‘Amal Saleh

Understanding the Qur’anic term ‘Amal Saleh´ righteous or good deeds require deep thought and reflection. The Qur’an includes under this blanket term all its moral and spiritual teachings including the laws of individual and social conduct.

It also makes an allusion to the fact that the secret of man´s real development and progress lies in performing these very acts. Righteous deeds alone can guarantee the growth of man´s natural capacities and potentialities on the right lines. To quote Maulana Farahi, an eminent scholar, on this point:

"Almighty Allah has designated good and righteous deeds with the word ‘Salehat´. This term itself guides us to the great truth that the whole of man´s development and rectitude be it outward or inner, worldly or spiritual, personal or collective, bodily or intellectual depends upon good and righteous deeds. Righteous action is life-giving and a source of maturity and enhancement.

By means of good deeds alone man can attain those highest stages of development to which he aspires while sticking to his true and ideal nature...... This point can be put alternatively thus: Since man is an integral part of the total scheme of universe, only those of his deeds will be righteous which accord with the grand design on which the universe has been fashioned by its Creator."

These ideas can be explained philosophically thus. Man, like any other being, has environment; but in contrast to brute animals, he is not bound to it. He can transcend it, in imagination, thought and action.

His encounter with any of the objects and situations surrounding him is always active and creative. Such an encounter presupposes ability to transcend and overcome both psychological inclination and outer compulsion, the ability to see the universal within the particular.

The Qur’anic moral imperative, in this sense, is the demand to realize one´s true nature actually which he has potentially.

Every act is a morally good action in which an individual self establishes itself as a true person. In this way, a moral act is not an act in obedience to an externally imposed law; it is the inner law of our true being, of our essential nature. Conversely, an anti moral act is not the transgression of one or several prescribed commands, but an act that contradicts the self-realization of the person as a person and drives towards disintegration ’fasad´ in Qur’anic usage.

It disrupts and corrupts the centeredness of the person by giving predominance to degenerate passions, desires and cravings. And when this happens, the self as an active being is split and the conflicting trends make it their battlefield.

The ‘will´, in the sense of a self that acts from the centered totality of its being, is enslaved. Freedom is replaced by compulsion. The voice of man´s essential and true being is gradually silenced until it reaches a state of total depersonalization, described by the Qur’an as the state in which:

“God hath set a seal on their hearts and on their hearing and on their eyes is a veil; great is the penalty they incur.” (Surah Al- Baqarah: 7)

One cannot discard the moral imperative itself without the self-destruction of one´s essential nature and one´s manifold relationships.

Moreover, the Qur’anic word ‘amal´ too is very significant. The two locutions ‘action´ and ‘activity´ are both generally taken to convey the sense of the Arabic word ‘amal´. But there is a subtle difference in their connotation. Any kind of movement or work can be called activity, but the word action usually implies some strenuous or arduous task and it, as such, better expresses the meaning of ‘amal´.

By combining the connotations of ‘Saleh´ as explained above and that of ‘amal´, we would realize that the real significance of this term is: it is necessary for man to put up a hard struggle to achieve that real goal for which he was potentially created, and he has to ascend certain heights to attain that goal. All this is conveyed by the comprehensive word ‘amal Saleh´.

The basic and poignant concern of the Islamic faith is to point to, and overcome, the crisis of our age the crisis of man´s separation from man and of man´s separation from God. Islam recognizes that human morality and human ideals thrive only when set in a context of a transcendent attitude.

A religious person commands a depth of consciousness inaccessible to the profane man. The Qur’an emphasizes the moral dynamic of man.

Its image of man as the vicegerent of God on earth, Homo cum Deo, implies the heightest conceivable freedom, the freedom to collaborate with the very creative process. This image implies further that the intellect and conscience are capable of making genuine discrimination between good and evil.

Qur’anic theology has dealt with the problem of the concrete moral decision in terms of the doctrine of the divine presence. The sense of "Divine Presence every-where" opens man´s eyes and ears to the moral demand implicit in the concrete situation. Tables of laws can never wholly apply to the unique situation. Belief in God, on the contrary, opens the mind to these potentialities and guides decision in a particular situation.

The plural nominative of ‘saleh´ used in the Qur’an is ‘salehat´. It means good deeds. Its semantic constitution contains emphatic reference to belief in God, prayer, and good will and love for humanity. However, the practice of salehat is repeatedly joined to Faith. Thus this term connotes ‘faith expressed in outward conduct´.

If we take into consideration the facts of human psychology in reference to the proper realisation of the moral ideal, we are bound to hold to the Qur’anic view that some desires deserve to be suppressed, some to be moderated, and some to be encouraged and enhanced, ultimately subordinating all to the spiritual yearning of obtaining Divine Pleasure, keeping the sense of duty always dynamically alive and the action entrenched in the purest motivation.

In this sense, the soundness of the Qur’anic view is self-evident even though certain religions like Budhism, and certain great moral philosophers like Kant are opposed to it.

For instance, maintaining that all desire is bad, Kant says:

"The inclinations themselves being sources of want are so far from having an absolute worth for which they should be desired, that on the contrary it must be the universal wish of every rational being to be wholly free from them". Schopenhauer rightly terms Kant´s view as the ‘apotheosis of lovelessness´, because in Kant´s estimation even the most unselfish acts of benevolence towards, and love for, other human beings lose all their moral worth unless inspired by pure sense of duty and unless emptied of all desire to be benevolent towards fellow-beings.

According to the Qur’anic view, on the other hand, neither desire as such, nor the higher desires that relate to high and noble ends, are condemned. Only the desires relating to the unregulated instinctive urges, called hawa in Qur’anic terminology, are subjected to moral disapproval.