SOURCES OF WESTERN MATERIALISM

knowledge of the Hellenistic world, but they built upon it by means of experimental research in the laboratory. Gerard of Cremona (1144-1187) devoted his entire life to translating ninety-two complete scientific works from the Arabic, including Ibn Sina’s vast Canon which for centuries remained the supreme authority of its field in all the medical schools of Europe.

Francis Bacon epitomized the scientific spirit of the modern age in The New Atlantis. An English ship lands upon a utopian island in the remote Pacific whose chief pride is a great institution devoted to scientific research. “The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes and the secret motions of things and the enlarging of the bounds of the human empire to the effecting of all things possible.”

Descartes carried on the development of the experimental method where Francis Bacon had begun, completely overthrowing the authority of Aristotle and the medieval scholastic philosophy. He craved a method for discovering new truth instead of merely proving what was already known.

There is no inherent incompatibility between scientific research and religion.

Does not the Qur’an regard man as the noblest creature of God, subjecting all other creatures and elements of nature for his benefit? The discovery of Muslim geographers that the earth was round instead of flat centuries before Columbus and the suspicions of many Muslim astronomers hundreds of years before Copernicus that the earth revolved about 22 the sun, never constituted the slightest threat to the survival of the Islamic way of life. Because the Qur’an teaches that Nature is a friend of man, Muslim scientists sought to live in harmony with it and thus felt completely at home in the universe.

The tragedy of Western science lay not in its specific discoveries which were of such tremendous benefit to the human race, but rather the dogmatic, narrow, materialistic outlook of the scientists themselves. After Copernicus, the Western astronomer saw man as only a puny speck on a tiny planet revolving around a tenth-rate star, drifting aimlessly in an endless cosmic ocean.

Since God, the angels and Satan were not to be seen through their telescopes they concluded that man was absolutely alone in a cold, complex cosmic machine, his creation perhaps only an accident or a mistake.

Feeling like a stranger in the universe without tangible proof of any God who cherished his welfare, Western man thus abandoned as futile the search for the ultimate meaning and purpose of life and began to regard Nature as he does today—as an enemy to be conquered, possessed and then manipulated by mechanical means to advance his material well-being.

To Western scientists like Descartes, Nature was nothing more than a machine which had no spiritual significance. All living beings, including man, were a mere matter of automatic chemical reactions.

“Give me the elements,” boasted Descartes, “and I will construct the universe!”

Intoxicated by the theory advanced by Newton that the entire universe was regulated by immutable mathematical 13 laws, the protagonists of the so-called Age of Enlightenment taught that all beliefs contrary to human experience and observation must be discarded.

Miracles, prophecy, revelation as well as religious rites and ceremonies were ridiculed as superstition.

Voltaire taught that God created the universe exactly as a watchmaker assembles a watch, afterwards having no further concern with it. Hume rejected all religious beliefs on the ground that they could not be proved either by scientific experiments or human reason. He attacked even the deist god of Voltaire, declaring that we have seen watches made but not worlds. If the universe did have an author, he may have been an incompetent workman or he may have long since died after completing his work, or he may have been a male or female god or a great number of gods.

He may have been entirely good or entirely evil or both or neither—probably the last. Hume’s argument against the existence of the Hereafter ran as follows: “We have no reason for concluding from a life where rewards and punishments do not coincide with human deserts that there will be any other in which they do.”

Morality was regarded as a science like mathematics, just as independent from theology as any other branch of human knowledge.

Philosophers, such as Diderot and Rousseau, all agreed that utility and happiness were the sole criteria for morality.

They waged a determined fight against all those ethical ideals which have no immediate social value. Man instead should seek as much pleasure and happiness as he can in this life without depriving his fellows of their rightful share.

Whatever relations gave pleasure to all concerned could not but be beneficial. There14 fore they saw no good in the traditional demands for chastity between the sexes. Only those pleasures which inflicted direct and immediate harm upon society could be rejected. The philosophers of the so-called Age of Enlightenment were the protagonists of religious liberty much more because of their indifference to religion than their faith in the principle of toleration itself.

Having destroyed what they considered the foolish errors of the past, the apostles of the “Enlightenment” believed that reason and science spread by universal mass education would usher in a virtual heaven on earth. Now that man possessed the magic key of science, it was within his power to shape his own destiny.

