PART I : PHYSIOGNOMY OF THE WEST
CHAPTER 1
Genesis of Human Life and Civilisation
Every advance in scientific research into the origins of life on this planet pushes the date of its first appearance further back into remoter ages while increasing the riddles to unravel and the puzzles to solve.
Despite the comparatively recent appearance of human life proper—an infinitesimal fraction of the period for which the planet has nourished living matter —much uncertainty obscures the etiology of its production. Nonetheless, scientists and paleontologists have, by excavations and the discovery of artifacts, corn and other relics of human handicraft, been able to trace the course of man's upward progress through a series of stages in history thus:
1. Paleolithic — marked by the use of simple weapons to kill animals in self-defence or for food: stones, sticks and similar hunting tools: savagery and brutishness in constant fear of the beasts: use of caves and holes in the earth as shelter from voracious carnivores and from the dark. Primacy went to the most capable hunter : all human effort was bent to the conquest of foes— whether hostile nature or animals or humans.
2. The Later Paleolithic — man's first step up from the use of existing objects as tools was to fabricate for himself, e.g. by binding a stick to a stone to make a hammer, or manufacturing a sharp edge by percussion of flints; from which he was led on to the discovery of the art of kindling a fire; and so to the cooking of food ; and the overcoming of night and dark. Long centuries were spent on this series of developments until the Paleolithic stage was finally surmounted, and:
3. The Neolithic Age — saw manifold and varied changes in human living. Artifacts were still made of stone and wood, but the crude clumsy devices of the Paleolithic were replaced by beautifully regular, exact and polished tools. Huts were made to live in, woven wood plastered with mud. Mud was moulded into crocks and pots, dried first in the sun and later on the fire. Crops were grown and the soil cultivated in primitive fashion; certain animals were domesticated. Man learnt which grains to sow for food, which trees to protect for fruit and timber. He invented the bow and arrow and so rid himself of some types of dangerous beast; and spears to catch fish. Arrowheads, spears and axes were still of sharpened stone. But skill increased over the centuries (which have left their relics for us to find and so reconstruct their life) and finally led them out of the stone Ages into:
4. The Bronze Age — with the use of metals came the birth of civilisation justly so-called. For CIVI-lisation is from the same root as "City" and connotes "social living". So does also "Ta-maddun" the
Arabic, from the root M-D-N — city or community life: so do also "policy" and "police" from the Greek "polis" : "urbane" from "urbs" and so on. For with it human life assumed a novel aspect and entered a new phase. Man was no longer a mere hungry animal always busied with the quest for food. From concentration on his belly and its needs he emerged to dreams and visions and an objective consciousness of the world around him. The more victories he gained in his struggle with nature, the more his desires and needs increased. Emerging from barbarism he found the final road toward civilisation: freed from the trammels of ignorance and dullness imposed by his conditions, he set out on the pursuit of learning and science.
The human animal's progress was distinguished from other species' stagnation by a spiritual factor. An internal quality we call intellect or reason, the most amazing of all phenomena, gave man hindsight and foresight, to assess the past and improve on it, to be alert to fresh methods and to innovations. Every forward step he took imprinted itself on the memory banks of the race. A sense of dissatisfaction over imperfections spurred him on to correct them. Thus unfolded the effects of this invisible, indescribable, marvelous phenomenon called "mind". Its light causes him to observe objects and events, reflect on them, learn from experience and store the information for future use in that astounding computer called "the brain" as "memory", where it is available for the construction of new hypotheses, visions, experiments and advances.
Two other revolutionary products of human ingenuity arose in the mists of prehistoric antiquity:
1. The invention of the WHEEL for transport — at first mere rolling of heavy objects on logs— to the axle-tree between two roundels—to the developed cart, set between true wheels with axle, hub, spokes, felloes and tire: and
2. LANGUAGE — noises accepted as means of conveying the impulses arising in one human mind to another—mutual agreement to interpret certain sounds each time uttered as of the same significance the grunt of fear or warning—the roar of rage—the coo of love—and so to the names of objects—to phrases— to orders like "come", "go", "fetch", "run" and finally to abstractions, concepts, ideas, projects, worship of the forces controlling capricious nature. With language, social living and so true civilisation came to birth. When signs were accepted as representing the arbitrary sounds that represented ideas, prehistory emerged into written history.
