Islam Creator of the Modern Age
1. Islam: Creator of the Modern Age
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Rooting out
shirk,
or superstition, was not a purely
religious undertaking. It had, a bearing on all
human concerns. The truth is that this all-
pervasiveness of superstition served as a hurdle to
all kinds of human development.
Placing nature upon a pedestal of sanctity had
completely discouraged an investigation of it.
Without such investigation, scientific and industrial
progress was simply not possible. Progress towards
the general acceptance of human equality was
likewise barred by beliefs concerning the
superiority or inferiority of a man’s birth, which
had grown out of a variety of baseless suppositions,
all governed by superstition. The emergence of all
those factors, which today add up to enlightenment
and progress, had been rendered impossible by a
complete absence of scientific vision. It was
superstition, which was responsible for delaying the
birth of such an outlook by many centuries.
Efforts on the part of the prophets over a period of
thousands of years had proved that any struggle,
which was confined, to intellectual or missionary
fields was not sufficient to extricate man from the