Liberty, social and economic equality and universal peace would reign over the entire world. They were confident that increasing scientific knowledge would banish forever all disease and suffering, leading to an indefinite prolongation of human life. The technological and scientific revolutions of the following century served to confirm this new faith in the perfectability of human life on this earth without the aid of any supernatural power.

Darwin’s concept of the evolution of man from lower forms of life introduced a wholly new scale of values. Philosophers now conceived of human society in a constant state of flux and change, inevitably leading to higher and more complex stages of development. The principles of biological evolution applied to human society identified the “modern,” “up-to-date,” “advanced” and “progressive” with what was most desirable.

Historians came to look upon man as a product as well as a part of nature, 15 evolving to his present state from lowly origins with all of his achievements having been painfully acquired in the struggle against a hostile environment. Darwin convinced Western philosophers that man was an animal species like any other—a higher mammal to be sure—but only an animal. William James even questioned the value of retaining the intangible concept of mind at all, regarding consciousness as merely the end result of chemical reactions upon the nervous system produced by external stimuli. Psychologists like Pavlov sought to delve into the motives of human behaviour by studying dogs, monkeys and apes.

Freud’s discovery of the compulsives of the unconscious mind originating in early childhood as the source of all irrational behaviour provided modern philosophers with yet an additional weapon against religion.

Freud maintained that the small child projected the image of his parents who gave him life, protected him from harm and subjected him to discipline, punishment and reward onto his religious faith in adult life. The concept that religion is purely man-made and that ethics are relative and not absolute is enthusiastically welcomed by students of anthropology.

Most anthropologists would agree with Ralph Linton that the uncompromising monotheism of Islam originated in the rigidly patriarchal family life of the Semitic tribes. He writes in The Tree of Culture:

The concept of an all-powerful deity who can only be placated by complete submission and devotion no matter how unjust his acts may appear, was the direct outgrowth of Semitic family life.

Another product of the exaggerated super-ego to which it gave rise was the elaborate system of taboos relating to every aspect 16 of behaviour which are epitomized in the Law of Moses. Such codes of taboos provided those who kept them with a sense of security comparable to that of the good child who is able to remember everything that his father told him to do. Allah is the portrait of the typical Semitic father with his patriarchal, authoritarian qualities abstracted and exaggerated. Freud was not content to deny the divine origin of religion; he rejected the idea that faith was justified on any grounds whatsoever:

It seems not to be true that there is a power in the universe which watches over the well-being of every individual with parental care, bringing all within His fold to a happy ending.

On the contrary, the destinies of men are incompatible with any universal principle of justice. Earthquakes, floods and fires do not distinguish between the good and devout man and the sinner and unbeliever.

Even if we leave inanimate nature out of account and consider only the destinies of individual men in so far as they depend on their relations with others of their own kind, it is by no means the rule that virtue is rewarded and wickedness punished.

It often happens that the violent, crafty and unprincipled seize the desirable goods of this world while the pious go away empty.

Dark, unfeeling and unloving powers determine human destiny. The concept of divine justice, which according to religion governs the world, seems to have no existence. No attempt to minimize the supremacy of science can alter the fact that it takes 17 account our dependence on the real, external world while religion is only a childish illusion which derives its strength from the fact that it happens to fall in with our instinctual desires.

Bertrand Russell develops this thorough-going materialistic and atheistic philosophy even further when he writes:

That man is the product of causes which had no provision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no amount of heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave, that all the labour of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration of human genius are destined for extinction in the vast death of the solar system and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things are so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffold of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can man’s habitation be safely built.

After denying any positive value to religious faith Freud had to admit that science is an unsatisfactory substitute:

Science, apart from the emphasis on the real world, has essentially negative characteristics in that it limits itself to tangible material truth and rejects 18 illusions.

Some of our fellow men who are dissatisfied with this state of affairs and desire something more for their momentary peace of mind, may look for it where they can find it, but we cannot help them. Schopenhauer carried this purely materialistic philosophy to its logical conclusions. For him, the essence of life is aimless, restless activity, an utterly irrational force:

Since the basis of all desire is need, deficiency and thus pain, the nature of brute and man alike is originally and of its very essence subject to pain. If on the other hand, it is deprived of objects of desire through too easy satisfaction, such void and ennui fills the heart that existence becomes an unbearable burden.