Prehistory is traced from vestiges and evidences dug up and interpreted. History starts when there are written records to consult. This invention of writing was the most revolutionary stroke of genius. It started with inventories of property, bills of exchange, composed by drawing pictures of the objects (sheep, cattle, vessels, grain-measures) then with a series of dashes to indicate number; then with symbols to indicate the nature of the transaction—the names and addresses of parties to it— and so gradually to symbols for every observed phenomenon, for relationships between them, and, finally, for
abstractions like colour, shape and concept. Some races like the Chinese stayed in the pictographic stage, like the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic. Other races moved on to analyse the sounds which composed words and to adopt signs to represent always the same sound regardless of its meaning. It is these which carry all we know of the past 6 millennia of humanity's history.
Meantime masonry also made great advances. Exact measurement became possible. Men learnt to extract ores from rocks by smelting, and then to mould and temper them — at first the softer metals like tin and copper and their alloy bronze. When the same arts were applied to the harder iron, the Bronze gave way to the "Iron Age" — the true start of modern times.
Four thousand years ago true religion dawned through the obedience of the Patriarch Abraham to the call of Almighty God in Babylonian territory. The world's Creator charged Abraham with the task of leading Babylon's society out of darkness. His was the first apostolate as God's spokesman to rally mankind out of superstition and wrongdoing. Naturally he met with opposition and resistance from those with vested interests in falsehood and evil. But Abraham's prophetic proclamation of Monotheism and ethical worship raised a force of followers far superior to the united front of his adversaries, the advocates of Ahriman and the would-be despotic tyrants on the spirit of man. Abraham obeyed the call to leave his ancestral home, and finally after many thousand miles of nomad travel found haven in the Hejaz where with his son Isma'il he set up Monotheism's central shrine.
Seven and a quarter centuries before Christ, Rome was founded; and in the succeeding centuries extended her rule far and wide. Not long after Rome's foundation, Zoroaster (Zardusht) arose in Iran and substituted for the magic of Magianism a rational and moral relationship between man and the God of Good in the eternal battle against Evil. In almost the same century Confucius and Lao-Tse in China and Gautama the Buddha in Hind laid the basis of the philosophy which was developed by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in Greece during the succeeding century. All this found consummation in the Birth and Life of Jesus Christ, who proclaimed the call to reform human society, to rescue mankind from the pollutions of Judaistic materialism, to extirpate corruption and internecine combat, and raise humanity towards ethical and spiritual purification. This age was marked by the growth of intercommunication, of industries, and of building and medical skills.
AD 476 launched the Mediaeval period in Europe. The Church added temporal power to its spiritual leadership and became ruler of the thinking and living of society, while Europe fell into the dark ages of barbarian invasion, ignorance, bloodshed, nationalistic and tribal rivalries.
Meantime in the East, Islamic civilisation established its sway (see Part 2). In AD 1453 Sultan Muhammad Fateh captured Istambul and a new age began. In Europe the new independent nations— England, France, Germany, Austria—vied with each other for expansion. The magnetic
compass enabled ships to cross the Atlantic Ocean and find America. A Renaissance of thought and science swept over Europe and established more orderly international relations, until the French Revolution of AD 1789 ended the Age; and the Industrial Age took over the 19th century and changed the face of Europe. Invention followed invention. Discovery pressed on the heels of discovery. European history entered its newest and modern phase.
Evaluation of Modern Occidental Civilisation
The world we live in has been making giant strides, entailing a revolution in thought because of science's daily advance in the study and the satisfying of man's needs. Science and industry have unloaded the work that yesterday imprisoned man in hard labour onto machine-tools. These set man free to enjoy life's luxuries in ease and leisure. They liberated his mind and spirit from the bonds of business to expand into limitless research into Creation's mysteries.
So swift has been this progress that developments which took centuries of the olden "time" measured in "nights and days" take only minutes or even seconds of modern "time". Ships which took months and years to cross oceans by the force of winds on sails, now by steam or electrical power take days for the distance. Land transport, once dependent on beasts of burden, now moves on trucks, trains and planes with djinn-like speed. Man's gaze, no longer earth-bound, explores our galaxy and outer space, plumbs sea-deeps and penetrates to the earth's core. Old ignorance of this marvelous planet yields to fascinating new knowledge of the facts of nature, from infinite space to the atom's infinitesimal components, magnified a million times and made visible by electronic microscope. Modern Western civilisation's productivity, affluence, comfort and leisure cannot be denied or decried. Advances in health and welfare, childcare and maternity have cut infant-mortality, increased longevity, produced cures for diseases deemed incurable, swept the plagues and pestilences of the past into oblivion.
