taken refuge in various kinds of pantheism, and pantheism is always destructive of moral values. To identify God with automatic processes is to destroy the God of conscience; the God of the real is never the God of the ideal. One of the vainest delusions to which religionists give themselves is to suppose that religion is inevitably a support of morality. There are both supramoral and submoral factors in religion. Professor Santayana makes the discrimination between two instincts in religion, the instinct of piety and the instinct of spirituality, the one seeking to hallow the necessary limitations of life and the other seeking to overcome them Pantheism inevitably strengthens those forces in religion which tend to sanctify the real rather than to inspire the ideal.

That is why modernism, which has sloughed off many of religion’s antimoral tendencies but has involved itself in philosophic monism and religious pantheism more grievously than orthodoxy ever did, has been so slight a moral gain for mankind. Liberal religion is symbolizing a totality of facts under the term God which orthodoxy, with a truer moral instinct, could comprehend under no less than two terms, God and the devil. It would be better to defy nature’s immoralities in the name of a robust humanism than to take the path which most modern religion has chosen and play truant to the distinctive needs of the human spirit by reading humanity into the essentially inhuman processes of nature. There is little to choose between the despair to which pure naturalism tempts us when we survey the human scene and the easy optimism which most modern religion encourages. What we need is both the spirit of repentance and the spirit of hope, which can be inspired only by a theism which knows how to discover sin by subjecting man to absolute standards and how to save him from despair by its trust in absolute values.

The secularization of modern life is partly due to the advance of science, but also to the moral inadequacies of Protestantism. If liberal Protestantism is too pantheistic, traditional Protestantism is too quietistic to meet the moral problems of a socially complex age. Protestantism, as Professor Whitehead in his Science and the Modern Worldhas with rare insight pointed out, has no understanding of the social forces and factors which impinge on and condition human personality. It believes that righteousness can be created in a vacuum. It produces no sense of tension between the soul and its environment. The conversions of which it boasts may create moral purpose, but that moral purpose is applied to a very limited field of motives where application is more or less automatic. It helps men to master those sins which are easily discovered because they represent divergence from accepted moral customs: the sins of dishonesty, sexual incontinence and intemperance.

No religion is more effective than Protestantism against the major social sins of our day, economic greed and race hatred. In a recent trial of Negroes, growing out of a race riot in one of our metropolitan centers, the defense lawyer shrewdly manipulated the selection of the jury so that there would be at least a minority of Jews and Catholics in the jury box, and it is reported that their votes were for the defense when the jury failed to reach a decision. No real progress can be made against the secularization of modern life until Protestantism overcomes its pride and complacency and realizes that it has itself connived with the secularists. By giving men a sense of moral victory because they have mastered one or two lusts, while their lust for power and their lust for gain remain undisciplined, it is simply aggravating those lusts which are the primary perils of modern civilization.

Protestantism reacted against the dualism in Roman Catholic ethics which produces asceticism on the one hand and an easy-going connivance with human weakness on the other. It is true that there is a dualism in Roman Catholic ethics, which can develop, let us say, a Cardinal O’Connell on the one hand and a Cardinal Mercier on the other. But Protestantism has a dualism equally grievous, which produces a Cardinal O’Connell and a Cardinal Mercier in the same skin, a pagan and a puritan in one person, whose puritanism becomes an effective anodyne for a conscience not altogether easy in the sins of paganism. If a choice is to be made between monastic and quietistic ethics, surely monastic ethics must be termed the most Christian, for it is better that the world shall be feared than that it be embraced with a good conscience.

How a fretful anxiety about a number of lustful temptations can develop a perfect complacency in regard to other temptations may be seen by the fact that the church is not now so conscious of some of the sins of modern civilization as some of our most thoroughgoing, realists. If Scott Nearing had the ear of New York he could convict it of sin more surely than Bishop Manning can. The Nation prompts its readers to a consciousness of social sin more effectively than does, say, the Watchman-Examiner. It is significant, too, that the very part of the country in which the churches insist upon “regenerate membership” and recruit such a membership by persistent revivals is most grievously corrupted by the sin of race hatred. Protestantism — and insofar as Roman Catholicism has departed from the best medievalism, Catholicism, too — has no understanding of the complex factors of environment out of which personality emerges. It is always “saving” individuals, but not saving them from the greed and the hatred into which they are tempted by the society in which they live. Protestantism, it might be said, does not seem to know that the soul lives in a body, and that the body is part of a world in which the laws of the jungle still prevail.

Perhaps it might not be irrelevant to add that its failure to understand the relation between the physical and the spiritual not only tempts Protestantism to create righteousness in a vacuum but to develop piety without adequate symbol. That is why the church services of extreme Protestant sects tend to become secularized once the first naive spontaneity departs from their religious life. In Europe nonconformist Protestants tend more and more to embrace the once despised beauty of symbol and dignity of form in order to save worship from dullness and futility. In America nonconformist Protestantism, with less cultural background, tries to avert dullness by vulgar theatricality. The Quakers alone escape this fate because their exclusion of symbol is so rigorous that silence itself becomes symbol. If worship is to serve man’s ethical as well as religious needs, it must give him a sense of humble submission to the absolute. Humility is lacking in Protestant worship as it is missing in Protestant civilization. If this humility is medievalism, we cannot save civilization without medievalism.

More here

Another interesting read just imagine it was written for Muslims

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