Islam's Response to Contemporary Issues — Page 58
58 islam’s response to contemporary issues In the countries governed by totalitarian philosophies, this progressive rise of consciousness of individual freedom is at present engaged in a grim battle of liberation of the individual from complete totalitarian control. Unless there is a counter-revolutionary upsurge in the powerful extreme left of the armed forces, this trend for greater freedom has every likelihood of winning the battle very soon. What may happen afterwards does not augur well for the moral prospects of emancipated youths in the erstwhile communist countries. Almost two generations have grown to adulthood in the void of a godless society, with nothing to guide and discipline moral behaviour. Apart from the lack of an in-built code of moral values vested in religious ideologies, the danger of vain, playful pleasure-seeking and irresponsible trends flooding from the West on the youth in the USSR and Eastern Europe, can produce devastating effects on their moral behaviour in years to come. At the same time, one cannot fail to note that the experience of living without religion for many decades has not only bequeathed ill to contemporary society but has also brought some clear advantages. The socialist revolution of Russia severed the ties of the socialist world not only with religion but with religious dogmas and views which themselves were corrupted and distorted. Be it Christianity or Islam, whatever sects the Christians or Muslims belonged, there was a medievalism about the concept of their respective religions which had created in many areas of belief, a parallax between religious doctrines and the realities of nature. Both could not be true at one and the same time. It took a special training of minds to view the discrepancies between the religious views and facts of nature and yet not feel disturbed. To live with paradoxes is, perhaps, not easy except when paradoxes are bred into a people, generation after generation.