We have culled habits...

We have culled habits, thought, laws, manners from here and there over centuries, and donned them in indiscriminate combination, so that we make ourselves more like figures in a ridiculous carnival procession than the dignified personalities that we should be, wearing our own national garb with distinction and consuming our national dishes with conscious nobility. Take our present constitution.

We first copied French models : then those of other European nations were added ; and later, on each occasion when new legislation was called for, sought our mould in some other place again, so that there is an endless conflict between the spirit of the laws which we have borrowed from outside, and the national spirit for which the laws are made. As a result, a transgressor of the law gains national renown, hero-worship, and help unstinted in every way. Why? Through ignorance in the community?

Not so! For the educated do not respond to the laws. No! It is the inconsistency between the national spirit and the borrowed laws, unrelated to social needs, historical antecedents, national consciousness, personal convictions that emerged from an environment entirely alien to the spirit of our people. Each borrowed law came from a community with its own history, religion, needs and peculiar realities.

Yet none of them can even give a wholly positive answer to its own people, as continuous insurrectionary conditions show. Professor Hocking of Harvard in "The Spirit of World Politics" writes: "Islamic lands will not progress by merely imitating Western arrangements and values. Can Islam produce fresh thinking, independent laws and relevant statutes to fit the new needs raised by modern society? Yes! - and more! Islam offers humanity greater possibilities for advance than others can.

Its lack is not ability - but the will to use it. In reality the Shar'iya contains all the ingredients needed." Iran's national daily "Keyhan" on 14th Dey, 1345 reported: "Yesterday, anniversary of the martyrdom of the Imam Ali, all Tehran practised Islam's laws 100%.

Result: - no crimes; forensic offices unemployed; no murders; no violence; no ripple on the calm surface; borough officers and police untroubled by any calls; even family quarrels within the homes were quickly hushed in reverence for the martyred Leader of the Faithful." The Persian "Reader's Digest" (No. 35, Year 25) corroborated this, saying.