The Root of Our Disorder: Restoring Divine Design in a Decadent Society
The Disorder
Our society is collapsing from within. We waste our energy fighting about politics and trivial matters while the foundation of our civilization crumbles beneath us. We're trapped in an endless cycle, repeating the same destructive patterns, refusing to learn, unable to change, while our character rots away.
Our families are breaking apart. Neighbors don't know each other. Communities that once supported each other have dissolved into isolated strangers staring at screens. We're more "connected" than ever through technology, but lonelier than any generation in history. This social breakdown leaves everyone exhausted, anxious, and clueless.
The real crisis isn't political gridlock. It's moral decay. We've abandoned the values that built strong communities and turned instead to selfishness and excess. Right and wrong have become whatever feels good in the moment. We chase pleasure, comfort, and entertainment.
The deepest problem is spiritual emptiness. We've filled our lives with possessions, distractions, and noise, yet we feel hollow inside. We've rejected faith, scorned wisdom, and mocked anything sacred. Now we're discovering that material wealth and worldly success can't answer the fundamental questions: Why are we here? What matters? What should we live for? The diagnosis is clear: modern society works in reverse. We have made haram easy and halal difficult, inverting the natural moral order.
The Foundation: Taqwa as Moral Anchor
This inversion stems from abandoning the most fundamental principle of human morality: taqwa or God-consciousness. Which means Righteous vigilance: An active, dynamic state of striving to please Allah in thoughts, actions, and intentions.
The Promised Messiah (as) said "Har ik neki ki jarh yeh ittiqa hai Agar yeh jarh rahi sab kuch raha hai": The root of every virtue is righteousness (taqwa). If this root is preserved, everything will survive. The quality of a person's taqwa remains the most significant predictor of moral behavior, raising human morality to a higher level through the constant struggle to improve one's relationship with the Divine.
Taqwa functions as a moral compass, steering individuals toward virtue and away from sin through profound awareness of divine presence, promoting ethical behavior and personal accountability that motivates believers to engage in righteous deeds while avoiding harmful actions. This principle connects to eternal truths recognized across traditions: natural laws that transcend personalities and serve as ultimate adjudicators of right and wrong.
Eternal law is God's rational purpose for all creation, with natural law representing humanity's participation in that divine order through reason. These are not abstract theological musings but foundational realities upon which functional societies must be built. When we abandon God-consciousness, we remove the very foundation of moral order. Too often, religious institutions reduce faith to ritual observance, mistaking the outward form for the inward transformation. It is precisely the failure of religious institutions to cultivate taqwa that ails us most profoundly.
The Primary Structure: Family as Society's Foundation
Yet even robust God-consciousness cannot flourish in a vacuum. It requires the nurturing soil of stable family structures. The family unit serves as society's foundational structure, and its health determines every subsequent social outcome, a reality confirmed by extensive research demonstrating that family stability significantly affects children's cognitive, behavioral, and health development. Studies show that living with stably married parents is associated with the highest cognitive scores and lowest behavioral problems, while family instability affects children by reducing available resources, both time and money, that parents can provide during critical developmental years.
Whether people become God-fearing and law-abiding depends fundamentally on their upbringing, and the mother's presence in child-rearing proves essential to moral formation. Yet modern society has diverted women to work, military service, police forces, and careers that pull them from this primary role, constituting a deviation from divine design: men and women were made to complement each other, not to compete. As men, we are hardwired by nature and confirmed by divine design to provide, protect, and lead, not for ego's sake but in service to families and society. When women are forced into competitive roles rather than complementary ones, children's upbringing suffers, creating ripple effects throughout civilization.
This is not a matter of denying equality but properly understanding it. Equality does not mean treating everyone identically, but rather treating people differently and appropriately to their needs so as to facilitate equal opportunity for better outcomes. In human beings, equal opportunity does not necessarily mean equal outcome. Human beings are not identical units; we are similar but not interchangeable pieces of social machinery. Equality is based not in political ideology but in the reality of differences and mutual dependencies between real men and women. We are designed to need each other, not replicate each other. Because we have deviated from divine design and intent, modern culture remains conflicted about equality and gender roles, unable to resolve tensions that arise from ignoring complementarity in favor of competition.
Addressing Modern Pathologies: Sexual Harassment and the Necessity of Modesty
This deviation manifests in numerous pathologies, among them the epidemic of sexual harassment that plagues contemporary workplaces and social spaces. The uncomfortable truth is that many men, and some women, possess inherent predatorial dispositions, and when we remove all inhibitions and restrictions, human nature defaults to brutal predation. Since men are the primary offenders, they must actively police this behavior rather than ignore it.
