And what is the remedy?

By way of answering this question, let us recollect certain outer aspects of our civilization—I mean, the Islamic civilization— aspects whose function was, and can be again, to act as a protective shell for the kernel, that is, for the religion itself. The fabric of our civilization is woven out of the example set by our Prophet; and particularly significant in this connection is the fact that his house was a prolongation of his mosque. Thus for twelve hundred years—and more in many Islamic countries—the houses of his people were prolongations of the mosques. The Muslim would take off his shoes when he entered his house just as he would take them off when he entered the mosque; he would sit in his house in the same manner as he sat in the mosque; he would put such ornaments on the walls of his house as he saw on the walls of the mosque; nor would he put in his house any ornaments that would not be suitable for the mosque. Thus he was continually surrounded by reminders of the spiritual dignity and spiritual responsibilities of man, and he dressed himself according to the same principles. His clothes were in keeping with the dignity of man’s function as representative of God on earth, and at the same time they made it easy for him to perform the ablution, and they were in perfect conformity with the movements of the prayer. Moreover they were an ornament to the prayer, unlike modern European clothes which rob the movements of the prayer of all their beauty and impede them, just as they act as a barrier between the body and the ablution.

All that I have mentioned is outward, but the outward acts upon the inward, and a man’s clothes and his home are the nearest of all things to his soul, and their influence on it is perpetual and therefore incalculably powerful. There can be no doubt that these outward things were one of the secrets of the depth of piety among Muslims, for twelve hundred years; and this brings us back to the saying that Islam embraces the whole of life. Thanks to the outer aspects of the Islamic civilization, the whole of life was in fact penetrated by religion, and I see no other remedy for our present religious crisis but a return to that noble civilization whose function it is to create a worthy setting for the spirit of the religion, a setting that makes relatively easy the fulfillment of our ritual obligations. Nor can the community dispense with the help of anything that makes this spiritual life easier, for man was created weak . But this return can be accomplished only by the widespread setting of examples. Arabs, you are in the abode of Islam, where after your independence you are free to do what you will, and we look toward you from outside that abode and place our hopes in you. Do not disappoint us.

All the talks I had attended so far had been politely applauded in varying degrees of enthusiasm. But when I came to the end of mine there was a dead silence, and I saw that some of the audience were weeping. Then the man who had been appointed as the leader of the non-Arab group of invitees to which I belonged, an elderly man from Senegal with a venerable appearance, rose to his feet and came towards me. He took my hand between his two hands, and without saying a word he just beamed into my face for two or three minutes. Then a much younger man—he was from the sub-continent—came up to me and said: Kana lazim an yuqal al-haqq (It was necessary that the truth should be told). Then an Egyptian took me by the hand and said: Ja’a mina’l-qalbi fadakhala ’l-qulub (It came from the Heart, and it has entered the Hearts)