Islam Rediscovered
24. A Case of Discovery*
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clouds balanced between heaven and earth are
signs to people of understanding; Yet there are
some who worship other objects besides Allah,
bestowing on them the adoration due to Allah.” (2:
164-65).
As to the second part of the
kalima
, it is not a
“necessary fiction” as Gibbon chooses to call it, but
a very necessary and highly valuable truth
consistent with reason, and appealing to the highest
aspirations of our spiritual life. Whenever the
fundamental truths, on which our moral and
religious life is based, are either obscured or
forgotten, whenever men become too worldly and
avaricious, too immoral and materialistic, there
appear, in the history of races and nations, men so
highly spiritualised by birth and breeding as to be
called prophets and apostles of God, and whose
sole mission in life is to remind men of what they
have forgotten and to revive what they have lost. “I
am no more than a public preacher. I preach
nothing new. I only try to bring home to you certain
eternal truths proclaimed by all true prophets of
God which you have evidently forgotten.” This is
being constantly repeated in the Quran. And that
