By Naseem Mahnavi
naseem.mahnavi@gmail.com
As were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they did not know until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of man.
Matthew 24: 37-39
Say ye: "We believe in Allah and the revelation given to us and to Ibraheem, Isma`il, Isaac, Jacob and the Tribes and that given to Moosa and Issa and that given to (all) Prophets from their Lord we make no difference between one and another of them and we bow to Allah (in Islam)." (The Qur’an verse 2:136
If Allah so willed He could make you all one people: but He leaves straying whom He pleases and He guides whom He pleases: but ye shall certainly be called to account for all your actions. (The Qur’an verse 16:93)
And the Jews say: The Christians do not follow anything (good) and the Christians say: The Jews do not follow anything (good) while they recite the (same) Book. Even thus say those who have no knowledge, like to what they say; so Allah shall judge between them on the day of resurrection in what they differ. (The Qur’an verse 2:113)
And the Jews will not be pleased with you, nor the Christians until you follow their religion. Say: Surely Allah's guidance: that is the (true) guidance. And if you follow their desires after the knowledge that has come to you, you shall have no guardian from Allah, nor any helper. (The Qur’an verse 2:120)
O you who believe! be careful of (your duty to) Allah with the care which is due to Him, and do not die unless you are Muslims. (The Qur’an verse 3:102)
1. INTRODUCTION
All religions started with the common purpose of uniting and guiding people to a healthy and desirable way of life that would ensure social harmony in this world and peace even after death. They also provided a platform for coordinated thought and regulation of life. Unfortunately, ambitious religious leaders found it convenient to raise points of difference and divide the believers into churches, sects, schisms and temples. In modern times, religious organizations resemble tourist bus services to heaven. Buy a ticket, hop into one and the driver will deliver you to the gates of paradise. The sad part is that there is no insurance or money-back guarantee. Even more disturbing is the thought that if they deliver you to the wrong gates, there is no return or detour.
1.1 Bismillah
Islam literally means accepting a reality, and not surrender in the sense of laying down arms as is commonly mistaken. The meaning of the most frequently used Arabic sentence “Bismillah irrahman irraheem” can be best understood by translating the article “Al” as “the real”. The meaning then becomes “In the name of the real Master, the real beneficent and the really merciful.” That is the beginning of the search for truth.
The Holy Qur’an is the only religious book that states plainly that men and women were created from a single soul (verse 4:1), implying that spiritually they are equal and gives clear-cut instructions about moral and ethical principles. Prophet Muhammad in his last sermon categorically stated that the red man is not superior to the black man and vice versa. Much of mankind ignored these instructions for 1300 odd years after the revelation of the Holy Qur’an until Dr. Christian Barnard of apartheid South Africa unwittingly demonstrated the Qur’anic truth in 1969 by transplanting a woman’s heart in a man’s body that lived for months and trans-racial heart transplants followed. The world has changed considerably since then. Apartheid evaporated from South Africa and women and black people are no longer considered inferior in the Western world. The advancements of science have many indicators to divine truths that seem to be ignored by most educated people.
The Qur’an contains all the essential parts of the old and new Testaments in addition to the unique revelations to Prophet Muhammad. Neither the exact Ten Commandments nor the socio-economic principles that have come to be known as Jewish morality and Christian values, can be found stated directly in either the Old or the New Testaments. They can only be found stated clearly and unambiguously in the Third Testament called the Holy Qur’an. Almost any book of prose or poetry can be interpreted to portray high ideals and moral principles, and the moral values of all religions except Islam are derived from legends and anecdotes. In a most unusual show of magnanimity for a religion, Islam endorses both Christianity and Jewish faith as religions of Divine inspiration and acknowledges both Issa (Jesus) and Moosa (Moses) as Prophets of God and divine predecessors of Prophet Muhammad. The Muslims are awaiting the return of Issa more anxiously than the Christians. The Qur’an goes to the extent of saying in verse 2:62,
“Those who believe (in the Qur'an) and those who follow the Jewish (Scriptures) and the Christians and the Sabians and who believe in Allah and the last day and work righteousness shall have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear nor shall they grieve.”
