Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 722
ATTEMPTS TO PHILOSOPHICALLY JUSTIFY. THE FINALITY OF NON-LAW-BEARING PROPHETHOOD remains the same perfect, unaltered, un-interpolated Book that it was fourteen hundred years ago. . T. HE SECOND justification in support of the Doctrine of. Absolute Finality relates to the idea of the intellectual maturity of man. The chief pr proponent of this view is no less a person than 'Allamah Iqbal claimed by some to be the greatest Muslim thinker of modern times. . This doctrine of maturity is based on the assumption that the Holy Quran was revealed at a time when man had finally reached the ultimate stage of his mental and intellectual maturity. As such, he stood in no further need of day-to-day guidance by any Divine personage as did his ancestors of earlier ages. A beautiful philosophy but how hollow and empty of substance it turns out to be under closer scrutiny. The very premise that man has matured enough to be able to draw his own conclusions and chart his own course of conduct from the principle teachings of a perfect religion is challengeable on many counts. . It should not be forgotten that at every stage of man's progress, he always considered himself to be at the summit of intellectual maturity. At every point in history, the generation which occupied it also considered itself to be at the pinnacle of human progress. Looking back from their vantage point, all previous generations must have appeared less mature and less advanced by comparison. Yet at no stage in the past has man behaved wisely enough to guide himself. Heads such as that of the Pharaoh's were always raised in defiance of Divine guidance. All such rebels rejected the prophets of their time with the same inflated ideas of their own importance. All repeated the same claim over and over again that they had matured to take care of their own affairs. Nonetheless, history proves each of them to be wrong. It is so naive therefore, to consider the contemporary age as the only one in which man has finally 680