FAITH AND GUIDANCE

king was the sole controller of the economy. The king became one who could give to whoever he wished, and he could grab from whomever he wanted. In effect, the king enjoyed the status that should have been of God alone. The king was the ruler and everyone else were the ruled. In this way, the king had become a political alternative to God. But this state of affairs was not what God willed. And so, a new process was set in motion in history that began in the seventh century CE. At this time, a system of tribal chieftainship existed in Arabia which was surrounded by two mighty empires―the Sassanid Empire and the Byzantine Empire. According to the Bible, these two empires were like mighty political peaks. Through the Prophet and his Companions, these peaks were destroyed and a new political process began in history which continued its journey through the centuries, finally arriving in Europe. The culmination of this process occurred in 1789, in the form of the French Revolution. Following this revolution, a new age dawned in the world―the Age of Democracy. Democracy demolished the idea of monarchy and ushered in the rule of the people, whose slogan was a ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’. This democratic revolution destroyed the old system of dynastic monarchy, first in Europe and then elsewhere in the world. In this way, the ‘religion of the king’ also ended and at the ideological level the religion of God, deen in Arabic, was re-established in the world. This reestablishment was not in the sense of political power or governmental system. It was at the level of intellectual exposition of the religion of Truth. These developments did not happen by mere chance. Rather, it was actually the result of a grand divine operation in history. Democracy was not just a political ideology. Rather, an important aspect of it was that it had put an end to the concept of political divinity on the basis of which kings of the past had established their claims to greatness and power. After the democratic revolution, political power was reduced to mere administration. Its position as a divine institution had come to an end. In this matter, the third example is of Humanism. Humanism is a modern philosophy that can be summed up as the ‘worship of man’. This is the last alternative to the deen of Truth and it emerged in the second half of the 20th century, soon acquiring widespread popularity. Similar is the case of Existentialism―the ideology founded by French