Thus life swings like a pendulum from pain to ennui, from ennui to pain.

Life is a sea full of rocks and whirlpools which man avoids with greatest care and solicitude although he knows that even if he succeeds in getting through, with all his efforts and skill, he comes but the nearer at every task to the greatest, the total inevitable ship-wreck—death. Every human being and his course of life is but another short dream of the endless spirit of Nature. The persistent will to live is only another fleeting form which nature carelessly sketches in its infinite pages, allows to remain for a time so short, it vanishes into nothing and then obliterates to make room for others.

Thus we have traced the origins of Western materialistic philosophy from its origins during the Renaissance when men sought only to enjoy the pleasures of exercising 19 their intellectual curiosity to investigate the world around them, to the utter despair of Schopenhauer who can find in this life nothing but meaningless futility.

We have watched man, the vicegerent of God on earth with an immortal soul, a moral and a spiritual being directly responsible to his Creator for his deeds, debased to an animal accountable to nothing but his physical and social requirements.

It is not at all surprising why such ideologies as Fascism, Nazism, Communism, Pragmatism and Zionism should flourish so luxuriantly in this soil. The directors of the Nazi concentration camps which organized murder on the scientific assembly line basis of gigantic factories, the Soviet secret police, the creators of the completely regimented life of the communes in communist China and those Zionist leaders responsible for the ruthless expulsion of an entire people from their homeland would all agree with Nietzsche that God is dead.

Because of the extraordinary virility of its economic and political power, Western civilization was able to extend its domination over the world.

When the nations of Asia and Africa were finally able to win their struggle for political freedom from imperialist bondage, their indigenous cultures had long since been crushed.

Their leaders, almost without exception educated in European and American schools, were simultaneously taught to despise their native heritage and imbued with the philosophies of Western materialism.

20 Thus the leaders of Asia and Africa are at one with those of Europe and America in regarding progress through the raising of the material standard of living and the expansion of economic and political power as the supreme goals of human society.

We must not confuse Islamic methods of combatting social and economic injustice with those of the West.

Islam regards a certain minimum of physical well-being essential if the soul is to be freed from exclusive concern with bodily needs to the fulfilment of its spiritual life.

In Islam, man’s material welfare is only a means, in contrast to the West which regards it as an end in itself.

No wonder Western forms of totalitarian dictatorships are so attractive to the leaders of Asia and Africa! Impatient to adopt the social, economic and political systems of the West, they cannot help but be deeply impressed by the rapidly growing prestige of Communist China. The price which China has had to pay for her political and economic expansion in millions of ruined individual lives does not concern them in the least because they consider that the end fully justifies the means.

One might think that the erosion of the world’s cultural variety would lead to greater harmony and unity among peoples.

However, we have seen that from its inception the basic theme of Western civilization has been its revolt against all spiritual and religious values. In view of this outlook prevailing in the world today, one can easily understand why there is more hatred, strife and violent upheavals than ever before in history.

Gone 21 any sense of moral responsibility in international relations.

In the sessions of the United Nations, delegates do not hesitate to lie, to distort and twist the facts without the slightest scruple whenever it suits their purposes, for anything that promotes the national interest, even at the expense of other countries, can never be wrong.

Delegates at the United Nations do not vote according to the merit of the issues involved but purely for the sake of expediency.

The leaders of the Muslim countries are no less guilty than any others, for they too have been deluded by the philosophies of Western materialism.

Some of them speak glibly about the necessity of reconciling Islam with the spirit of the modern age. In order to do this, they say that a distinction must be made between the social content of the Qur’an and its spiritual teaching.

The former, reflecting the conditions of seventh-century Arabia, must be rejected as irrelevant to the problems of today and only the latter regarded as the eternal truth. They are indifferent to the fact that Islam is a complete, harmonious way of life infinitely superior to anything the West has ever been able to produce.

Rejection of any part destroys the whole.

The January 6, 1961 issue of The New York Times reported that the Ministry of Education in Turkey had ordered the destruction of all unauthorized schools said to be conducting secret classes in the Qur’an. The article went on to explain that secret instruction in the Qur’an 22 had been forbidden in Turkey for several years as subversive.

The leaders of Turkey, like the leaders of all the other Muslim countries, must choose what they want — Western materialistic philosophy or the Qur’an. They cannot have both.