Islam and the Seven Laws
Comments(17) Islam and the Seven Laws It isn’t just Christians and Jews who worry where Islam is heading. Many Muslims have doubts themselves.
Where do Noah’s Laws - the Seven Universal Laws that define what it is to be civilized - fit into Islam?
Islam has an official approach to free will - the doctrine that an individual can choose to respond one way or the other to the alternatives before him, without being fated, destined, or Divinely compelled to choose either - which tends to deny that free will exists. Islam is a religion that believes strongly in fate. But individual Muslims usually act as thought they have free will. They make choices like anyone else.
None of the Noahide prohibitions conflicts with mainstream Islamic teachings. If you told a Muslim that he or she must conform to the basic requisites of civilization, the response you would hear would be agreement.
What are the Seven Laws? In very simple terms they are:
1) Do not ea flesh or tissue that was torn from any living mammal (thoughtless cruelty against animals trumped by eating them is disgusting, lawless and sick).
2) Do not steal. (Larceny defiles the earth.)
3) Do not commit acts of gross sexual immorality (sex acts that everyone ought to know are wrong.)
4) Do not commit murder. (Murder defiles the earth.)
5)Â Do not tolerate the oppression of the weak by the strong but, rather, establish and maintain a just system of laws, police and courts.
6) Do not insult or blaspheme God, the Maker of All things.
7) Do not serve or worship any thing or deity through idolatrous means - that is, by carrying on savagely, as idolators do, when they serve their gods with cruelty, obscenity, or murder.
(This last prohibition means, speaking a little more specifically, do not whip or cut yourself or anyone else to “suffer as He suffered,” or perform private biological functions in public in His honor, or kill human beings as living sacrifices or martyrs meant to honor or glorify the Divine. All such stuff is sacrilegious, an insult to the Being or beings who are supposedly being served or worshipped. No Being worthy of being worshipped would ever want to be worshipped in such manner.)
One of the features of the Seven Laws is that they all belong to a larger system of spirituality and belief - the Biblical system. The Biblical system, or Torah, puts them into context, and helps to flesh them out and give them meaning.
Since official Islam respects the Bible and the Torah, this should not be a problem. Many a Muslim has written me, saying that the Seven Law system resembles early Islam. In other words, they say, Islam contains the Seven Laws of Noah at its core.
Apparently, nothing in Islam is antithetical to Noah’s Laws, and nothing in Noah’s Laws, the Seven Universal Laws, is necessarily antithetical to Islam.
So when, we wonder, will Islam officially adopt Noah’s Laws? When will Muslims stop behaving so cruelly and violently, even among themselves? When will they stop sending themselves, or their wives, mothers, or even their children - more often, actually, someone else’s children - to maim and slaughter others, even their own fellow Muslims?
When will the world - let us leave the Muslim world out of it, at this point, let us just talk of non-Muslim who keep making lame excuses for Muslim “outrage” - clearly and unambiguously condemn such barbarity and cruelty?
And, finally, when will the Muslims themselves condemn this evil, these horrible violations of the world’s most fundamental laws of civilization? When will they wholeheartedly take up the basic requisites of civilization?
In this age of environmental consciousness, let us recognize the truth that every violation of God’s Universal Laws defiles the Earth itself. As the Bible teaches, larceny, sexual immorality, injustice, blasphemy, cruelty and thoughtlessness towards animals, murder, idolatry, etc., all pollute and corrupt the land.
(By the way, the history of man on earth proves that proposition. Look at the ecological disasters that are Nigeria, Kenya, or Zimbabwe, or in India, and China. Look at some of America’s central cities. Look at the Muslim world itself - where deserts fill what used to be called the Fertile Crescent. . .
MD