What I learned from Islam: moral sobriety

When you refuse to demonise Islam as is often done today, you can discover its spiritual value without any problem. By very simply reading the Quran, you can come to the obvious conclusion that the core messages of Islam aren't what certain contemporary discourses make of them.

Admittedly, the Koran isn't easy, but that's true for every holy book. So just like with other holy books, you won't get very far when you read the Quran with too many preconceptions. But when you read it with an open spiritual mindset, you can for example find one of the most lovely moral principles on every page of the Koran. I call it 'moral sobriety' myself.

In many suras the Quran clarifies that the moral life of a spiritual person does not start from grand and complex maxims or high-end principles but from moral obviousness: 'do not steel', 'do not lie', 'do not cheat', etc. – principals that everybody knows. The moral call that lies within Quran can thus be easily summarised: “Simply be a good person.”

In itself not many words are used to expound this moral call, at least not explicitly, but it lingers within all Quran verses and supports the many ideas that are explicitly worked out in the different suras.

The moral rules one should uphold are more 'presupposed' than clarified in the Koran. The holy book builds upon the idea that the rules are obvious and do not need any further explanation because all the prophets have reminded us about them for thousands of years and because everybody, deep down, knows that they are correct. In the Koran it thus does not seem necessary to repeat them all. What seems necessary, on the other hand, is to encourage the faithful to simply follow the rules of the prophets and to stop transgressing them. “All in all it is clear what you can and can not do, just try to stick to it,” is what the Quran seems to say.

The evident truth that is thus formulated within the holy book, the 'moral soberiety' it thus brings forward, of course opposes the contemporary idea that we always should keep on learning, keep on searching further and keep on reading more to know how we can live in a 'good' way because eventually, the Koran says, we all know it for more than two thousand years and we really shouldn't make it that difficult.

If we do make it more difficult, then it actually shows that for one reason or the other we do not wish to follow the moral rules that prophets and sages have expressed again and again. An endless quest for new things will not solve our ethical questions and it will not bring us any satisfying answer, for the problem does not reside in a lack of knowledge, it resides in the incapability to apply the evident rules and our unwillingness to abide by them.

As such the concept of 'moral sobriety' puts a needle in the bloated hot air balloon of the contemporary lifestyle of a whole lot of people. No matter how many big words and ideas we come up with, eventually life isn't that difficult for the majority of the time. Once in a while there might be a real tensionful dilemma that needs more consideration, debate and discussion, but in the dailyness of our existence, life is, morally speaking, pretty clear: just try to be a good person, be a bit decent and don't do stuff of which you already know it's wrong.

This text is a small part of my boek “Ego-removal. The way of prophets and wise.”  
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