Some thoughts about morality

What does it mean to say about someone, you know, before you found Islam, you weren’t a very good person. But now, that you follow these rules, and believe in God, your behavior has improved. You treat other people better…more like people.

It means that starting out, you weren’t very much at all. Maybe you were raised in a society that on some level was deeply sick. Maybe you grew up not knowing the difference between treating people as ends and treating people as means. Maybe you didn’t even know there was a distinction.

Maybe you looked for advantage all the time and felt justified doing so because, well, either on some level you didn’t care about others, or because you just felt you hadn’t been given a fair shake. Your life was a series of obligations you had not chosen. Your future was circumscribed by a society that did not encourage success. Your success enviably would lift the veil of denial cushioning other people’s compromises and failures. And that would just be too painful for them to take.

What do you do with such a person, such a society? Here, there is an entire moral system just waiting for you, all you have to do is sign on! Follow these simple five steps: pray five times a day, give charity, fast for Ramadan, believe in the one true God and his prophet, go to Mecca once in your life. Do it with a pure heart, motivated by true belief, and the riddle is solved.

It is the ultimate 12-step system, except its even simpler. It’s the Five-step system. Do it with your whole heart and it can save both you and your society from oblivion.

The risk, of course, is the all or nothing system it creates. When there is only one truth, only one way, you are either following it or you are not. When you fall short, there is no break: no system of secular morality to fall back on. In the push to follow the one true way, encouragement to understand the purposes of moral behavior, which creates conviction, may not exist.

The stakes become very high, and the definition of what the proper path is exactly becomes all important. And not just for you personally. Someone doing things another way points out the fact that perhaps your way might just be wrong. And with not just this life, but the next life riding upon your judgment, that may just be too painful to take.