The American astronaut, Neil Armstrong, was the first man to set foot on the moon after a four-day space voyage on July 20, 1969. On reaching his destination, he uttered these words, which are now a part of history: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Armstrong, along with his colleagues, Edwin Aldrin and Michael Collins, undertook this journey in a special rocket called Apollo 11. In the final stage they boarded a lunar vehicle called Eagle in order to land on the surface of the moon. These vehicles, the Apollo and the Eagle, were not- —as some of the more fanciful among us might imagine—two magic, flying chariots, but scientifically designed machines made in accordance with our observation of the unchanging laws of nature. Their ability to traverse such immense distance in space is entirely due to man’s correct application of his empirical knowledge. These laws, the application of which would enable man to reach the moon, have existed throughout the universe since time immemorial, yet it took man centuries to discover them. Given the possibilities of nature, why did so many thousands of years have to elapse in the course of man’s development before he felt ready to launch himself into space? The answer to this is the prevalence of polytheism, a creed which looked upon things and creatures as deities, and encouraged their worship. In ancient times polytheism dominated the entire world. Man considered the moon a deity, just as he held all kinds of other inanimate objects to be gods. The moon, with its brilliant silvery light, inspired man to bow before it rather than try to conquer it. Holding the moon to be sacred was a major obstacle to even thinking of conquering it. Then, for the first time, in the 7th century, the supremacy of polytheism was brought to an end by the Islamic revolution, which replaced it with monotheism, making it the dominant creed of the times. This revolution was initially brought about in Arabia. Later, it continued its onward journey through Asia and Africa to Europe. In more recent times, it has crossed the Atlantic to gain a foothold in America. In the Muslim world this revolution was brought about through the influence of religion. The western world, with its own particular circumstances, began to develop this revolution along different lines, separating secular science from religion. Gradually, it was brought to its present culmination. The moon journey mentioned here is an obvious illustration. Just as nationalization is an economic part of the philosophic system evolved by Marx, similarly modern science is a part of Islamic revolution, which has been separated from its whole. The same is true of all the sciences, which are now called natural sciences. The fields of these sciences had become forbidden territory because of the polytheistic view of the sanctity of all of nature’s phenomena. It was the revolution of monotheism, which opened the doors of research and investigation by displacing nature from its sacred pedestal. Thus began a new era of freedom to investigate nature. The slow, thousand-year process of maturation finally culminated (towards the end at an ever-accelerating pace) in modern science and technology. Modern science is wholly the gift of the Islamic revolution – directly in its initial stages, and indirectly in its later stages.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 16:47:26 +0000
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