Management requires that anything which incites, stimulates, or facilitates predatorial behavior must be curbed, removed, or diminished, beginning with power structures and authority: all employers and those in management positions must undergo four hours of education and training annually about avoiding and managing predatorial behavior, and all employees must sign mandatory quarterly affidavits indicating whether they have been sexually harassed or have harassed anyone. But structural accountability is insufficient without addressing root causes, which leads us back to the divine principle of modesty.
Both men and women must mind their gaze. Both must dress modestly. Free intermingling of men and women in break areas and lunch spaces must be curtailed; eating together should not be permitted, and where possible, separation in the workplace must be maintained. The principle stands: when a man and woman are alone in a room, the third entity is Satan. We might find it difficult to define modesty as a virtue, but we all agree that it should exist. Some things simply should not be seen by most people; the question concerns only where to draw the hemline. The Holy Quran clarifies this: it addresses modesty of men first, then modesty of women, in both acts and dress, encompassing physical, mental, and spiritual dimensions, including humble presentation, avoiding ostentation, recognizing limits of knowledge, and standing humbly before Allah.
The Quran's wisdom extends further by bringing up benefit as opposite to sin, clarifying that haram is that which harms. If there is no cold, we never understand heat; so sin is that which harms us, and when God says "Do not," He means "do not harm yourself." An Islamic principle related to haram holds that if something is prohibited, then anything leading to it is also forbidden, and similarly, the sin of haram extends beyond the person who engages in prohibited activity to others who support the person materially or morally. By unveiling what should not be unveiled, we invite others to sin, or at least to entertain sinful thoughts which induce sinful acts. Since men tend toward more visual and immediate sexual appetites, bodily modesty falls somewhat more upon the fairer sex, though principles apply to both. Modesty should not be understood as imposition but rather as an act of love, willing the good of the other so that beauty and vulnerability might be revealed at the right time and in the right way.
Institutional Responsibilities: The Proper Roles of Church and State
These moral imperatives raise the question of institutional responsibility, which requires proper understanding of the separation of church and state. States are not moral agents; people are. People can impose moral standards on powerful institutions, but institutions themselves lack moral agency. The business of the state is law and order and protection of its people. Government must ensure security of life and property, provide help for the underprivileged, and guarantee justice and equity, with elected officials passing laws beneficial for the protection and prosperity of all citizens, not laws contrary to divine design. Religious institutions bear the complementary responsibility of teaching moral values vigorously, and when church and mosque fail to cultivate taqwa, when they abdicate moral formation, society loses its ethical foundation, perhaps the greatest institutional failure of our age.
The Cascade Effect: Fix the Foundation, Everything Flows
The systemic solution follows logically from this analysis: fix the family unit, and better people evolve; from this, everything else flows. Stable families produce less crime and violence. Better people become more honest elected officials, creating better government. Better government enacts better justice and equity laws. Better laws provide improved services for the underprivileged. If we look at modern society, we observe the opposite trajectory.
The Erosion and the Warning
Morality does not evaporate overnight; erosion is creeping. Today's threat is that we as human beings have been reduced to a sub-human state through limitless indulgence in our own vices, with ruinous consequences to society. Political correctness and social discourse have reduced us to not resisting these tribulations, shrugging them off as "what cannot be mended must be endured." If most people so resign themselves, indeed all is lost. The lessons from these hypocrisies circle back to where we began: there are natural, eternal laws that transcend personalities and are the ultimate adjudicators of right and wrong.
Returning to the original teachings
There is The Almighty out there. Do not pick a fight with God. When in doubt, revert to the original teachings. The path forward requires courage to name root causes rather than symptoms, wisdom to restore divine design rather than pursue failed experiments, and faith to rebuild from foundations rather than patch crumbling facades. The family unit, grounded in taqwa and organized according to divine complementarity, remains the essential starting point. From this foundation, all else follows: moral individuals, just laws, honest leadership, and a society that makes halal easy and haram difficult rather than the reverse. Only by addressing disease rather than symptoms can we hope to escape the decadent feedback loop and restore genuine human flourishing. As Allah says 3:111 You are the best people raised for the good of mankind; you enjoin what is good and forbid evil and believe in Allah…..16:91 Verily, Allah enjoins justice, and the doing of good to others; and giving like kindred; and forbids indecency, and manifest evil, and transgression. He admonishes you that you may take heed.