Nonetheless, although science and technology have moved mankind farther and faster in the last century than in 10 previous millennia rolled into one, we of the Jet, Atom and Space Age know we have only started to learn the ABC of the writings in nature's mighty Book of Truth which await perusal.
It must be regrettably acknowledged that Western civilisation's short comings and weaknesses are no fewer than its advantages. Despite the leisure and ease which knowledge and culture provide for society, despite the new pages of history turned, human happiness has not increased nor have social ills diminished.
Technology and industrialisation have reached a zenith while moral and spiritual life have sunk to their nadir. While science climbs, thought declines, divisions proliferate, and the West, rejecting spiritual and moral values, has bowed its neck under the yoke of worship of the machine. Machine-worshippers will never lay hands on joy or peace or happiness. Science imposes an order on life which provides affluence but
not happiness, since happiness is outside its competence. Science does not distinguish benefit from harm, nor ugly from lovely, but only true from false. The order imposed on human living by science alone will set Hell on fire and must be resisted at all costs. For civilisation draws in the train of its priceless gifts a pernicious and deadly insecurity, breeding-ground of crimes and corruptions. It kindles a fire of lusts and longings that burns warp and woof of soul and spirit. It bans calm of mind, spirit, faith. Far from lighting a lamp to illumine human conduct, science has lunged it into deeper dark and murk.
Science's conquests and victories, like those of war, leave an aftermath of ruin and waste, sadness and suffering beyond the reach of remedy. Beside every flower blooming in civilisation's garden grows a thorn that wounds the soul. Balance the boons of cars, planes, factories, surgery, wonder-drugs and affluence against the banes of bombs, gas, jets and rockets, death-rays, crime and violence. Within its own limits intellect is a good servant. But it cannot grasp the non-material. Hence with the decline of virtue many axioms of ethics have been consigned to oblivion beyond recovery.
The Islamic world, though not in midfield of the disturbances and activities of science, does not escape their manifestations in personal, ocial, educational or cultural life, and the flood of "civilisation" rushes upon us. For ideas and ethics know no national frontiers; they infiltrate from land to land—good as well as bad. Man's inclinations being what they are, the evil and corrupt go quicker and deeper. Hence, though our society cannot compare in scientific or technological advances, it manifests the complete pattern of Western decadence.
A society can suffer no worse disaster than the loss of the power to distinguish good from bad; no society that has suffered this loss can attain welfare or wellbeing.
Too many see only the fascinating externals of "civilisation", but are blind to the painful tragedies and the moral crisis of the modern age. The "civilised" world displays its superficial charms, so that persons who briefly sojourn there willingly abandon their discernment and judgment and shut their eyes to unpleasant facts and wrongdoings, feeling that the slightest difference in their own manners of habits or talk from those that obtain in the West is shameful; and instead of seeking the causes of Western progress and the means of reaching such ends, bring home as gifts a load of moral degeneracy and spiritual degradation. Such self-deception is the worst of defects, causing the loss of personality, of independence of thought, and of appreciation of the treasures of national culture, religion and nationhood.
This misleads thought away from religious conviction. It robs people of the power to assess and analyse events by a deep and universal doctrine that distinguishes good from bad. By this means many a truth is obscured.
East-West Interaction
The nations of Europe have been able to arrive at their modern welfare states without rejecting their religion and manners.
Japan, too, has made notable progress while preserving her creeds, customs and characteristics: and has with lightning speed soared up towards a high level of civilisation. From being, through centuries, one of the world's backward lands, Japan has, in a mere 60 years, entered the ranks of progressive nations. Japan never leant towards the West, nor fixed eyes and ears on Europe as a model to copy. She has clung fanatically to her heritage and nationhood. Cherishing the traditions of the great men of her history, she has continued to act as for centuries past, still preserving her ancient "Shinto" and "Buddhism" and pursuing vehemently her own forms of worship — however lightminded a sensible person might consider that worship.
But revolutionary freethinking gives no basis for diagnostics. It cannot analyse or unravel even the most obvious of social problems. Yet it welcomes every form of protest against, or criticism of, religion, with respect and joy, as being tokens of "enlightenment". Such negligence will never be able to face life's realities with a free mind.
