circumstance. Its teachings are never out of date, and there is no
limit beyond which it could fail to enlighten the development and
the realisation of individual potentialities, and explains the laws that
govern the rise, decline and fall of nations. The Qur’an thus is a
Divine Book embodying all these attributes, and being the final code
of life forever prescribed by God for mankind, is fully comprehensive
and complete in every respect.
This great work of Almighty God tell us that all the failures and
frustrations of mankind, all the destructions and bloodshed that the
world has suffered, can be traced back to fallacious views of life that
man had adopted through the distorted vision and perverse
thinking. One of these is the materialistic concept of life according
to which man is merely the most developed specimen of animal life,
his being depending entirely upon this physical body for existence
and ending with its decay. Human life, they think, is governed
entirely by physical laws. The preservation and promotion of man’s
material welfare is the only aim worth striving for. It is the function
of human intellect to help man in achieving these aims. Those who
believe in this view of life inevitably accept the supremacy of the
law of jungle that might is right. This law naturally results in strife
and conflict among individuals and groups, eventually leading to
global conflicts and mass destruction of life and property and tragic
human sufferings. In short, all the courses that mankind has
adopted for the organisation of social life have ultimately led, not to
security and peace, but to mutual destruction. In The Making of
Humanity, Robert Briffault has brought the root cause of the trouble
clearly into focus when he says:
No system of human organisation that is false in its very principle, in its
very foundation, can save itself by any amount of cleverness and
efficiency in the means by which that falsehood is carried out and
maintained, by any amount of superficial adjustment and tinkering (p. 159 ).
The Qur’anic View of LifeThe Qur’an on the other hand, holds that man is not merely a
physical being but is composed of something else besides his body
which is called human personality. This personality, however, is not
inherited by man in a fully developed state; it exists in a latent form
Introduction 5