JANUARY 6 In the Age of Science

Once there was an illiterate person who, for the first time in his life, saw a car travelling along a road. In his ignorance, he thought it was a magician who was causing a room to move by the sheer power of his magic. But any educated person would consider such a supposition ludicrous, because it does not take a scientist or an engineer to know for sure that such magic does not in reality exist. In this way idolatrous beliefs and concepts or the system of supposed deities have become utterly ridiculous to the educated mind. For now everyone knows that the coming of rains, the yield of crops and all other such seasonal events are based on the principles of nature. In the old superstitious age, the creed of shirk might have been acceptable, but today, in the age of knowledge, the whole structure of shirk, from belief to practice, has been thoroughly discredited. In the age of modern science, the fate shirk has met can be compared to that of a darkened room, which was supposed to harbour a dangerous, long-horned demon, but which, when opened up and flooded with light, was seen to contain nothing of the sort. Before the emergence of science the world was dominated by superstitious beliefs. Due to an inadequate fund of knowledge, people were deceived into believing in shirk. But now with the spread of the light of science, it has become impossible for shirk to find a place once again in the minds of the people. However, the superstitions themselves have not been entirely laid to rest. In their personal lives people all over the world still hold beliefs of mysterious kinds. Although the majority of the educated class do not believe in deities, they have not yet arrived at belief in one God. The only difference is that if the past generations were irrevocably devoted to gods and goddesses, nowadays people have set up another “deity”, called the law of nature, to which they accord the same importance as was formerly shown to pagan deities. The course of human history has followed many pathways, but now a stage has come when all obstructions have been cleared away, so that a movement, based on the teachings of the prophets, could well be revived. Today, such a movement to reject shirk and affirm monotheism could freely and effectively be launched. In this modern age the political and international atmosphere is also entirely favourable, and all academic arguments are in support of it. It would not be an exaggeration to say that today any movement based on monotheism would be in a position of unopposed victory. No obstacle is now in its way. The need of the hour is for the monotheists to rise with all their will and determination and communicate with unstinted zeal and vigour the divine message—the life-giving reality of tauhid.