Ignorance’s Consequences on Our Society [Archives:1999/39/Culture]
Mohammed Noman Al-Hakimi,
Taiz
It is quite obvious that ignorance and negligence are fully contrasted. The great difference between the content of these two allies is exactly what we feel today in our society and what our ancestors felt as well. But what we realize is different from what they did. They lived in the darkness of ignorance. However, after the coming of Islam, they began to look for science and cling to it till they accomplished remarkable progress. In contrast, today, we live in deeper darkness. It is the darkness of neglecting science. That negligence has made the Islamic nation a rather sick nation, after a remarkable progress achieved centuries ago. Such darkness was planted into the heart of nearly every Arab Muslim colonialists. However, we find colonizers from the West themselves wondering at and looking for the miracles of this religion that science has proved. What the Holly Quran comprises, indeed, astonished the world as a whole. Many people certified on behalf of the Islamic religion, most agreed with it, and the others believed it.
The scientific and technological progress the world enjoys today, and which nourished the various fields of human life, like flying in the air away from the earth, was known to illiterate prophet (peace and prayers be upon him) 14 centuries ago, according to the Holly Quran revealed to him still we must have a confessive and scientific stance concerning this. The stance should be first of all, out of ignorance which prevailed in our present Age, and has become a doctrine rather a philosophical school for many intellectuals and thinkers of today. Due to a number of internal and external factors, it seams to them that it would be in the interest of the individual to ignore the constant facts and statements the Holly Quran reveals, and which form a stumbling block before them.
And thus they find it impossible to continue their fast progress or get out of the organized sphere of science to the sphere of decline and aimlessness.
When coming back to the Holly Quran, which is the greatest of the Holly Books which are not distorted, we see that it involves a great deal of scientific rules and facts with a direct relation to technological and scientific discoveries humanity has made since the beginning of t his world. These facts indicate obviously that the Everlasting Creator has a knowledge of what has happened and what is to happen, And how we will stop the preamble since what follows will be even more interesting.
We have to return to some facts the Holly Quran includes regarding discoveries.
We start from the seabed till we reach high space layers coming through the life of the peculiar creator named man (Insane.) In addition, we will consider geographical and physical phenomena which surround him and which are well matched to his activities.
At the beginning of the age of many-sided scientific inventions and discoveries oceanographers were able, no doubt after a very hard extended work, to discover the fact that sea, in general terms, which appears to form its outside to be one uniform mass of water, in fact stratified. Every layer has different characteristics from that of the layer which follows. And these very deep seas contain earthly waves which are also different from those on the surface of the sea. They have reached the fact that seas are too dark in their deeper layers. Besides, many other scientific facts have been recorded by the scientific fraternity and after all, it has been realized with fiducial looks that all that the scientists have come to know was however, known of earlier through the tongue of t he “illiterate prophet” (peace and prayers be upon him). Indeed, it is strange that the prophet’s information was said centuries ago, i e, at the time of camel and donkey riding and of present day means, such as airplanes.
The earth, that planet of medium size among several others, is considered only one stoma, It has been asserted by scientists in the modern age that the earth along with other planets situated in the same cosmic galaxy was only one mass. And due to the influences of several factors a tremendous explosion happened. That led to the dispersal of a group of planets to very far-off distances out of the original mass. Again the “illiterate prophet” informed the world of it much earlier.
And one of the scientific facts considered very important today is the continuos expansion of (sky) heavens. This was also emphasized by the true God through the prophet Mohammed’s tongue.
It is only because Muslims make little of their religion and science, others begin to undertake them. Besides, they have grown despite the fact that they really are not. Muslims have deteriorated in many fields. All this was but a consequence of our negligence. And this is what colonialism exactly aimed at, and what Muslims accepted willingly.
In closing, what we are to do is to come back to the original Islamic sources which encourage science and never suggest neglecting it. We have to adhere to what we say, to what we believe. We should not continue to be negligent or else we will suffer a great loss of face.
“Allah changeth not the condition of a person until he first changeth what which is in has heart.” A verse from Surat Arrad.
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