The Call of Dawah in the Modern Age March-April

when science can now provide the means to reaffirm religious truths, atheism should have come to dominate human thinking and actions. Academically speaking, religion has become an adjunct of atheism. It has no independent status of its own. The German statesman, E.F. Schumacher, sums up contemporary attitudes to religion in the following anecdote: “On a visit to Leningrad some years ago (August 1968) I consulted a map to find out where I was, but I could not make it out. I could see several enormous churches, yet there was no trace of them on my map. When finally an interpreter came to help me, he said: ‘We don’t show churches on our maps.’” (E.F.Shumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed, London, 1981, p.9) This instance is a telling reflection of modem conditions. In today’s world when all sciences, including history, physics, botany, zoology and astronomy have been quite elaborately developed, God has been ousted from the academic and intellectual domain. Nowhere does the name of God occur. A man of insight perceives the signs of God everywhere—in every nook and cranny of the earth, and right throughout the furthest reaches of the universe. But in the empirical sciences, God is a non-entity. Students of these sciences find no trace of Him anywhere. Given these conditions, the task of propagating the message of the oneness of God is to re-inscribe the name of God on the map of human thought. But it would require a worldwide intellectual revolution to spur man into coming to terms once again with the truth about his Maker. Only then will man understand and be convinced of the unity of God and the reality of the Hereafter. Our predecessors succeeded in breaking the dominance of idolatrous thinking, replacing it with the