Each Generation a Watered-Down Version

And then, finally, the point of all of that is that time does come to an end. The human condition does come to an end. And that is how Islam contextualises history: that there is an end, and it is imminent. Again, for the individual person, the imminence of the end of time is always related to their own personal death.

But there is another important idea within the Islamic tradition, and that is that each generation will be less; that they will be fulfilling the idea of this dimensional Islam — of īmān, Islam and iḥsān — not as well as the previous generation. There is an idea that each generation is a watered-down version. There are periods of renewal historically: the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) did say that there would be renewers every hundred years or so, people who come and renew. But the idea is that it is not the same. Traditional Muslims anyway do have an idea that it is not so much progress, but quite the opposite.

One of the things René Guénon pointed out about the rapid speed of progress is that one of the things we forget is that increasing acceleration means going down, not up. That is the idea of the modern world. And there is a lot of questioning now of the wisdom of that idea. Bacon introduced the idea of progress, because prior to that the Christians did not have that idea within their worldview — that we are progressing. They had quite a different idea.

Ultimately, from the Muslim worldview, and also from other traditional worldviews, the same ethical issues that Plato is positing through Socrates — what is justice? how do we lead a good life? what is a good life? — these are things in which we have not come any closer to really progressing, in terms of our ethical nature, in terms of our spiritual nature. Although we have massive outward technology, able to do extraordinary things — bring the dead back to life, move mountains quite literally — despite that, we are still dealing with basic human tendencies such as greed, lust, envy, slothfulness. It is hard to get away from those. And in some ways we are less aware of our own negative tendencies than perhaps people before us were, and more filled with our own sense of hubris and our own sense of power.

Although certainly the twentieth century is a century that has created a lot of disillusionment. We have killed a hundred and eighty million people this century alone in wars between human beings. And it is interesting that they were not religious wars; they were ideological wars. Because one of the criticisms of religion is often: well, look how many people died in the name of religion. Well, look how many people died in the name of communism. We forget that we are dealing with a human species. Religion is not the problem; man is the problem. And if there is a humanising factor in the human condition, it has been religion. Religion is what has introduced into the human being concepts like making beauty, concepts like becoming conscientious; charity, caritas. All of these things are coming out of religious traditions. And the Muslims always say, in the end: God knows best.

A word is due here about the approach taken throughout. It adheres to the teaching of Islam, and it is a believing approach: it takes a more devotional path than some of the other, academic approaches do. But it tries hard not to preach at people — preaching being something it is hard to like being on the receiving end of. If any of it has come off as that, or if anything said has in any way offended people, or their tradition, or their own beliefs, that was not the intention, and the reader is asked to excuse it graciously.