It is not surprising that the drivers of the Jewish and Christian buses to paradise do not stop at the Qur’an shop on the way.
If one looks back in history, one finds that whereas the words of the Qur'an are constant and unchanging, its understanding has an evolutionary character. In the first phase during the lives of the Prophet and early Caliphs, the mere repetition of the text was enough as the listener knew the language well enough and the intonation would make the meaning quite clear. The cultural or environmental symbolism was also well understood and the references to specific events were only parts of their lives. In the second phase when Islam had spread in most of Arabia and around it where dialects of Arabic were spoken, it had to be presented in writing, with detailed punctuation and a few explanatory notes. In the third phase when Islam had spread far and wide in the world, it was understood by majority of its readers with the help of translations and a few marginal comments. In the fourth phase when it was no longer taught in primary curriculum and its basic concepts had become alien to most of its readers, it was understood with the aid of lengthy explanations and references to Hadith and other books. In the fifth phase, which is still in progress, there has been an attempt to reconcile Qur'anic and scientific knowledge rather than treat them as opposites. It would be such a pity if, while reading the Qur'an, one were to ignore the wealth of knowledge mankind has acquired as a consequence of being inspired by it. Those who think in terms of scientific references can only be convinced about the validity of an idea in scientific terms.
The importance of independent thought and action in Islam was underscored by the Prophet when he insisted that those who went to his mosque must meditate on their own before and after he led them in prayers. Prophet Muhammad was a true democrat. He did not treat his simple followers like a herd of sheep. He treated them as intelligent human beings and trained them so that they could manage their relationship with God by themselves, without dependence on any sort of clergy. Before Islam, religion was something that was administered by a priest and the common man was a captive of the religious establishment. Unfortunately, today many Muslim believers have also become captives of their misguided leaders.
This author’s thinking is based on the assumption that the Universe has been objectively engineered and that there could be a margin of error in God's work. True that God is perfect, but nowhere has He claimed that any of His creations is absolutely as intended. The imperfection of His creations by no means diminishes His own greatness. It is possible that God intended the Earth to be inclined at a quarter of a right angle to its orbital plane, but actually it turned out to be 23.5 degrees i.e. one degree more, or that the year was intended to be exactly 360 days and not 365 and a quarter as it actually is. Similarly, evil exists not because it was intended by God but as a consequence of the imperfections of the creations; and God has set in motion a process of evolution and guidance for the rectification of these defects and for improvement in the quality of His creations. All the tangible knowledge of physics, Chemistry, Biology, Electronics, Mechanics and much of Mathematics that is or will ever be written in books is already at work in the human body. Man is not discovering Science, but only learning to express what is already inherent in him. The rest is speculation.
This book has been written neither to gain accolades from Islamic scholars nor to tease them. The intended readership of this book consists of Muslims who are well versed in secular studies, but fail to find interest in Islamic literature. If a man does fear or believe in God and does not admire Muhammad (PBUH), his interest can only be aroused by showing him that the Qur’an also deals in the subject that constitutes his passion for knowledge. A scientist would read the Qur’an only if convinced that it contains science, which it certainly does. The same is true of other secular professions such as medicine, economics, law, psychology, sociology etc. It is also meant for Non-Muslims who would like to know the essence of Islam without giving up their prejudices in the first place. As for the perverted, they may get interested in Islam after reading this book, but can not go any further astray than they already are.
In the following pages, there are a number of essays that were inspired by religious study, but also include related secular knowledge that supplements the religious ideas. The technological bias in the thinking is the inevitable result of this author’s own professional passion. Even my belief in God is partly owed to the fact that no one has reported finding a piece of naturally occurring quartz or grain of sand with a functional digital logic circuit formed by random mutations.
