The Problems Facing Modern Civilization

reality of a new era of sexual caution and restraint.”10 People had been delighted at having discovered the key to unlimited enjoyment in freeing themselves from the curbs of religion, for, according to divine law, a sexual relationship between a man and a woman was permitted only within the bonds of marriage. But now the realities of nature are finally forcing man to forsake the path of free love and follow the path of sexual restraint. It has taken the fatalities of the final quarter of the twentieth century to convince people that divine law and the law of nature are one. Too late, it has dawned on “free lovers” that promiscuity could be a killer. Time’s cartoon showing a man and a woman encircled by a deadly snake, epitomizes one of today’s major human dilemmas. It was not without good reason that the Qur’an commanded that sexual relationships should be confined within the bonds of marriage: (Lawful to you are), in wedlock, women from among those who believe, and, in wedlock, women from among those who have been given the Book before you — provided that you give them their dowers, taking them in honest wedlock, not in fornification, nor as secret love­companions.11 This has been interpreted by Qur’anic commentators as a clear injunction to establish sexual relations only through marriage, and that there should be no extra-marital relationships. Experiments have shown that this is the only right and natural way. Marital relationships and fornication are not just matters of approval or disapproval by religious authorities, but matters of life and death. The married state is a blessing for human society; any other is a curse. It is significant that the new education plan released by the U.S.12 government stresses sexual abstinence as a preventive measure. This public exhortation to observe the rules of old-fashioned morality is a clear indication of the superiority of divine law over man-made law. A believer in divine law, who errs by entering into an illicit sexual relationship, and contracting AIDS in the process, will be considered to have deviated from the principles of divine law. However, one who belongs to western civilization and contracts such a disease as the result of promiscuity will be said to have shown the error of the principle of western civilization itself. The former case proves the error of a man while the latter case proves the error of the principle of a civilization. THE CONSEQUENCES OF UNNATURAL EQUALITY “No one who has ever known me can believe what I did,” said a 35-year old American whose demeanor suggested innocence and seriousness of mind. He related how he had beaten the wife he loved, choked her till she was unconscious, pushed her face in the mud and held a kitchen knife to her throat.13 “How could I have done that?” he now wonders.