Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 724
ATTEMPTS TO PHILOSOPHICALLY JUSTIFY. THE FINALITY OF NON-LAW-BEARING PROPHETHOOD destitution prevailing in the Muslim world and the tragedy of their lifeless existence becomes all the more pathetic. . Commit their survival to the maturity of their intellect and perform ablution for their funeral rites, ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust and earth to earth -- Amen!'. What misery! Why can modern intellectuals not understand that the purification of a religious society is a task which the mere existence of a Perfect Book cannot perform? Were it so, the followers of Islam must have retained an exemplary state of ideological unity. This unfortunately is farthest from the truth. . All that can be said here in defence of the late Dr 'Allamah Sir Muhammad Iqbal is that the idea of blocking the passage of Heavenly light with this balderdash did not originate from him. His mistake was to copy, rather blindly one must say, the great German philosopher Nietzsche. It was Nietzsche who had first employed the idea of the maturity of human mind in the modern age against any need of guidance from God. In fact, Nietzsche coaxed man to come to age and utilize his own faculties of five senses. . Overman, or superman, is Nietzsche's term for a man who reaches a stage of maturity where his senses are developed to the full. Such a man needs no God to guide him a God which according to him is no more than a conjecture. Such conjectures were born out of an imperfect faculty of reasoning during an age when man had not yet matured enough to become his own master. Now that man had attained maturity, he concluded in his book Thus spoke. Zarathustra* the symbolic oracle of the wisdom of. Nietzsche that there was no more need for holding onto conjectures. 682 * see footnote on Zoroaster in Zoroastrianism.