What gives a civilization the right to lecture others about morality? Is it power. Is it wealth. Is it the ability to name itself judge and jury while exempting itself from the dock. That question sits at the heart of the Western moral posture today, and it does not survive serious scrutiny.
Let us begin where Socrates would begin, by asking what virtue is. Not how it is performed in speeches or codified in resolutions, but how it appears when tested by interest, temptation, and power. A morality that holds only when it is convenient is not morality. It is theater. The West speaks endlessly of human rights, rule of law, women’s dignity, child protection, and ethical governance. Yet when its own elites are implicated in crimes that violate every one of these principles, the machinery of accountability stalls. Files disappear. Trials are postponed. Names are protected. Silence becomes policy as star witnesses were and are still unalived.
Kant insisted that moral law must be universal. An action is right only if one is willing for it to become a general law. Here the Western position collapses. The standards applied to others are not applied inward. Muslim societies are judged collectively for the crimes of individuals. Western societies, by contrast, individualise guilt when it threatens power and collectivize virtue when it serves prestige. This is not moral universalism. It is moral exceptionalism.
Bentham would ask a different question. What is the utility of this moral posture. Who benefits from it. The answer is obvious. Moral lecturing becomes a tool of dominance. It justifies sanctions, invasions, cultural contempt, and political interference. It produces pleasure and security for the powerful at the expense of the dignity of others. Any calculus that calls this the greatest good is deeply corrupted.
Montesquieu warned that laws divorced from virtue rot into instruments of tyranny. Today we see institutions loudly proclaiming ethics while quietly enabling impunity. The law is invoked against the weak and negotiated away for the strong. This contradiction is not accidental. It is structural. A civilization that measures success by power will always subordinate morality to interest when the two collide.
Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al Sadr diagnosed this crisis decades ago. In *Our Philosophy*, he exposed the emptiness of materialist ethics that lack an objective moral anchor. When values are untethered from transcendence, morality becomes a consensus game. Whoever controls institutions controls ethics. In *Our Society*, he warned that societies built on such foundations inevitably fracture. They speak of justice while institutionalizing inequality. They speak of freedom while normalizing exploitation. They speak of morality while protecting predators.
This is where the critique of Edward Said becomes indispensable. In *Orientalism*, Said showed that Western discourse did not merely misunderstand Islam and the Muslim world. It projected onto them its own unresolved pathologies. Violence, sexual repression, irrationality, despotism. These accusations functioned as displacement. The West externalized what it refused to confront within itself. The East became the screen onto which Western guilt was projected.
Nothing illustrates this more starkly than the recent exposures surrounding elite abuse networks. Epstein Files! Crimes that Western media and policymakers habitually associate with Muslim societies were revealed at the heart of Western power. The difference is not the crime. The difference is consequence. Those implicated remain free, respected, protected. Not because they are innocent, but because they belong to the right “civilization”, the right class, the right narrative. Islam is condemned for what it forbids. The West is excused for what it practices.
Sayyid Qutb saw this coming. In *Milestones*, he argued that modern civilization, stripped of divine guidance, would eventually lose its moral compass even as it retains its technological prowess. The result would be _jahiliyyah_ with a polished exterior. Advanced systems. Hollow ethics. Loud slogans. Quiet corruption. Qutb’s claim was not that Muslims are morally superior by default, but that Islam alone offers a coherent framework where morality is not negotiable, not selective, not suspended for elites.
Islam’s insistence on accountability before God is precisely what makes it dangerous to power. No one is above the law. No one is shielded by status. No one’s crimes are erased by affiliation. This is why Islam is attacked not only politically but morally. *A system that exposes hypocrisy cannot be tolerated by a civilization that survives on it.*
The West’s moral crisis is not that it fails to live up to its values. All societies fail. Its crisis is that it refuses to admit failure while demanding repentance from others. That posture is no longer credible. The mask has slipped. The lectures ring hollow.
What remains standing, after the rhetoric collapses, is not a civilization but a question. Can morality exist without transcendence. Can power restrain itself. Can a society judge itself by the standards it imposes on others.
Islam answers yes, but only at a price. The price is submission to a moral law higher than empire, higher than markets, higher than elites. Higher than paedophilian human flesh eaters. Yes! You heard me right. That is why, amid the ruins of moral posturing, it stands as the last coherent claimant to ethical seriousness. Not because all Muslims are perfect, but because the standard itself does not bend.
And that, more than anything else, explains the hostility it faces.
