FAITH AND GUIDANCE

The message of Islam as presented in the original sources will always retain its ideological dominance. This dominance will be based on account of the evidence that testifies to its veracity and not as any political or social system. For this purpose, God adopted a certain method. He arranged that whenever some people developed their own edition of Truth, such causes and conditions would appear in history that would put an end to it. In this way, the veracity of the Truth would remain intact. History tells us that from the emergence of Islam until now there have been three major occasions when people invented their own edition of the Truth. But later, in line with historical processes, such conditions were produced that destroyed these alternatives through evidence. In this way, the ideological veracity of the Truth remained intact in history. The first such example from history was the phenomenon of nature worship. In the language of religion, this is referred to as shirk. Nature worship means to believe that there are divine attributes within natural phenomena and accordingly, to worship these things. In ancient times, this worship of natural phenomena remained in existence for thousands of years. After the advent of the Prophet Muhammad, God arranged for such revolutionary developments to occur in history the result of which ushered in the Age of Science. Through modern science, an objective exploration of the phenomena of nature was undertaken, which showed that there is no divinity at all in nature. It was now understood that nature is just a created thing and has no divine attributes. In this way, the fact that God’s religion is indeed the religion of Truth remained authenticated. The second instance of an alternative to the revealed religion emerged in earlier times in the form of ‘personality cults’. The political expression of personality cults came about in the system of monarchy. It was believed that the kings possessed some form of mystical supremacy over other people. As a result, the king was given the status of a deity. Monarchy or the political personality cult continued in history over thousands of years. In the age of monarchy, the focus of human thinking revolved around the king. It was generally accepted that the ‘religion of the king’ must be the religion of all his subjects. During the age of monarchy, the mainstay of the economy was agriculture. Considered the owner of all the land in his kingdom, the