Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 432
CHIRALITY OR SIDEDNESS IN NATURE. Muslims are required to always use the right hand for touching and holding clean things, while the rest are left to the left hand. Hence when a Muslim shakes hands with others he is expected to do so with full confidence that he is offering a clean hand. . Instructions such as these clearly indicate that the concept of sidedness in religious and social behaviour were purposefully incorporated in Islam. It is also in this sense that the prophecies concerning the future of mankind use the terms 'rightist' and 'leftist'. Hence the political and economic division in the contemporary age, based on the rightist philosophy or the leftist philosophy, tally clearly with the Quranic prophecies regarding the future of mankind. . Why is it that it is Islam alone which emphasizes sidedness so strongly while other Divinely revealed religions do not even mention it?. In answer to this question, it should be well understood that according to the Quran, the age of all other religions had come to an end with the dawn of Islam. . Polarity and sidedness are the trends which had not yet been born in human affairs in the age prior to it. It was only. Islam which was to address the people of an age where polarity and sidedness were to become common coinage in matters of expression. . Looking at it from this angle, the evidence of sidedness in day-to-day behavioural matters was in a way prophetic, that man was about to be ushered into that advanced age when sidedness would acquire new depths and new dimensions. This is exactly what has come to pass. . Little did the man of that age know that not only in matters of political and economic divisions, but also in the domain of science, sidedness would acquire such importance as could never be imagined in any previous era. 421