Theocentric Ethics in Islam:
From Spiritual Consciousness to Moral Conscience
AN ARTICLE BY Reza Shah-Kazemi
A ‘theocentric ethics’ governed by this vision of the intrinsic beauty of divine reality makes good action not only conceivable and practicable but also infinitely attractive, if not irresistible. To accomplish sin, in such a perspective, becomes practically inconceivable, in much the same way as ugliness is intrinsically repulsive. One should also note, finally, that a moral disposition that is centred on God rather than man, far from rendering inaccessible the source of human morality, makes that source inescapable. For man is made in the image or form of God, and he cannot escape That of which he is an image, and which is thus more fully constitutive of ‘his’ reality than he is himself, just as, to return to our earlier image, the reflection is more fully real in and as the Light of which it is a reflection than it is as a reflection.
