The Quran and the Secular Mind by Shabbir Akhtar

Author:Shabbir Akhtar [Akhtar, Shabbir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2007-10-31T07:00:00+00:00

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Although the intellectual climate of the nineteenth century was inclement, it took the Darwin affair to clinch the case for the secular opposition. The revolutionary ideas of natural selection, mutation, and the simian origins of the human race were a direct affront to biblical views confirming the instantaneous original perfection and subsequent fixity of our species, not to mention the scriptural claim that we have no precursors in the natural world – except Adam and Eve. Humankind, the crown of divine creation, was reduced to being merely a part of nature. This implied that our mental, moral and spiritual constitution was as explicable as our physical constitution and biological needs – and all in terms of natural scientific laws or something analogous.

Charles Lyell (1797–1875), Darwin’s predecessor, participated in the 1820s in the debates about reconciling the biblical account of the flood with geological findings. His seminal work on the antiquity of the earth and the uniform forces moulding it, The Principles of Geology (published in 3 volumes, 1830–3) influenced Darwin. Many believers of the time desperately argued that God had planted fossils in order to deliberately mislead us about the true age of our planet, reckoned to be no more than a few thousand years, according to Bishop James Usher’s chronology of the creation which dates it to 4004 bce.26

Darwin’s doctrine endowed the concept of nature with a depth, consistency and, eventually, an autonomous application which was to be the death-warrant for the purposive interpretation of nature favoured by pre-Darwinian Christian teleologists such as William Paley. Inquiry into purposes came to be seen as futile for the prediction and control of events in nature. To predict an eclipse, it is sufficient to know its causes. Its purpose, if it has any, is irrelevant to science. Matter is governed not by purpose but by natural law.

Movements of secular thought vary in their impact on religious belief but the dramatic increase in the authority, scope and cultural esteem enjoyed by the sciences of nature and society, during the last two centuries, has directly and decisively influenced the development of both western Judaism and Christianity. In principle, it also challenges Muslims and invites them to distil an Islamic essence which alone might survive in the asphyxiating atmosphere of an aggressively confident secularism which has been canonized in the aftermath of the failure of western Christianity to control the subversive movements in the culture it has historically spawned.

The sceptical rationalism of the eighteenth century, to revert to the Christian saga, failed to damage radically the traditional Christian views of human nature and God’s revelation, especially the unique dignity of humankind and the authenticity of the Bible. That larger catastrophe was reserved for the succeeding century in which the historical mentality took deeper root as thinkers supplied it with a secular metaphysical foundation. The historical study of the scriptures assumed new importance; ancient religious documents were subjected to unfettered rational inquiry with its strict canons of critical history and literary criticism. Traditional ideas concerning the

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