Appendix 2: An Introduction to Akhlaq (9)

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IV. THE THREE DIMENSIONS OF AKHLAQ

A Case for Consideration

Imagine that you are the member of the Da’wa Committee of your mosque responsible for inviting lecturers and scholars. You are asked, due to strong popular demand, to contact a famous Muslim sports star. Hundreds of youngsters, their parents, and many other members of the community would be willing to pay $10.- each to see this star and hear him speak. You are told, moreover, that the mosque desperately needs the money.

You disagree, however, with this man’s claim to fame, i.e. the sport he plays and/or the money he makes, you disapprove of his attitude and/or lifestyle, and you wish to minimize the influence he will have on impressionable young Muslim minds. So you tell the Committee, without bothering to contact this man, that he is unavailable. A Committee member discovers you are lying, resulting in a huge and complicated argument involving the whole community.

The Issues

For the sake of clarity, let us try to resolve the points of argument into three categories.

Intentions

Your concern was with the purity of the message to be delivered; your opponents cared more about the power of its impact. You argue that a sports star should not be a spokesman for Islam, but your opponents say that as long as he is speaking for Islam, it does not matter who he is or what he represents. We must assume that his intention and the intentions of those who want to hear him are pure. Lack of positive assumptions (husnudh-dhann) in such matters is itself a sign of ill will.

You reply that you have but a single motivation, whereas your opponents’ motives are mixed. Your sincerity is evident in your willingness to stand up against popular pressure and the lure of money. Your opponents retort that your unwillingness to consider the needs of others is a sign, rather, of taking pride in one’s own opinions, and hence of insincerity. They argue that GOD’s good pleasure can be attained in many ways, e.g. by attracting more people to the mosque, by associating Islam with modern-day ‘success’ rather than political and cultural failure, and by strengthening the mosque with much-needed funds.

They regard you, moreover, as primarily a functionary with a job to perform. By letting your private opinions interfere with your public responsibility, you have neglected what should be your overriding intention, namely to serve the community, since the hand of GOD is with the group. You, on the contrary, consider your duty to the truth to outweigh people’s expectations of your position, and that it is on this basis that you see yourself motivated by a higher concept of the common good, namely conformity to ‘real Islam’.

Behaviour

Given the loftiness of your ideal, you feel justified in lying to achieve your end while maintaining what you intended should be good relations with fellow Committee members. Whatever your intention was, your opponents reply, the fact of the matter is that now your relations with your colleagues are damaged not only by disagreement but even more by deceit. Lying in this instance was a breach of trust. And lying is simply not the conduct of a believer. You respond by saying that we are allowed to lie to maintain brotherhood. They say, in turn, that the hadith explaining that principle does not apply to this case, and that your behaviour had more to do with protecting yourself than communal unity. They also see your opposition to the will or decision of the majority to be harmful in itself, let alone compounding that harm by hiding your opposition in falsehood.

Relationships

You have emphasized that promoting a sports star creates unhealthy attachments, rewards success at the expense of piety, and thereby weakens the community. We do not want such a person to be a role model for our children. Your opponents have a different focus; rather than trying to measure the value of the sports star’s influence on the community (since they view it as positive), they are concerned about your influence on the community. You are wrong to assume that it is a good one. By putting your personal opinions ahead of the community’s, you have set a precedent of divisiveness, disobedience, and arrogance. You are actually a worse role model than the sports star you seek to exclude from the community.

Points of General Observation

Notice that:

1. Purity and Power are both attributes of GOD. Culture, individual temperament, and local circumstances will incline people to prefer one type or set of intentions to another.
2. The degree to which one questions one’s own or others’ intentions will determine what kind of intention is deemed acceptable.
3. The urge to infer intentions from behaviour is virtually irresistible.
4. The boundaries between intentions and behaviour, and between each of them and the relationships they influence, are difficult to draw with any certainty.
5. Complexity or aggregation of intention may be regarded positively as well as negatively.
6. There is a hierarchy of intentionality implied in every claim to having a good intention. A good intention at one level may appear less positive within a different scale or framework of values.
7. The trade-off between means and ends cannot easily be rendered absolute or fixed.
8. Results are often seen as rendering intentions invalid.
9. The applicability of a moral standard in actions may vary according to the intention or the result of those actions.
10. Actions, too, fall within a hierarchy of priorities.
11. Selectivity of data or issues to be discussed determines the outcome of a moral judgement. The mass media, in their presentation of “terrorism”, constantly illustrate this maxim.
12. Good relationships (and role models) are determined by prior judgements about intentions and conduct.
13. All of these ethical issues arise through human interaction, whereby intentions and conduct come into play. Relationships are by no means a secondary concern in this scenario. Indeed, Henri Stendhal is quoted as saying that “One can acquire everything in solitude, except character.”

Virtuous Variety

The grounds of dispute in the above case are actually much broader than what has been mentioned so far. There are, perhaps countless frameworks or starting points from which the aforementioned issues can be treated and decided. (Suppose you start from the assumption that even considering a sports star as a speaker on religion invalidates the institution that invites him, or that all matters should be decided in the light of the obligation to make hijra from a society that is entertained by sports stars.) Such ambivalence and divergence are intrinsic to the subject of ethics.

All three dimensions of akhlaq – intention, behaviour, and relationships – are cores of mystery surrounded by clouds of complexity. Although we may be able to define all three terms, and have a general sense of when each should be considered excellent or inferior, our problems arise with particular applications and comparisons.

The same difficulties occur in evaluating an individual. A person’s heart, body, and environment interact with and yet differ from one another in ways similar to the many connections and blurred boundaries between intentions (heart), behaviour (body), and relationships (environment). Judgements about morals bear the same ambiguity that colours our assessments of people’s characters. There may be much we know, but little or none of it is absolute.

In Q4:114 AL-LAH says:

(In Arabic, charity, because it is derived from the same root, may be considered a form of sincerity.)

Not only are all three underscored terms general (and generous in their generality), but we are rewarded handsomely for pursuing GOD’s pleasure through any one of them, thus leaving open the question of what judgement applies if the other two are slighted or even impaired.

Ethics: Art or Science?

Given the high degree of ambiguity involved in assessing the purity of motives, the acceptability of conduct, and the effect both have on relationships, I believe that there is very little which can be precisely measured or determined in moral matters. As with any art, there are standards which those proficient in the field are careful to uphold, and which amateurs can either be taught to appreciate or allowed to neglect and denigrate. Exactitude cannot be achieved, but constant attention to the best models and values tends to produce an intuitive “feel” for ethical beauty similar to that we might develop for paintings or music.

These models and values are inculcated and demonstrated by the Qur’an and the Sunnah. A course of study from these two sources will, GOD willing, gradually refine our faculty of moral judgement and make us better critics – primarily of ourselves, and only after much practice in humility and sympathy, of others. They will set standards for our conduct, adorn our intercourse with our fellow human beings, and motivate us to strive ever upward in our quest for Divine Approval, Blessings, and Compassion.