The vast extension of scientific exploration into all aspects of material life has enabled human living to make an astounding leap forward. But while scientists busy themselves laying bare nature's powers and channelling their discoveries into technological industries, they fail to notice that they are only occupying one corner of a vast laboratory and neglecting all but the physical side of human nature. Could this be the deep cause of the mounting tide of licence and excess?
The perfecting of material science has not been accompanied by increasingly profound ethical insights. In fact the two disciplines proceed on different courses — so different that progress along one course may even precipitate retrogression on the other, from sheer satiety.
Recently a European professor said to a science conference held in Tehran : "In the field of morals the West envies the East. For the East's moral achievements are richer and finer than the West's. While the East profits from Western science and industry, the West needs to profit from Eastern ethical achievements."
To keep alive, human society needs other principles alongside industrial and technical culture. When the political and social set-up cuts the human community off from its basic philosophy of living so that life is bereft of altruistic ideas of mutual help and turns into a monotonous
unremitting pursuit of enough to eat, the masses fall prey to the type of violence which the poet called "man's inhumanity to man." Unfortunately mankind today is still in the kindergarten stage. We still have to attain an adult intellectual level if we are to make full use of the priceless reserves hidden in the heart of nature and at the same time to invest our spiritual capital in ways that yield dividends of happiness of heart and enhancement of spirit. Infant mankind is childishly at the mercy of passing moods and passions instead of obeying the dictates of mature common sense. The bulk of humankind fails to recognise its prejudices and superstitions as idols, but worships them as much as "progressive" people worship "science".
Millennia of unpalatable experiences, and constant fresh mis adventures, must finally drive man to realise that the only alternative to inevitable annihilation is self-committal to the Road of Right and of Divine Guidance.
Stahwood Cobb the sociologist writes, in his "Lord of 2 Ka'abas" (p.1): "Each vital facet of Western society's life, organisation and culture is marred by some extraordinary crisis. Its whole body politic and soul are sick. Its nerves are on edge because the world is teetering on the brink of the divide which separates the moribund age of materialist scientific glory from the dawning age of tomorrow's moral culture. We are experiencing the thoughts and deeds of the last minutes of a 6-centuries old materialist civilisation ; and glimpsing the first faint rays of the new. They are still too weak to sustain a sure hope. The long dark shadows cast by the old as it sinks below the horizon dim nascent brightness, making the road towards the new even more difficult to descry. Human culture is experiencing that longest night of the winter-solstice as it broods over our past culture, and torments our spirits with nightmares and bogies and phantoms, ghosts and ghoulies and gooseflesh and horrors. Yet beyond that night lies the morning of the new culture, truly universal and moral, awaiting its chance to bless mankind."
We boast our "realism". But it is highly unrealistic blindly to accept, to follow and copy, the manners and customs, the institutions and formulae, of others. Such imitativeness merely binds a yoke of obedience on its own neck. Initiative is the fount of independence. Imitation is the parasite that devours independence.
The confusion in our ideas and ethics is due to the torpor caused by imitation. Nor does our turning our back on our own historical and spiritual traditions in favour of Western habits help us towards clarity.
In his book, "Islam and Others" (p.42) a great Islamic thinker wrote: "We do not ask for intellectual or social seclusion. We do not draw aside from the course which history compels civilisation to follow, for we are fellow-travellers and partners in mankind's caravan. But we have been Muslims and, as such, have given great treasures to human culture. The positive achievements of our great past laid the foundations of the modern world edifice. Yet we fail, alas! to give this pioneering due credit, and to preserve its esteem and dignity. When we learn to value our past successes properly, we shall free our hearts of the inferiority complex
which bows the neck to tyranny, and take up the pure reasoning of free men. Instead, like beggars cap-in-hand on the rich man's threshold, we accept gifts when we should throw them back in his face—or act so nobly that we win him to imitate us. In fact, for us civilisation has a two-fold significance. It comprises, first, our own far from undistinguished share in founding civilisation, which we must not consign to oblivion but preserve in the stable practices and personality, the bright and shining extension of human experience provided by our people's way of life : and, in the second place, those fascinating manifestations of others' culture, prepared and matured by them for themselves, from which we must choose such a selection as will suit our needs without damage to our heritage. "Civilisation" derives from the same root as "city", and belongs to the sublime side of human thought. To debase its creativeness for mere epigonic imitation is to reduce whole communities to mere monkey-life."
