ISLAM

86 ISLAM VEKSUS CHRISTIANITY
words and come with any explanation you please,
people in Christendom even to-day reflect this utterance
of their Master in their actions the affluence
of sons to go hand in hand with the indigence of
mothers in the West mothers are discarded and
disregarded but a Muslim leaves no effort undone
to pay all respect and reverence to his mother,
because his prophet Muhammad tells him ;
"Paradise
lies at the feet a mother." Happy marriage may be
a lottery in the West, as some assert, but it makes
a wife, in a Muslim house, the dearest of friends,
a counterpart of a man susceptible to all healthy and
salutary influences. It could not well be otherwise
seeing that we are bound to obey the Master who
says : "The best of you are they who behave best
to their wives." Again he says
: "The best of you
before God and His creation are those who are best
in ther own families, and I am the best to my family."*
On the face of this it is difficult to see how can
the Bible itself, or the Christians either, think highly
of women or assign to them a glorious position.
Inspite of howevermuch noisily the Christians may
cry on the matter, it is a settled fact that women are
treated more liberally in Islam than in Christendom
and that "The Quran raised her woman to a position
of perfect freedom and also of equality which
. . .
among other nations, she has partly attained and
that after centuries of hard struggle." t
* Islamic Review.
t The Quran by Mawlana Muhammad Ali, Page 114.