“Significantly, after the advent of the Quran, in Muslim societies, no system of ethics was born outside the crucible of Islam In the West, by contrast, several comprehensive moral systems were produced by unaided human reflection, both before and after the event of Christianity.
Indeed two of the most influential were developed by ‘pagans’ who took the basis of morality to be individual merit, not divine grace: Aristotle and the Stoics have left us enduring moral legacies. Spinoza created an original ethical scheme and presented it in a geometric mode! Kant and John Stuart Mill constructed ethical systems, deontological and utilitarian respectively, with no or little regard for Christian moral values. Marxist and Nietzschean ethical schemes, if we may call them that, were self-consciously anti-Christian. Many systems of morality developed independently of religion not only in western nations. In China, there is Confucianism– which is not much more than a system of ethics and etiquette.
Muslim civilisation, however, has produced no moral system after the coming of Islam. There could scarcely be a better proof of the strength of the liaison between Islamic religion and morality.”
~ Shabbir Akhtar, The Quran and the Secular Mind: A Philosophy of Islam, 108–109
Blogging Theology
“Significantly, after the advent of the Quran, in Muslim societies, no system of ethics was born outside the crucible of Islam In the West, by contrast, several comprehensive moral systems were produced by unaided human reflection, both before and after the event of Christianity.
Indeed two of the most influential were developed by ‘pagans’ who took the basis of morality to be individual merit, not divine grace: Aristotle and the Stoics have left us enduring moral legacies. Spinoza created an original ethical scheme and presented it in a geometric mode! Kant and John Stuart Mill constructed ethical systems, deontological and utilitarian respectively, with no or little regard for Christian moral values. Marxist and Nietzschean ethical schemes, if we may call them that, were self-consciously anti-Christian. Many systems of morality developed independently of religion not only in western nations. In China, there is Confucianism– which is not much more than a system of ethics and etiquette.
Muslim civilisation, however, has produced no moral system after the coming of Islam. There could scarcely be a better proof of the strength of the liaison between Islamic religion and morality.”
~ Shabbir Akhtar, The Quran and the Secular Mind: A Philosophy of Islam, 108–109
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