Islam and Spiritual Values

In order to understand Islam and its spiritual values one must clearly understand two points: First, that in Islam there is no priesthood and no organized Church. No class has a monopoly on spirituality. There is no division of society between Church and State, between secular and religious laws. It is not the business of any class but of believing men and believing women in general to enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong, and such believing men and women are not only Muslims but are also found among non-Muslims. Some may discharge this function more efficiently than others, but they do not form an organized class mediating between God and man and attending exclusively to this work. Second, that in Islam there is no distinction between the religious and the secular, the spiritual and the mundane. The nature of an act, however secular in its import, becomes spiritual if inspired by the whole indivisible complexity of life. The distinction arises out of the bifurcation of man into distinct and separate entities-matter and spirit. The truth is that matter is nothing but spirit in space-time reference. The Ultimate Reality, according to the Qur'an, is spiritual, and its life, besides being transcendent, is immanent in the temporal. The spirit finds its opportunities in the natural, the material, the secular, All that is secular is therefore sacred in the roots of its being. All values are both spiritual and secular, and they unfold themselves in life, social as well as personal. They determine man's relation to his fellow beings as well as to his God. In Islam, there is no asceticism. It is opposed to renunciation or otherworldliness. Islam is not, however, against a period of temporary withdrawal from society and devotion to spiritual discipline. All values together, call them spiritual or mundane, form the very goal of man, situated as he is in the universe around him. According to Islamic ideology, the universe in which man is placed is not created for idle sport. It is teleological throughout, and to this universal teleology human beings are no exception. To every one of them there is a goal, and the goal is God himself. He is the beginning and the end. As al-Ghazzali has explained, God is the beginning as the cause and source of our existence, and he is the end as an ideal or, rather, as the Ideal. God

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