The Books Are Reminders

So the next object of faith is His books, kutubihi. There are books. There are dispensations. The books are dispensations from God, in which God explains to His creation what He wants them to understand about Him. So, from the Muslim perspective, every group has had this reminder. And it is interesting that it is called a reminder. These books are called reminders. The Torah was a reminder. The Gospel was a reminder. If the Vedic scriptures were revealed books originally, they were reminders. If Buddha was a prophet, he was a reminder — bringing people reminders, taking them back to their true nature, which is to understand God. The human being was created to understand God.

And God is the highest abstraction for the human being. We have nothing higher in terms of abstraction. The human being does have a concept of God. Even the atheist has a concept of God. So the intellect has the ability to conceptualise, really, that which cannot be conceptualised. It is paradoxical, but this is the power of the intellect. Someone once described the most sophisticated computer in the world, which has the same intelligence as a flatworm — and when this was called amazing, he said: that is not amazing. This is amazing. The human intellect is what is amazing. The human intellect is phenomenal in its capacity to imagine, to conceive, to conceptualise, to idealise. This is something very extraordinary. And the Muslims see it as a gift. The ʿaql is a gift. It is the crown of creation. And a gift should be used for that which it was intended, according to the Islamic tradition.

What about emotion? The intellect can be something that is clear, that is concise, that is unfeeling, insensitive. Here, again, one gets into definitions and semantics. From a Muslim point of view, the intellect is not really what is conceived in the West to be intellect. In the West, the intellect is really seen as this rational, analysing, critical faculty; the height of intellectual prowess is seen in the scientist, in a sense. Whereas from the Muslim point of view, the intellect relates really to perception, and compassion might be the necessary thing to be perceived. It is a broader understanding of intellect. In other words, the intellect really is that which sees things as they truly are. One teacher, asked what the intellect was, said that it is a light that God puts in the heart, by which people are able to see things as they truly are. So the intellect is an organ of perception. And if it perceives things as they truly are, then the emotive activity within the individual might be stimulated by the perception of something as it truly is. So if one sees somebody suffering, and one's intellect understands truly what that means, then empathy emerges. So that is part of the function of the intellect. So the intellect would be necessary to… Looked at in a tri-brain type of way, this comes up again with the nafs, below.