CHAPTER SIX — Modern Possibilities

such a distrust of industrial civilisation that the slogan, ‘Return to nature’ is now being raised. Many of today’s happenings in the western world are not indicative of any positive thought; they only point to the fact that man, aghast at the consequences of materialism, is now in pursuit of a more appropriate culture. Even long after the end of the second world war, the west Germans would say, “We have no problems so long as our factory chimneys keep on emitting smoke!” But today, industrial pollution has reached a point where it is considered only next in gravity to the expected outbreak of an atomic war. Dr. Anne Dubes of Rockefeller University, New York, has warned the world that industrial pollution is depriving man of many qualities, and that there is a danger of man being reduced in the future to an inferior form of life (Life, 24th July, 1970) Such an outcome of the materialistic culture has deprived modern man of happiness and peace of mind—in spite of all his progress. Many books are appearing in the West today which acknowledge this fact. For instance, Walker Kerr of the U.S.A. maintains in his 325-page book, The Decline of Pleasure (1962), that Americans are not happy today, even though the present American generation has leisure, luxury items, long life and all those things that their forefathers could not even dream of having. The extraordinary progress in the industrial age had led the Americans to think that they would obtain everything that they desired, yet they failed to attain happiness and fulfilment. The resources of technology came to be misued for human destruction instead of human construction. (Time, January 18, 1971) Having reached the final stage of our machine-age paradise, the growth of such extraordinarily critical problems was not a mere accident. It was quite in accordance with the way (sunnah) of God. He produces in the lives of the unmindful such circumstance as stand out like question marks before them. God had produced favourable circumstances for the believers to perform their duty and disseminate the divine message to the people. The ground had been fully prepared by God to make