The following farsighted lines are from Muhammad Assad's insightful autobiography "The road to Makkah". Muhammad Assad, whose original name was Leopold Weiss, was a renowned German journalist working as a foreign correspondent in the Muslim world when he became a Muslim in 1926. Note that these were his thoughts in the early 20th century and remain timeless up-to-date:
“Western civilization has not been able to strike a harmonious balance between man’s bodily and social needs and his spiritual cravings; it has abandoned its erstwhile religious ethics without being able to produce out of itself another moral system, however theoretical, that would commend itself to reason. Despite all its advances in education, it has not been able to overcome man’s stupid readiness to fall a prey to any slogan, however absurd, which clever demagogues think fit to invent. It has raised the technique of ‘organisation’ to fine art – and nevertheless the nations of the West daily demonstrate their utter inability to control the forces which their scientists have brought into being, and have now reached a stage where apparently unbounded scientific possibilities go hand in hand with world-wide chaos. Lacking all truly religious orientation, the Westerner cannot morally benefit by the light of the knowledge which his – undoubtedly great - science is shedding. To him might be applied the words of the Koran:
Their parable is the parable of people who lit a fire: but when it had shed its light around them, God took away their light and left them in darkness in which they cannot see - deaf, dumb, blind: and yet they do not turn back.
And yet, in the arrogance of their blindness, the people of the West are convinced that it is their civilization that will bring light and happiness to the world … […] the belief that all human problems can be solved in factories, laboratories and on the desks of statisticians.”
As he correctly remarked: Godlessness leads to darkness, no matter how intellectually superior they might be - they certainly do not serve humanity.
“Western civilization has not been able to strike a harmonious balance between man’s bodily and social needs and his spiritual cravings; it has abandoned its erstwhile religious ethics without being able to produce out of itself another moral system, however theoretical, that would commend itself to reason. Despite all its advances in education, it has not been able to overcome man’s stupid readiness to fall a prey to any slogan, however absurd, which clever demagogues think fit to invent. It has raised the technique of ‘organisation’ to fine art – and nevertheless the nations of the West daily demonstrate their utter inability to control the forces which their scientists have brought into being, and have now reached a stage where apparently unbounded scientific possibilities go hand in hand with world-wide chaos. Lacking all truly religious orientation, the Westerner cannot morally benefit by the light of the knowledge which his – undoubtedly great - science is shedding. To him might be applied the words of the Koran:
Their parable is the parable of people who lit a fire: but when it had shed its light around them, God took away their light and left them in darkness in which they cannot see - deaf, dumb, blind: and yet they do not turn back.
And yet, in the arrogance of their blindness, the people of the West are convinced that it is their civilization that will bring light and happiness to the world … […] the belief that all human problems can be solved in factories, laboratories and on the desks of statisticians.”
As he correctly remarked: Godlessness leads to darkness, no matter how intellectually superior they might be - they certainly do not serve humanity.
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