It causes people to think twice. Much the same is true of the penalty of amputation for theft, he said. The restrictions on the use of this penalty mean that in countries where it is in force it is applied only to people who have taken up thievery as a profession not to someone who may have yielded to temptation in one particular incident. During his university days, when he studied biochemistry at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, he was a political activist, and pretty well accepted Marx's dictum that religion is the opiate of the people. But the concept of God is still there.
People try to fill that vacuum.
Communism, he said, promised that everything would change after the revolution but seemed to have little guidance to offer the individual in the here and now. A good friend and former fellow-activist embraced Islam and Philips started reading about the faith himself. He accepted Islam in Toronto in 1972. Two years later Philips was in Saudi Arabia, where he learned Arabic and earned a bachelor's degree in Islamic studies from the University of Medina and a master's degree from the University of Riyad. He earned a doctorate in Islamic Theology in 1994 at the University of Wales.