Tim’s Reviews > Islam and the Destiny of Man > Status Update

the great virtues - and it is the Prophet's virtues that the believer stirves to imitate - can, it seems, be expressed through human nature in countless different ways, whereas worldly fashion induces uniformity.

Islam is the religion of mercy, but it is also, and above all, the religion of truth, and truth is pitiless in that it cannot be other than what it is. There is no way in which black can become white so as to appease the grief of a human soul. Not even God, for all His omnipotence, can choose to make error ino truth.

Ultimate Truth - the truth of the Shahadah - cannot be neatly fitted ino the terrestrial dimensions and therefore finds expression in painful contradictions and the interplay of opposites. If Truth is the principal business of religion - but for which all Faiths would be be mere sentimentality and wishful thinking - then religion is inevitably stretched out upon the rack of contradiction.

Christians compare Muhammad to Jesus, always to the discredit of the former, because he is found to be unlike Jesus in so many ways, and they also compare the Qur'an with the Bible; but, as Schuon and others have pointed out, the only legitimate comparison would be between the Prophet and Mary on the one hand and on the other between the Qur'an and Jesus.

At the very heart of Islam lies an almost ruthless determination not to impose human standards - or the categories of human thought - upon God or to confine Him within any definition.

"There is something very peculiar about the contemporary tendency to regard a person's worst qualities as representing his 'true' self, although it goes hand in hand with the common belief that ugliness is in some strange way more 'real' than beauty..."