1.2. The Need for Religion
There are two basic types of religion. The first is the divine type that concerns itself with all aspects of life including every thing from the creation of the universe to what happens after one dies. Islam, Christianity, Jewish faith and Vedantic Hinduism are the most common examples of divine religion. The second is the social type that concerns mainly with how one conducts one self in the world and with respect to other living beings. Examples of the social type are Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, Confucianism, Sikhism etc.
All divine religious thought starts from one basic thesis that can be stated as follows:
For any new action to take place anywhere in the universe, a command must be generated somewhere by someone. Therefore, all efforts to achieve physical results should also be complemented with prayers to a Command-generator for the issuance of necessary commands to ensure that the efforts produce the desired results.
Not only a modern day computer programmer would quickly endorse the idea of the necessity of command for action, but it seems that even the prehistoric philosophers were convinced that in order to function stably within life sustaining limits, the world requires a supervisory system. Consequently, numerous models of the probable supervisory system were put forward in different parts of the world and came to be known as religions. The Greeks had a god for everything. Indian religious literature speaks of a million great souls (Mahan atman) who reside in the Himalayas and control every thing that happens in the world. Biblical and Islamic traditions even give names of angels who are assigned the management of various worldly functions such as communication, arranging rains and crops, and taking lives etc. The mathematical concept of God is one of a universal origin. One simple example is the origin of a graph where the coordinate axes intersect. All the processes and equations exist at this point, but the values of all the variables and functions are zero. At the same time, no point in the system can be defined without reference to the origin. Hence the frequent references to God (Insha Allah) by those with a strong sense of religion.
However, in most communities, closed institutions were formed which claimed to have access to the supervisory system and began to make demands on their respective communities that would place the former in an unreasonably comfortable and dominant position in relation to other fellow beings in return for solving their problems by communicating with the supervisory system. As time passed, it became obvious that many, or perhaps most, of these institutions were nothing more than facades to extort undue benefits, and their `miracles' were merely tricks and sleight of hand. On the other hand, the seemingly genuine ones were so tyrannically choosy in allowing new aspirants to join their circles of study, or the initiation rites and initial courses were so atrociously discouraging that very few would have the patience to pursue the discipline for long. So, failing to break the closely guarded circles, the more intelligent and resourceful group (mainly in Europe) decided to find its own access to the universal supervisory system by identifying and tapping into its components or subsystems through the conduit of scientific investigation. Soon the scientific institution, by virtue of its superior ability to heal and comfort, itself became a power axis and conflict between the two became inevitable. Before long, the antagonism grew to such a large extent that the two contenders began to needlessly deny the basis of existence of each other. The result was that the development of both was hindered and, perhaps, even disoriented. An interesting account of confrontations between the seekers of knowledge and policy makers of faith can be found in Hoodbhoy's "Muslims and Science". The modern educated man's ability to believe only selected parts of his own knowledge is indeed an achievement in the area of self-control which far exceeds the ancient mystic's ability to believe in the unknown.
Once we accept the existence of a supervisory system for the Universe and that things happen in this world according to a basic plan, it is possible to develop a coherent scenario spanning the past and future of life on Earth. Almost all religions agree that before the emergence of plant-animal life, the earth was dominated by some sort of spiritual life forms that did not possess physical form in spite of great knowledge, cognitive powers and ability to maneuver matter and energy. Their creator, leader and master is called God. They designed and developed plant and then animal species through a process of controlled organic evolution that culminated in the domination of the Earth by civilized mankind who think that they possess even greater physical strength and ability than their originators. Whether or not that spiritual race continues to pursue the creative process, we do not know as they are beyond our perception. However, the latest developments in genetics indicating that the unique and extremely complex configuration of millions of atoms in the genes in each cell of an animals body multiplies billions of times with exact precision, points to the possibility that there must be some sort of a code prevalent all over the world that motivates and controls the process. Taking into account the fact that all living organisms need exposure to cosmic radiation for growth one wonders if the vital code is contained in some frequency band of the cosmic radiation which is intentionally transmitted from a remote source in the universe. The idea is further reinforced by the fact that there are maria only on that side of the moon that faces the earth, but the other side is quite plain; and the maria so closely resemble reflective dishes that could concentrate many thousand times a signal coming from deep space and focus it onto the earth as a small area scanning spotlight. Anyone hit by the focused beam would acquire the latest operating system for the genome or new utilities that would give him or her apparently supernatural abilities.
