Thoughts of an American Muslim September-October

“You know,” he explained, “that your uncle and me own a stationary store. Well, one day a customer comes in to buy some pencils. He hands me a twenty-dollar bill and I mistake it to be a one-dollar bill and I give him the change accordingly. But the customer doesn’t notice. He’s heading for the door and I look at him and at the twenty-dollar bill and then I realize I am faced with a moral question: ‘Do I share the twenty-dollar bill with your uncle or not?’” More often than not the Americans appear to be a people who are, as the Quran puts it, lost in darkness (zulmat) after their ephemeral light has disappeared. They neither listen to those who talk sense, nor do they know what to do. ‘Whatever became of sin?’ asks William F. Buckley, Jr., who shares with the fundamentalists much of the conservative ideology, in a recent issue of The New York Times Magazine. It is, not surprising, precisely the question Karl Menninger of the Menninger Clinic asked in his book published in 1973, Whatever Became of Sin?, a volume aimed at solving all kinds of social problems through ‘an ethical system for today’s world.’ The book sold more than 125,000 copies in hardcover alone and about twice as many in paperback. The question these authors should be asking is, ‘Is anyone listening? Is anyone listening to those who remind the people of vital necessity of values to keep society together?’ The majority of Americans simply do not know that they are committing some wrong. And when the very few do, they do not know what to do about it. A fine, recent example is a school’s attempt to cut down and eventually eliminate promiscuity. It forbade the holding of hands within the school buildings. Evidently, educators still have to learn about the youngsters they have to deal with. The students reacted with the way they usually do, by overdoing