INTRODUCTION

The expression ‘to command right and forbid wrong’, for all its salience in Islam, is not without parallels outside it. In England it was proposed in AD 1801 to establish a ‘Society for the Suppression of Vice and the Encouragement of Religion and Virtue’. A German legal document of AD 1616 offers the phrase ‘recht gebieten und unrecht verbieten’ with regard to the conduct incumbent on the judge of a certain court. Blackstone (d. AD 1780) in his celebrated treatise on the laws of England defines municipal law as ‘a rule of civil conduct prescribed by the supreme power in a state, commanding what is right and prohibiting what is wrong’. His definition echoes one already adopted by the Stoics. Thus Chrysippus (d. 207 BC) opened his book on law with the statement that the law must, among other things, command what should be done and forbid what should not be done. This in turn echoes Aristotle (d. 322 BC). But it would be hard to argue that all occurrences of such phrases go back to a single origin. As will be seen later in this chapter, they also crop up among the Buddhists and Confucians, and further parallels doubtless lurk elsewhere in the world's literatures.

If the phrase has such echoes in other cultures, should we think of the duty itself as a universal human value? Or is there in fact something peculiarly Islamic about it? The basic principle involved in the value is that if one encounters someone engaged in wrong doing, one should do something to stop them.