Introduction to the Study of The Holy Quran — Page 19
19 God, as it were, the duty of planning for his salvation. The result was that the very religion which thought that the sacrifice of God was necessary for the salvation of man began to teach that for the moral advance of man the guidance of God was not necessary. We have a complete historic record only of the Israelite religion. Therefore we have taken our example from Israelite history. When a question relates to the end which a process of evolution seeks, we can answer it only by reference to historical records complete in all their stages. The history of the Israelite religion is witness to the fact that the human mind kept on growing for a long time. It traversed stage after stage but did not seem to reach any final end. Similarly, the history of the world is witness to the fact that the human mind has advanced through many periods of social progress, but has still failed to reach the conception of a large human brotherhood. Both lines of evidence seem to point to the fact that the human mind, like the human body, has had to pass through many evolutionary stages. But until the advent of Islam it did not reach any kind of finality in spiritual advance. In passing through different stages of social advance it was not able to rise above the limitations of nation or race and the idea of human equality and human brotherhood did not take root. It passed through many different periods of culture, but did not reach any satisfactory Law, a Law for all mankind. The Mosaic teaching no doubt made an attempt to bring together social and cultural ideals, but after a time it began to fail. It began to fail because what it had offered was not the last word on the subject. Jesus no doubt tried to make a change, but the change did not prove enough, and was not able to stand the tide of rebellion in which the human mind had then become involved. All that survived of the teaching of Jesus is the saying attributed to Christianity that the Law is a curse. This saying, taken in the form in which it occurs, offends the good sense of every thinking person. Unless it is suitably interpreted, the saying is itself a curse because it only serves to turn man away from God and to free him from His guidance. Therefore it seems that the end which the evolution of the human mind was seeking had not yet come. The process and stages through which human civilisation and human culture had passed pointed to the fact that civilisation and culture are subject to the same law of evolution to which the human body was for long subject. It seems certain, therefore, that human civilisation and culture were to attain to an ultimate perfection in the same way in which the human body, after a long process of evolution, had attained to an ultimate perfection of form; and this alone indicates the need of Islam in the presence of other religions, the need of a religion which should provide an end to the evolution of human culture, an end which is embodied in the teaching of the Quran. A Pertinent Question The third question, an affirmative answer to which establishes the need of the Quran, is: Had the earlier books come to suffer from defects which called for a new book, which was the Quran?