The Spirit of Muslim Culture - Excerpts

... the finality of the institution of prophethood... The abolition of priesthood and hereditary kingship in Islam, the constant appeal to reason and experience in the Quran, and the emphasis that it lays on Nature and History as sources of human knowledge, are all different aspects of the same idea of finality
The idea (finality), however, does not mean that mystic experience, which qualitatively does not differ from the experience of the prophet, has now ceased to exist as a vital fact. Indeed the Quran regards both "Anfus" (self) and "Afaq" (world) as sources of knowledge. God reveals His signs in inner as well as outer experience, and it is the duty of man to judge the knowledge-yielding capacity of all aspects of experience
... Inner experience is only one source of human knowledge. According to the Quran there are two other sources of knowledge - Nature and History
It is a mistake to suppose that the experimental method is a European discovery... Europe has been rather slow to recognize the Islamic origin of her scientific method. But full recognition of the fact has at last come. Let me quote one or two passages from Briffault's Making of Humanity
"... It was under their successors at the Oxford School that Roger Bacon learned Arabic and Arabic Science. Neither Roger Bacon nor his later namesake has any title to be credited with having introduced the experimental method. Roger Bacon was no more than one of the apostles of Muslim science and method to Christian Europe; and he never wearied of declaring that a knowledge of Arabic and Arabic Science was for his contemporaries the only way to true knowledge... The experimental method of the Arabs was by Bacon's time widespread and eagerly cultivated throughout Europe"
In the history of Muslim culture... we find that both in the realms of pure intellect, and religious psychology, by which term I mean higher Sufism, the ideal revealed is the possession and enjoyment of the Infinite
Devine life is in touch with the whole universe on the analogy of the soul's contact with the body. The soul is neither inside nor outside the body... Yet its contact with every atom of the body is real
It is one of the most essential teachings of the Quran that nations are collectively judged, and suffer for their misdeeds here and now
The unity of human origin... As a social movement the aim of Islam was to make the idea a living factor in the Muslim's daily life, and thus silently and imperceptibly to carry it towards fuller fruition.

The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam

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