In our current age Science reigns supreme, its methodology, its assumptions, its gaze has become near universal, all-consuming, unavoidable. The average person, religious or secular has relegated to the sciences a pedestal from which it acts as judge, jury and executioner. Its formulas, its instruments and probes, its edifice which rests upon gear-esque institutions have become so intertwined in society that for the vast majority of people they have become a “natural” fact of life. It is naive to presume that the scientific method and its inquisitors operate only in a set domain, divorced from everything else. In fact it has bled into everything else. The duality of mind and body, the assumption of inert principle-less matter, reductionism, obsessive observations, the exalting of mathematical logic, the banishment of metaphysics, these are not merely confined to laboratories, observatories or universities. The tentacles have spread, grown and ultimately infected everything. Medicine recognizes only concentrations, waveforms and measurements of various chemical substances. Pain is to be treated mechanistically, to acknowledge an ontic component of one’s suffering is irrelevant, laughable, it is merely a symptom of the failure of the many gears that the human body comprises. Only treatable if the person in question acquiesces to the supremacy of the pharmas and becomes theirs in totality. Consider schools, regardless of board, funding or any other characteristics they all follow a single standardized metric. Whether the school in question employs modern teaching pedagogy, or “outdated” rote learning, whether it conducts traditional exams or evaluates skills qualitatively, they all seek to implement a narrow mechanistic regime on the entirety of their students. Whether the instructor simply gives out the answers or leads students through an inquiry, the fact remains that he or she is constrained by the “machine”. Results are required at all costs, no matter what curriculum/framework gymnastics are employed, the student is fodder for the school’s profits, he or she is being set up to become a cog amongst billions. Scientific precision in action. This attitude as mentioned earlier pervades everything, akin to a poisonous ether. Look at everything around you. Look at what they’ve done to you, what they intend to do to your children. The madness of calculations, the folly control, the continuous erasure of the human perspective. Observing what is perhaps the beginning of a horrendous collapse of modernity that is hovering on the horizon, I cannot help but appreciate the agency that the shariah has granted to the human being. The very agency that some in our ranks are eager to bring down. The human experience has been privileged in all its aspects. The Quran speaks of natural ayat in terms that speak directly to the human experience, in particular the human gaze unaided by instruments or machines. Thus the sky is presented as a firmament, a fortified roof. The Sun, Moon and stars as radiant lamps. Mountains as pegs, the earth as a wide expanse. Rain in the Quran is presented simply not as an inert principle-less chemical shower. Allah speaks of the rejuvenation of dead land that comes alive in the aftermath of rain. The qualities of life and death are attributed by the human perspective to the vegetation before and after rainfall. A rejuvenating effect, ihya, is something we experience. It is that experience that is privileged by Allah SWT, not the reductive view of the meteorologist, nor the evolving mesh grids of the computational climatologist. According to the Sharia, by default, anything is pure as long as one does not observe any physical impurity or has any tangible evidence to the contrary. This is in stark contrast to the obsessive industrial standards of cleanliness that have been thrust upon the planet, all for the purpose of more profits and ultimately wrestling away even more agency from the human perspective. Not to mention the burden these standards place on the planet. Despite all the boasting of disease eradication it seems that we are at all times on the verge of a catastrophic pandemic, or the discovery of another carcinogenic that we’ve been convinced is vital to our survival. In this frenzy to sanitize we are becoming more and more paranoid, more distrustful of ourselves and more willing than ever to relent to further control via mathematical precision. With the sacred law this is never the case, the All Knowing in His infinite wisdom has made it so. He Has ennobled man, His vicegerent, made mankind the recipient of the Prophets, has blessed him with an intellect that surpasses those of the Angels. In contrast, what have the Lords of Modernity offered to contemporary Man? That he is nothing more than a heap of atoms, indistinguishable from anything else in the cosmos? That nothing exists other than the imminent? The only telos is that of more and more consumption? What is it about all of this that is worth looking forward to? What part of this moribund dystopia is expected to bring about the best of man? His longing for the infinite, the acknowledgment of his finitude and his upcoming infinitude. Hamiltonians, Lagrangians, anti-biotics and effectively everything else that this world has to offer, its very foundations have hollowed out what is exclusively human. To contain the spirit, the intellect and the heart in a labyrinth of matrices and quantitative manipulation is the ultimate tragedy that has beset our age. The cages grow more and more sophisticated, less obvious, more insidious, more restrictive. Yet man’s interior remains the same, unchanging, primordial, pre-modern. It longs for its Lord, it longs for Jannah tul Adan. The names it was taught eons ago, the covenant that was made with it in the Spirit Realm before its departure for this lowly realm.
Afkar-e-Qurtuba 