The work known in Arabic as Khasaʾis al-Tasawwur al-Islami wa Muqawwimatuhu is not a manual of manners or a collection of rules for personal conduct. The English title often supplied for it, The Characteristics and Values of Islamic Conduct, is misleading if read as a book of ethics or adab. The book is an exposition of the Islamic tasawwur—the comprehensive conception or worldview that Islam gives of God, existence, life, man, and value—and of the constituents that make that conception coherent. Its argument is that right conduct is a consequence of a right conception, not an isolated set of behavioral rules.
The book begins from the claim that every human life and every society rests on some conception of reality. A tasawwur is not merely an opinion or a set of beliefs held in the mind; it is the framework through which a person interprets the universe, understands himself, assigns meaning to life, and decides what is good and worth doing. The Islamic conception, in this account, is distinctive because it comes from revelation rather than from human speculation, and because it integrates what other systems divide: spirit and body, individual and society, this world and the next, worship and work, fixed principle and changing circumstance.
The central portion of the book sets out what it presents as the defining characteristics of the Islamic conception. It is divine in origin: God is the source of the conception, the authority behind it, and the end to which it directs human life. This is not treated as a bare doctrinal point but as a liberation of the human being from servitude to other humans, to arbitrary custom, or to impersonal systems. The conception is also unitary. Tawhid is not only the assertion of one God but the principle that gives coherence to the whole of existence and to the whole of human activity. The universe is not a chaos of competing powers; it is a created order. Man is not a fragment divided between sacred and secular callings; he is one responsible servant of God.
The book stresses permanence together with flexibility. The fundamental principles of the Islamic conception are fixed because they come from God, but their application in changing circumstances is not frozen. This distinction between the permanent source and the variable application runs through the argument and is used to answer the charge that a revealed worldview must be static or irrelevant to new situations. The conception is also comprehensive: it addresses belief, worship, morality, law, family, economy, politics, social relations, and the inner life, not because it reduces everything to one flat category, but because it refuses to leave any part of human existence outside the rule of God. The book repeatedly warns against the fragmentation of life into a religious private sphere and a supposedly neutral public sphere.
Balance is another major characteristic. The Islamic conception is presented as a middle path that avoids extremes: it does not deny the body in the name of the spirit, nor the spirit in the name of the body; it does not absorb the individual into the collective, nor dissolve the community into private individualism; it does not make this world an absolute end, nor treat it as worthless. The same balance is applied to the relationship between the ideal and the real, between what is commanded and what human beings are actually capable of. The conception is realistic, in the book’s sense, because it takes account of human nature, human weakness, and the concrete conditions of life. It is practical because it is meant to be lived, embodied in law, community, and daily conduct, not contemplated as an abstract system. It is positive because it calls for construction, reform, and responsible engagement with the world rather than withdrawal or passive piety.
The book also treats what the Arabic title calls the muqawwimat, the constituents or supporting elements of the conception. These are not separate chapters of doctrine so much as interlocking dimensions of a single vision. The Islamic conception of God grounds everything else: God is one, transcendent, living, knowing, powerful, and directly related to His creation without being merged with it. The conception of the universe follows from this: the world is created, ordered, and governed by divine laws; it is not autonomous, not self-originating, and not indifferent to human meaning. The conception of life presents existence as purposeful and as a test, with the hereafter giving ultimate weight to worldly action. The conception of man presents the human being as God’s vicegerent on earth, endowed with will, reason, and responsibility, capable of obedience and disobedience, and accountable for the use of his freedom. The conception of values roots good and evil in God’s command and in the nature of created reality, rather than in utility, custom, or collective preference. Conduct, in this framework, is the outward expression of these convictions.
A large part of the book’s rhetorical force comes from its contrast between the Islamic conception and what it calls jahili conceptions. The term is used broadly: it does not refer only to pre-Islamic Arabia but to any worldview that bases ultimate authority, value, or law on something other than God. The book criticizes materialist philosophies, nationalist and racial loyalties, secular accounts of life, and systems that treat religion as a private affair or as an obstacle to progress. It argues that these alternatives produce fragmentation and imbalance because they cannot give a unified account of existence, knowledge, and moral obligation. The Islamic conception is presented as the remedy: a coherent whole in which belief, worship, law, and conduct are not competing authorities but expressions of one submission to God.
The book is therefore less concerned with listing particular virtues than with establishing the doctrinal and conceptual foundation from which virtues and rules derive. It insists that Islamic conduct is not merely conformity to external commands; it is the practical shape of a lived conception of reality. The Muslim’s view of God, the universe, life, man, and value determines how he acts in family, society, work, and worship. The work closes in the register of exhortation and revival: the conception must be understood, embraced, and embodied in a believing community, not left as an intellectual possession. Its concern is the renewal of Islamic thought and life through the recovery of a comprehensive Islamic worldview.
The book’s account of these characteristics is integrative rather than catalog-like. It presents the Islamic conception as rabbani in source, so that it is received as revelation rather than projected from human desire; as stable in its fundamentals, so that it is not blown about by fashion or circumstance; as comprehensive, so that it cannot be reduced to ritual, law, ethics, or private belief in isolation; as balanced, so that it avoids both world-denial and world-worship, individualism and collectivism, rigid literalism and loose subjectivism; as realistic, so that it reckons with human nature, social existence, and the concrete conditions of action; and as positive, so that it directs energy toward construction rather than mere negation. These traits are treated as mutually supporting: the divine source grounds authority, comprehensiveness guards against partial readings, balance prevents extremism, realism prevents utopian abstraction, and stability gives fixed principles while application remains a matter of reasoned judgment within the framework.
The book also presses the point that the conception is not an object of mere study but a criterion and a mission. It is meant to reshape how the Muslim sees existence, judges other systems, and conducts himself in worship, family, work, and society. This gives the work its revivalist edge: it warns against importing alien premises into Islamic thought, against treating Islam as a collection of disconnected rules or ethical maxims, and against reducing religion to a private compartment. The remedy it urges is a renewed aqidah-centered formation, in which thought, worship, law, and conduct are consciously referred back to one unified view of God, the universe, life, man, and value.
Its significance lies in that insistence on wholeness: conduct is unintelligible without creed, and creed is incomplete without conduct. The Islamic conception is presented as both a diagnostic standard—by which philosophies, ideologies, and inherited practices are measured—and a program of renewal that begins with thought and formation and then seeks outward reconstruction. The work is thus a sustained argument for an integrated life: one God, one revealed guidance, one coherent worldview, and one accountable human vocation.
