260 DESTINY DISRUPTED
evolved with the human community in the natural course of things-just
like art, agriculture, and technology-growing ever more sophisticated as
man grew more civilized.
Early humans had a limited capacity to explore moral and ethical issues
intellectually, Sayyid Ahmad speculated. They needed revealed religion to
help them overcome their passions and guide them to moral judgments
and conduct: rulings from a higher power, delivered by prophets with the
charismatic authority to persuade without explanation. But the moral and
ethical injunctions of all great, true religions are not fundamentally irra-
tional. They are reasonable, and reason can discover them, once people
have developed the intellectual capacity to do so.
That's why Mohammed announced that he was the last of the prophets-
he didn't mean that his rulings about issues in the Mecca and Medina of his
day were to be the final word on human conduct throughout the ages. He
meant that he had brought the last tools people needed to proceed on the
quest for a moral community on their own, without unexplained rulings
from God. Islam was the last of the revealed religions because it was the be-
ginning of the age of reason-based religions. Rational people could achieve
moral excellence by reasoning correctly from sound fundamental principles.
What Islam brought were sound fundamental principles. They were the same
as those found in Christianity and all the other great revealed religions with
the one caveat that Islam also enjoined rationality. It would have liberated hu-
manity from blind obedience to superstition and dogma had not Muslims
misinterpreted the meaning of the Qur'anic revelations and gone off course.
Sayyid Ahmad was suggesting implicitly that Muslims disconnect from
obsessing about heaven and hell and miraculous interventions by God in his-
tory and rethink their faith as an ethical system. In this approach, good Mus-
lims would not necessarily be those who read the Qur'an in Arabic for many
hours every day, or dressed a certain way, or prayed just so. Good Muslims
would be defined as those who didn't lie, or cheat, or steal, or kill, those who
developed their own best capacities assiduously and behaved fairly toward
others, those who sought justice in society, behaved responsibly in their com-
munities, and exercised mercy, compassion, and charity as best they could.
Before he went to England, Sayyid Ahmad had founded an organiza-
tion called the Scientific Society, in the northern Indian town of Aligarh.
This organization produced lectures and made advanced European learn-