I’m sorry, but I think you misunderstood Islam and the moral Zeitgeist.

Yes, morality can exist even without religion but I’m a firm believer that it will result in a version of morality that is skewed—a perversion of what morality is.

Let me explain why, inshāAllāh. https://twitter.com/ezro_cadabro/status/1261664970275606533

Firstly, it is important to clarify a few things to avoid fallacious argumentation. The most important clarification is that a person’s actions does not necessarily happen as a consequence of their moral system.

Meaning, a person can be good/evil regardless of their belief.

Pointing to someone bad and saying “this is where your morality will lead you” is not a valid argument because:
1) actions can be in conflict with their beliefs/moral conscience
2) humans inevitably make mistakes, there is no guarantee that the mistake is due to their morality

Secondly, to claim that moral progress in Islam happens because of the moral Zeitgeist is plain false. The moral Zeitgeist was a theory put forward by Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion. And he believes it to be independent of *any* religious principles, since it’s...

the ‘spirit of the people’.

Moral ‘progress’ in Islam has never occurred without reference to revelation. What people can’t seem to grasp when we say ‘revelation’ is that it is not a black-and-white thing—it is not only about commands and prohibitions in the Qur’an and Sunnah.

Take a class of Islamic Jurisprudence and you’ll understand that rulings in Islam are divided into two broad categories: qat’i(certain)and zanni(ambiguous). I’m not a student of fiqh, apologies if my explanation is simplistic, but the general concept is that: rulings that are

explicitly mentioned in the scriptural sources are not disputed in its hukm.

Zanni, being more open-ended is subject to scholars’ interpretations, who decides rulings through other means, such as ijmā’ (scholarly consensus) and qiyās (analogical deductions), and also some...

other secondary sources such as istihsān, masālih, etc but that’s not relevant. What’s relevant is that all these other sources, despite not being the Qur’an and Sunnah, are still putting the Qur’an and Sunnah as their main reference. e.g. a ruling made based on the use of...

qiyās are analogously deduced from–you guessed it–the Qur’an and Sunnah.

Therefore, moral progress in Islam in these Zanni matters did not, is not and will never progress because of the moral Zeitgeist. You’re giving it way too much credit, akhi. The credit should be given...

to 1400+ years of Muslim scholarship. The Zeitgeist theory proposes that morality changes because the majority of people say so. Islam says otherwise

Now the contention between an ever-changing morality and one that is anchored on revelation is very briefly explained here: https://twitter.com/aqilazme/status/1261801814023737344

But let’s inspect your claims for a second because you seemed to have jumped the gun there. You’re asserting that religion has been used to justify people’s heinous acts such as burying newborn babies but “society has progressed far past that”.

You said it yourself that it was an accepted practice—why did you think the 7th century Arabian society moved past that if not for Islam saying that it is harām to do so? Surely, it couldn’t be the Zeitgeist since it works based on what is accepted...

by the majority, and the majority accepted that heinous act. Did they somehow build a new moral system on their own overnight or did other regions’ code of morality dissipated into their society all of a sudden? Or could it have been Islam?Which one is more historically accurate?

I am not a student of history either, but I’m sure other historians can cite sources showing how Arabia treated women, outsiders/travellers, how unfair business practices were. It is laughable to think that all of those changed because of the Zeitgeist since it was so rampant.

However, I know this is going to be taken out of context by people who will quote ‘problematic’ hadīths and ask “is this morally correct? lmao”. But that’s a whole different discussion altogether. Regardless of what you think of those hadīths, you cannot deny that morality...

there evolved due to Islam at that time.

Second thing to inspect is the fragility of the moral system based on the ‘factor of harm’. You believe that doing harm onto others is morally bad, okay I can get behind that.

What do you think of harming other people as a form of...

retribution because they have harmed others? We have that in Islam by the way—hudūd, qisās, ta’zīr, etc. Would you say it’s okay to harm someone as a form of justice? Your logic would say otherwise because on what grounds do you justify retribution/punishment then?

Even if you do believe in retributive justice, I’ll still have to ask, on what grounds is it based on? I believe it was Immanuel Kant who was a major proponent of it, but what happens if the Zeitgeist decides that everybody abandons Kantian philosophy? What would...

justice look like in your future?

My point throughout all this is just that you (and Dawkins by extension) are giving the Zeitgeist way too much credit in shaping morality.
(and I’m pretty sure Kant derived his ideas from religious scriptures—could be wrong though)

Let’s take it one step further in analysing this ‘harm on others’ idea. A secular society would probably argue that harm on one’s own self is alright because it’s a personal choice. Hence why alcohol, pornography(psychological harms here), etc are not considered outright immoral.

This is the downfall of Western society in my opinion. Too caught up in ‘harm onto others’ that ‘harm onto self’ is never given much weight. While I do think what people do in an individual basis is one’s own choice, I think that a society that does not place any emphasis on...

‘self’ is morally corrupt—unlike Islam which has hifz al-nafs(the protection of self) and hifz al-‘aql(the protection of mind) in its maqāsid al-Sharī’a(higher aims of the Sharia). Why? Because I believe that self, mind (and other maqāsid like linage, property etc) are sacred...

and to say that one may destroy it on the grounds of personal freedom is a perversion of morality. To destroy something sacred. (With that said, I won’t pass any judgement on whoever chooses to do it; it’s up to you. I’m saying it in terms of a society that promotes this idea).

Again, my criticism is not towards individuals, I don’t care what someone else wears—what is halāl and harām is evident in religion—but my criticism is towards a secular society that normalises other acts that are in fact harmful to one’s self or to other aspects of the maqāsid.

Finally, yes, you can disagree with me on the aforementioned part of whether Western/secular society is morally corrupt—it’s a never-ending debate—but I do think your credit to the Zeitgeist is factually incorrect.

Wallāhu a’lam.
Correct me if I’m wrong.