but this God turns out to be a mere abstraction, far different from
the living god which religion tries to comprehend. Reason, by itself,
in short, has not enabled us so far to answer the question: “What is
religion?”
Let us now turn to the mystic’s approach. He appeals to his
subjective experience which he finds to be absolutely convincing
and supremely satisfying, at least to himself. He claims that in this
experience he feels himself to be in close and living contact with the
Absolute. Unfortunately, this experience, as the mystic himself
admits, is ineffable and incommunicable. He can neither convey his
knowledge to others nor can he convince others that his experience
was not purely subjective and illusory. Further, the mystic’s
Absolute is static and unchanging. Time is reduced to a mere
illusion. But the world of our experience is continuously in a flux.
What is then the source of change if God is outside the stream of
time? The mystic has no plausible answer to such a question.
Perhaps a survey of the higher religions of the world (which
originally were the same deen received by the various Anbiya from
time to time) might enable us to get an answer to the question of the
nature and validity of religion. Unfortunately, this is not an easy
task. Formidable obstacles will have to be surmounted before we
can form a just estimate of the value of each of the adyaan. The lives
of most of the Rusul in the history of adyaan are shrouded in
obscurity, and even the keen eye of the historian can hardly
penetrate the mist that envelops their lives. Authentic facts about
their lives are hard to obtain and the problem is more complicated
by the tangle of myths that has been woven around them in the
course of centuries. Even patient historical research has, very often,
failed to separate fact from fiction. The result is that the accounts or
their lives are mostly hearsay or conjectural. What is worse, even
their teaching has not come down to us in its original form. We do
not know, for certain, when their so-called sayings were committed
to writing, and there is good reason to believe that the sacred books,
generally supposed to embody their teaching, have been tampered
with from time to time. It would seem that in the course of
successive editions many passages were excised and many were
interpolated. The teaching of the Rusul has certainly been preserved
in the scriptures but only in a distorted form. It is, therefore,
What is Religion 45