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Where should I seek for knowledge? By the time I
was 15, I had discovered that there was something called ‘philosophy’ and that
the word meant ‘love of wisdom’. Wisdom was what I sought, so the satisfaction
of my need must lie hidden in these heavy books written by wise men. With a
feeling of intense excitement, like an explorer already in sight of the
undiscovered land, I ploughed through Descartes, Kant, Hume, Spinoza,
Schopenhauer and Bertrand Russell, or else read works which explained their
teachings. It was not long before I realized that something was wrong. I
might as well have been eating sand as seeking nourishment from this quarter. These
men knew nothing. They were only speculating, spinning ideas out of their own
poor heads, and anyone can speculate (including a school boy). How could a 15
or 16-year-old have had the impudence to dismiss the whole of Western secular
philosophy as worthless? One does not have to be mature to distinguish between
what the Quran calls dhann (‘opinion’) and true Knowledge. At the same time my
mother’s constant insistence that I should take no notice of what others
thought or said obliged me to trust my own judgment. Western culture treated
these ‘philosophers’ as great men, and students in universities studied their
works with respect. But what was that to me?
Some time later, when I was in the sixth-form, a
master who took a particular interest in me made a strange remark which I did
not at understand. ‘You are’, he said, ‘the only truly universal skeptic I
have known’. He was not referring specifically to religion. He meant that I
seemed to doubt everything that was taken for granted by everyone else. I
wanted to know why it should be assumed that our rational powers, so well
adapted to finding food, shelter and a mate, had an application beyond the
mundane realm. I was puzzled by the notion that the commandment ‘Thou shalt
not kill’ was supposed to be binding on those who were neither Jews nor
Christians, and I was no less baffled as to why in a world full of beautiful
women, the rule of monogamy should be thought to have a universal application.
I even doubted my own existence. Long afterwards I came across the story of
the Chinese sage, Chuangtzu, who, having dreamed one night that he was a
butterfly, awoke to question whether he was in fact the man Chuangtzu, who had
dreamed that he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that it was Chuangtzu.
I understood his dilemma.
Yet, when my teacher made this remark, I had
already discovered a key to what might be a more certain knowledge. By chance
- although there is no such thing as ‘chance’ – I had come across a book called
‘The Primordial Ocean’ by a certain Professor Perry, an Egyptologist. The
professor had a fixed idea that the ancient Egyptians had traveled to part of
the world in their papyrus boats spreading their religion, mythology, far and
wide. To prove his case, he had spent many years researching ancient
mythologies, and also the myths and symbols of ‘primitive’ peoples in our own
time. What he revealed was an astonishing unanimity of belief, however
different the images in which that belief was expressed. He had not proved his
theory about the papyrus boats; he had, I thought, proved something quite
different. It seemed that, behind the tapestry of forms and images, there were
certain universal truths regarding the nature of reality, the creation of the
world and of mankind, and the meaning of the human experience; truths which
were as much a part as our blood and our bones.
One of the principal causes of unbelief in the
modern world is the plurality of religions which appear mutually contradictory.
So long as the Europeans were convinced of their own racial superiority, they
had no reason to doubt that Christianity was the only true Faith. The notion
that they were the crown of the ‘evolutionary process’ made it easy to assume
that all other religions were no more than naive attempts to answer perennial
questions. It was when this racial self-confidence declined that doubts crept
in. How was it possible for a good God to allow the majority of human beings
to live and die in the service of false religions? Was it any longer possible
for the Christian to believe that he alone was saved? Others made the same
claim - Muslims, for example - so how could anyone be sure who was right and
who was wrong? For many people, including myself until I came to Perry’s book,
the obvious conclusion was that, since everyone could not be right, everyone
must be wrong. Religion was an illusion, the product of wishful thinking. Others
might have found it possible to substitute ‘scientific truth’ for religious ‘myths’.
I could not, since science was founded upon assumptions regarding the
infallibility of reason and the reality of sense-experience which could never
be proved.
When I read Perry’s book I knew nothing of the
Quran. That came much later, and what little I had heard of Islam was
distorted by prejudices accumulated during a thousand years of confrontation. And
yet, had I but known it, I had already taken a step in the direction of
Christianity’s great rival. The Quran assures us that no people on earth was
ever left without divine guidance and a doctrine of truth, conveyed through a
messenger of God who always spoke to the people in their own ‘language’,
therefore in terms of their particular circumstances and according to their
needs. The fact that such messages become distorted in the course of time goes
without saying, and no one should be surprised if truth is distorted as it
passes from generation to generation, but it would be astonishing if no
vestiges remained after the passage of the centuries. It now seems to me
entirely in accordance with Islam to believe that these vestiges, clothed in
myth and symbol (the ‘language’ of the people of earlier times), are directly
descended from revealed Truth and confirm the final Message.
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