mic achievement, unmatched before or since in the speed
and scope of its expansion. History tends to be a stern judge. Ultimately,
in its uncompromising perspective, the consequences to those who would
have blindly strangled such enterprises in the cradle will always be set
off against the benefits accruing to the world as a whole from the triumph
of the Bible's vision of human possibilities and the advances made
possible by the genius of Islamic civilization.

Among the most contentious of such issues in understanding society's
evolution towards spiritual maturity has been that of crime and
punishment. While different in detail and degree, the penalties prescribed
by most sacred texts for acts of violence against either the commonweal or
the rights of other individuals tended to be harsh. Moreover, they
frequently extended to permitting retaliation against the offenders by the
injured parties or by members of their families. In the perspective of
history, however, one may reasonably ask what practical alternatives
existed. In the absence not merely of present-day programmes of
behavioural modification, but even of recourse to such coercive options as
prisons and policing agencies, religion's concern was to impress indelibly
on general consciousness the moral unacceptability--and practical costs--of
conduct whose effect would otherwise have been to demoralize efforts at
social progress. The whole of civilization has since been the beneficiary,
and it would be less than honest not to acknowledge the fact.

So it has been throughout all of the religious dispensations whose origins
have survived in written records. Mendicancy, slavery, autocracy,
conquest, ethnic prejudices and other undesirable features of social
interaction have gone unchallenged--or been explicitly indulged--as religion
sought to achieve reformations of behaviour that were considered more
immediately essential at given stages in the advance of civilization. To
condemn religion because any one of its successive dispensations failed to
address the whole range of social wrongs would be to ignore everything
that has been learned about the nature of human development. Inevitably,
anachronistic thinking of this kind must also create severe psychological
handicaps in appreciating and facing the requirements of one's own time.

The issue is not the past, but the implications for the present. Problems
arise where followers of one of the world's faiths prove unab