Moreover, the Moslem's Allah is absolute _Will_, neither bound nor
directed by any law of right or wrong, and in His dealings with the
world there is, there can be, nothing moral. 'God,' we are told,
'misleadeth whom He willeth, and guideth aright whom He willeth,'[11]
and, 'As for man, we have firmly fixed his fate about his neck.'[12]
Therefore, to the Moslem there can be no true sense of sin, for what
his conscience condemns may be the will of Allah,[13] and the only
sin he can conceive is to transgress an arbitrary degree of Allah's
pleasure, or deny his Prophet.
{129}
Therefore, because Allah to the Moslem is not a Father, because He is
not Love, He does not yearn for the love of men.
Because He is not holy, He does not yearn for men to be Godlike, holy
as Himself.
So because He is not Love and Holiness, He does not seek to redeem
men from sin, to draw them to Himself.
There is no bridge needed, no bridge possible, no sacrifice, no 'wall
of partition' to be broken down, no Atonement, no Calvary, no thought
of God sharing our life, that we may share His in holiness and love
through all eternity, no Incarnation.
It is as though the Allah of the Moslem says, 'I have called you
slaves'; not the words of infinite love and infinite glory, 'I have
called you friends.' Islam denies, in fact, those eternal truths in
which man's only hope of a redeemed life can lie--the divine life of
our Lord on earth and His path through the Sacrifice of Himself, to
the glory of His resurrection.
[Sidenote: 2. Man and Woman. (a) Man.]
II. _His teaching about Man_.--Because the Moslem's view of God is
out of focus, discoloured, distorted, and false, therefore {130} his
view of man is false and out of focus too.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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