God is said to have breathed His Spirit into man, and created a potential creator like Himself, albeit of much lower stature than Himself. True to the task, man has created an entire world of inorganic life consisting of ingenious machinery and industrial plants for which human beings are equivalent to soul. Human civilizations have been working over the past five millennia or so and developed a new life-form in the shape of stationary and mobile machinery that possess even greater physical strength and ability. When the wheel was first invented, man used to push or pull a cart; now a man sits unnoticed in gigantic mobile mechanical devices that perform extraordinary feats. Man has produced mechanical creatures that work in conjunction with man to produce forces, speeds and displacements far in excess of anything that any animal can achieve. With the rapid development of computerized robots, a time may come when the world may appear to be entirely dominated by mechanical life with human beings invisible in the background controlling their destiny. Perhaps Avicena’s prediction that man could reach angelic reason has come true.
It seems that there has been a progression whereby spiritual life created organic life which, in its turn, fashioned inorganic life. The inorganic life system consists of all electric or engine powered machines, equipment and vehicles that move and communicate, and whose numbers and types are constantly growing although they do not produce babies, fruit or seeds. They would die out if we humans stopped caring for and supporting them. Today, it is so easy to compare a human being and his or her soul with an automobile and its driver, but it is interesting that the idea originated thousands of years ago when the analogy did not exist.
Scientific thought relies on the premise that actions are the effects of direct causes that can be manipulated independently by human beings without any spiritual assistance. Whether the human desire to achieve a result could invoke the spiritual command for the desired effect is not a measurable phenomenon and therefore ignored by Science. The mechanism of the cognitive process and inspiration are separated from physical sciences and identified as psychology. However, over the past few centuries scientists have compiled a great amount of knowledge and built a working model of the universe by observing causes and effects and analyzing them. Modern life is so dependent on the exploits of science that it seems absurd to question the validity of the scientific approach. A thousand years ago it would have been sufficient to explain an abnormal occurrence or legend as God’s will. But today we know so much about the ways in which God’s will is exercised that unless one can suggest a feasible mechanism by which the event might take place, the validity of the statement would be unacceptable to the educated mind. Yet, it is impossible to ignore an idea in whose favor more than half the world’s population has cast its vote. There is no doubt that for its own functioning, Science has to depend on mathematical relationships that exist since time unknown and universal constants whose values were fixed by the eternal Cause that can not be observed or measured.
In modern times there exists a secular school of thought. The secular thinker may be totally ignorant of science, and may even practice some religion whether or not he has studied it, but he is opposed to any role of religion except as one of many tolerable personal vices. Secularism seems to have arisen out of protest against the exploitation of the sentiments of honest believers and the occasional show of intolerance and violence by the more faithful, and portrays a fundamental difference in attitudes. Whereas religion insists that human social conduct should be based on a sense of moral duty, secularism believes in the supremacy of self-made law and assertion of rights. However, the universal charter of human rights prepared by the UNO is hardly a match for the eternal charter of human duties embodied in the Qur'an -- the culmination of human and divine religious thought. In the secular system rights imply duties, but in the religious system duties generate rights, which is a more positive way of ensuring equity and harmony. In a religious system one tries to acquire implements that would help to discharge one's duties and please others; in a secular system one tries to amass possessions that reinforce one's confidence and help in asserting one's rights by intimidating others. In some communities a compromise has been reached so that most of the strong and affluent citizens are only concerned with asserting their rights and making large profits, but they do not interfere with the activities of a religious group that considers its duty to help the weak and poor to survive. There are also those who assist others in asserting their rights for a price or share in their fortunes. There seems no reason why modern state management techniques can not be reconciled with religious doctrine and vice versa.
