keep a watchful eye on the nation and to warn it when it goes wrong.
The intellectuals are to blame if the nation pursues false values. If a
nation begins to decay, the process usually starts at the top. The
upper stratum of the society first becomes corrupt and the
corruption spreads downwards. It is strange that men of high
intelligence should be the first to be corrupted. It is because they
cannot resist the temptation to use their intelligence to further their
own interests:
And verily, We had empowered them with that wherewith We have not
empowered you, and had assigned them ears and eyes and mind; but
their ears and eyes and mind availed them naught, since they rejected
the laws revealed by Allah: and what they used to mock befell them
(46:26).
It is to this truth that the Qur'an directs our attention. Knowledge
and understanding, wealth and power, skill and intelligence will not
avail us if we adopt a course opposed to the eternal moral order, A
social system based on false values, on the glorification of wealth
and power, may flourish for a time, but will ultimately crumble
down. Iqbal has rightly said:
A society based on capitalism cannot maintain itself.
However much wily politicians may try to buttress it up. (Baang-e-Dara).
In the course of a discussion of the decline and fall of the Roman
Empire, Briffault has made some thought-provoking observations,
which we will do well to ponder over:
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. It is
doomed root and branch as long as the root remains what it is.(2)
He goes on to say:
Humanity does not necessarily stand upon a higher plane of being
when riding above the clouds, nor does a hundred miles an hour
constitute progress; man is not intellectually transformed by being able
to weigh the stars and disport his mind over wider spheres of
knowledge. There is a deeper aspect of human affairs. There is
something which stands nearer to the essence of human worth than
any form of material or intellectual power, than the control of nature
or the development of the mind's insight. Power, civilisation, culture
count for naught, if they are associated with moral evil. The real
standard by which the worth of the human world is to be computed is a
Islam: A Challenge to Religion 273