Humanity in a New Age

force, Newton took these debates to new heights. In his book, Principia, Newton presented the law of universal gravitation with prodigious mathematical reasoning. So, by Shah Waliullah’s time, there was ample evidence of an intellectual revolution sweeping Europe. The scientific aspect of this revolution held great importance for Islam. It was tearing apart traditional ways of thinking about the world. It accepted only those explanations that measured up to modern scientific standards. However, Shah Waliullah seemed to have been entirely unaware of these enormous changes at the global level. He viewed things from the narrow prism of the Delhi of his times and tried to address them by employing simple strategies. Had he travelled about widely and viewed the developments that were taking place from a global perspective, he would have realised that the real challenge was that of a veritable global storm, and not, as he thought, that of saving the tottering Mughal Empire—which, in any case, was a futile effort. He did not realise that this Empire was already dying, with the authority of the Emperor restricted to just Delhi and its suburbs. The fact is that the Mughal Empire that Shah Waliullah was so concerned to revive had already become so