'

.

.

double affliction of schizophrenia and tuberculosis

!80 and died an early death-a gloomy, nihilistic pessi· mist who expressed little else in his writings but the horrors of his own insanity, and hopeless despair. But however much Edison may differ from Kafka, they have this one thing in common· that both were unique products of modern life and in turn made in their respective fields of endeavour many contributions - for good and evil· of their Ol\ n.

Neither Edison nor Kafka could have lived as· they did in any civilization but the present one. Had they been born into another age or culture, their lives would have been com· pletely unrecognizable.

The impact of the both these men from Europe and America on the now modernizing Asia and Africa has been unhealthy-Edison for all tbe comforts, conveniences

and

recreation over the audio-visual media he bestowed upon the world through his spectacular inventions - a misplaced, misguided faith in human material well-being as the supreme end of life to the neglect of all higher moral and spiritual values-and Kafka as a living refutation of material progress ex· posing the fallacies of all Edison worked and stood for-hi~ nihilism, hopelessness and despair, resulting in a complete loss of faith in both human endeavour and Divine mercy. “Yet it is thisvery type of unwholesome, introspective mera· ture that is beginning to serve as a source of inspiration for a number of writers tod•Y ia

281

Arabic and Persian. In fact, the most famous contemporary literary figure of Persia-Sadeq Hedayat-who was deeply influenced by Kafka,

committed

suicide

because

of despair and although certainly a man of great literary talent, he was completely divorced from Islam and its way of life. Today in Persia. Sadeq Hayat’s books are o}>posed by all Islamic elements. Yet the nihilism expressed by Kafka and others is be coming fashionable in the literary circles of Some Muslim countries’’.\ Thus we have no choice to turn our eyes for inspiration from the biographies of the great men of the West, an astonishingly large proportion of them suffering from unbalanced minds-to the great historical personalities of Islam, past and present. As Edison and Kafka represent the epitomeof our present age, so does Umar ibn Abdul Aziz and Ibo Taimiya represent the Muslim at his best and neither could have m~de the great contributions they did to humanity and achieved what they did except as staunc~ believers in Islam. In contrast to the large Dumber of mentally afflicted “great” men in Western history,

there are no

such mental abnormalities to be found among the great men in Islamic history.

Almost all of them were completely sane, emotionally wcJl-balan-:~d and Jived

‘J.lani and the Plight of .\lo\<lNn &fan, ::ieyyeJ HoHe lD N&11r, Luui;mao Lid.) LooJon, 1976, p. H~ .

TWO MAKERS OF THE MODERN WORLD\

Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) :

The genius of Thomas Alva Edison was not ahead of his time, but perfectly attuned to it. To an e~a of tremendous industrial expansion, his inventions contributed

not only extraordinary

mecha.nica.I means

but totally new fields for

development.

He literally illuminated his world with unsuspected light and made it vibrate with the miracle of recorded sound. However, unlike moat innovators, he did not have to get his reward in heaven ; he received it abundantly on this grateful earth. Atthetimeofhisdeath,it wa~ estimated

lhatthebusinessinterestsbasedonor largelydueto hi8multipleinventionsamountedtothe staggeringsum

of S 25,683 344 343 00.!ThisasaNewYorkTimes

‘ ‘ ‘

obituaryestimatedit,gaveEdison’sbrainthe highest

CMhvalueinhistory.

The Edison family had been in America since the early 18th ce:Qtury before the Revolution. His father came from Dutch stock and his mother was of Scottish descent.

The youngest child in the Edison house was Thomas Alva born on Feburary

11, 1847.

The superstition that older parents produce precocious children seems to have some justification in Edison’s case ; at the time of his

‘Makora of th• Modero World. Lol1i.3 UoLerm!lyer. ~1111 >D anti Scbiulor, Noir York, 1955, pp. 2J8.227, 6JJ!.618.

284

birth, his father was 43 and his mother 47. No one could have enjoyed a more untroubled childhood. The family was close-knit, the hop:ie was comfor· table, the living was always agreeable if not parti· cularly gracious. When he was seven, the house· hold moved to Port Huron,

Michigan where the

lumber husinesss flourished.

As a result, the

Edisons were installed in a new and spacious house. Tom was sent proudly to school ; his mother ex·