Moreover, the Moslem's Allah is absolute Will, neither bound nor directed by any law of right or wrong, and in His dealings with the world there is, there can be, nothing moral. 'God,' we are told, 'misleadeth whom He willeth, and guideth aright whom He willeth,'[[11]] and, 'As for man, we have firmly fixed his fate about his neck.'[[12]] Therefore, to the Moslem there can be no true sense of sin, for what his conscience condemns may be the will of Allah,[[13]] and the only sin he can conceive is to transgress an arbitrary degree of Allah's pleasure, or deny his Prophet.
Therefore, because Allah to the Moslem is not a Father, because He is not Love, He does not yearn for the love of men.
Because He is not holy, He does not yearn for men to be Godlike, holy as Himself.
So because He is not Love and Holiness, He does not seek to redeem men from sin, to draw them to Himself.
There is no bridge needed, no bridge possible, no sacrifice, no 'wall of partition' to be broken down, no Atonement, no Calvary, no thought of God sharing our life, that we may share His in holiness and love through all eternity, no Incarnation.
It is as though the Allah of the Moslem says, 'I have called you slaves'; not the words of infinite love and infinite glory, 'I have called you friends.' Islam denies, in fact, those eternal truths in which man's only hope of a redeemed life can lie—the divine life of our Lord on earth and His path through the Sacrifice of Himself, to the glory of His resurrection.
2. Man and Woman. (a) Man.
II. His teaching about Man.—Because the Moslem's view of God is out of focus, discoloured, distorted, and false, therefore his view of man is false and out of focus too.
If God is not our Father, then we are not His children, and cannot be. If He is but an Almighty Despot, we can only be His subjects, His slaves at best. And the Korân gives man no better place than that of the highest of the living beings inhabiting the earth. No breath of God is in him, no spark that is divine. And so it came about that during his life Mohammed never taught men to think; he gave not principles, but precepts, and religion became a thing of ritual and not a religion of the heart. We have seen how Islam in its propagation sought to win men's allegiance and asked no questions as to motives. Its very religious observances are not concerned with righteousness of life. For instance, in its teaching about prayer the Korân contains the most explicit instructions about the manner of prayer, about the previous washing, about the direction, the posture, the language, the form, but there is hardly a word about its meaning or its spirit. 'In the 10,000 verses of the Korân there are not as many petitions as there are in the Lord's Prayer.' So completely do spirituality and righteousness seem to have got divorced in the Moslem mind, that there seems nothing incongruous, at least to many Moslems, in lying, cheating, swearing, and praying almost in the same breath.[[14]]