Islam is a religion of peace, as are Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism. Humanism, too, is a pathway of peace.
During Ramadhan, Muslims are obligated to remember those who suffer under the weight of poverty and those who lack sufficient food to live and provide for their families and to give charity to those in need.
Islam means 'submission,' and this submission implies humility: humility before God and humility in our conduct towards others. The ethical precepts of Islam: charity to the poor, compassion towards innocents, restraint towards prisoners of war and the principle that war is permissible only in self-defence, are intended to impose moral limits on human behaviour.
Each path seeks in its own way to bind human passion and power to ethical restraint.
This question of moral limits lies at the heart of the work of the great Russian 19th-century author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who explored what becomes of societies that reject any binding moral order.
Dostoyevsky did not condemn atheism itself. His concern was that when societies discard all transcendent moral reference points, religious, spiritual, or metaphysical, they risk replacing moral restraint with materialistic utility and power.
In such conditions, he warned, people may come to believe that 'everything is permitted,' including cruelty and murder, provided it serves their ideological purpose.
The twentieth century offers stark evidence of this danger. Under Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, an estimated 15–20 million people died through purges, forced collectivisation, famine and the Gulag system.
Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler implemented genocidal policies that murdered around 17 million civilians, including six million Jews in the Holocaust, while the Second World War, caused by Hitler’s Nazis, claimed approximately 70–85 million lives worldwide.
In China, policies introduced under Mao Zedong led to catastrophic famine and political violence, with most historians estimating 30–45 million deaths.
In Cambodia, Pol Pot presided over a regime in which around 1.5–2 million people — roughly a quarter of the population — died from execution, starvation and forced labour. These regimes differed in culture and context, but they shared a decisive feature: moral limits were subordinated to political ideology, historical necessity and the will of the state.
Violence was justified as a tool of progress. The individual human being became expendable. This is precisely the danger Dostoyevsky foresaw when no higher moral authority is acknowledged beyond human will and political purpose.
It is often argued that religion has been the principal cause of most wars. This claim does not withstand historical scrutiny. The largest-scale atrocities of the modern era were driven primarily by nationalism, racial ideology, imperial ambition and totalitarian political systems, often in explicit rejection of religious moral constraints.
While religion has sometimes been used falsely to front violence, it has far more often been overridden by secular ideologies that elevated power and destiny above moral law. The contemporary world continues to test these questions.
In Myanmar, Buddhists abandoned their religion and murdered many hundreds of their Muslim compatriots.
Zionists in occupied Palestine, detached from religious ethical restraints, are using Judaism opportunistically to justify collective punishment and genocide against mostly children and women. Jews who follow their religion of Judaism have been among the most consistent critics of such Zionist genocidal policies, demonstrating that faith can function as a source of moral resistance rather than criminal violence.
The issue then is not simply religion versus atheism. It is whether any society can endure without acknowledging moral limits that stand above political ideology, power and opportunism.
Dostoyevsky’s warning remains urgent: when no authority higher than human will is recognised, history suggests that human beings readily commit the most unthinkable crimes.
Karim Easterbrook
The writer is a Former Cambridge School Principal and Author
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
