What the British author: S. H. Leeder said about Islam (1)

In his book, the British author: S. H. Leeder said “The relationship between the father and his sons is one of the pleasantest features of Islamic life. “To please your father is to please God, and to displease your father is to displease God,” said the Prophet Mohammed; and the teaching is taken to heart.”

———————————————-

In his book: “Veiled mysteries of Egypt and the religion of Islam (1913)”, the British author: S. H. Leeder said in the introduction of his book: “There has always been a veil of mystery over the religion of I slam, from its very first days.”

What Leeder said about the gentleness and simplicity in Islam?

 “There is a great deal in the religion of Islam which teaches consideration for .others, and leads to gentleness and simplicity of conduct, which, with a remarkable absence of censoriousness, produces what we call gentlemen. And no national decadence, or falling behind in the race for intellectual and material attainment and advantage, has obliterated this.

The men of the family with whom we are staying, in the culture of mind they show in all the relationships of life and I speak now after a friendship which ripened into close intimacy recalled for me the fine qualities which marked the early Moslems.

Here was a father and five sons, living together in a patriarchal dignity, the father ruling with a firm and wise benevolence, and the sons filling their part with filial respect and affection, all conscious of their duty to their dependents and their neighbors, following a family tradition of many generations.

They are known as men faithful to their word, whatever may be the cost, and equally faithful to their self-respect, whatever the inducements to depart from it. The Bey would have been a Pasha, when titles were on sale, if he had not possessed qualities above the temptations of personal aggrandizement in the East a sore temptation indeed. It was my happiness with these friends to bridge the gulf of reticence which the different forms of Eastern and Western pride create to separate men of different races, and causes them to misjudge each other from across the gulf.

The relationship between the father and his sons is one of the pleasantest features of Egyptian life.

“To please your father is to please God, and to displease your father is to displease God,” said the Prophet Mohammed; and the teaching is taken to heart.

I never was in any family where the sons, of whatever age, did not rise when their father entered a room, waiting for him to be seated; an air of respect coming over them which prevents any slackness of good manners in his presence. His slightest wish is a law obeyed with quiet grace. The youngest son of this particular family sits by his father’s side at meals, and waits upon him as a most attentive servant. A father is seldom or never harsh to his sons; he reasons with them in a way that assumes intelligence, and a perfect desire to consider his wishes on their part.

An undutiful son is very rare amongst Moslems. The deplorable decline of respect paid to the aged in Western lands has no echo in the East.

“Nothing more greatly surprises the European traveller,” Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole admits,” than the polite and gentlemanlike manners of Egyptians of all classes. They always do the right thing in the most courteous, graceful, and self-possessed manner, and intentional rudeness to an older man, or a superior in rank, is almost unknown.”