Notes: Who is the Practical Teacher?
The Light (Pakistan), 1st September 1922 Issue (Vol. 1, No. 18, p. 1)
At the half-yearly meeting of the Cambridge and District Federation, Mr Andrew Buchanan, J.P. said:
“If Genoa had opened with the reading of the Sermon on the Mount and that had dictated the policy there, there would have been no more troubles and no more conferences.”
He declared:
“He had not been in a church because he was one of those millions of men and women who felt that the Church had no message for them.”
Another speaker, Mrs M. Joscelyne, remarked
“that they were told that men and women did not care for religion.”
She did not believe it; she believed that
“they were disgusted with the religion that was served to them. The women did not want a sloppy, sentimental religion; they wanted something worthwhile.”
The above speaks for itself. Christianity is discredited, and its disruption seems to be inevitable. What is the reason? Its impracticability. It is ethical and visionary only.
The faith of Islam, on the other hand, is characterised by its sound common sense and its practical nature as well as precept. The Quran says:
“Certainly you have in the Apostle of Allah an excellent exemplar for him who hopes in Allah and the Latter day, and remembers Allah much” (The Holy Quran, 33:21).
This points to the real practicability and liveness of Muhammad [pbuh] who, in his life, was an exemplar by his actions as a warrior, by his teachings as a law-giver, statesman and judge, and by his domestic life as a man.
This is the real standard, practice and precept combined, and not precept alone, which cannot accomplish any real work. Indeed, it is the distinguishing characteristic of his life that he not only gave practical rules of guidance in all walks of life, but gave in his life a practical illustration of all those rules.