The other trend goes to the extreme in the part related to the senses...

The other trend goes to the extreme in the part related to the senses, changing the slogan to an identity, and the hint to reality, causing the worship of the symbol to substitute what the symbol really stands for, and the direction towards him instead of the reality it points to; thus, the worshipping person sinks, in one way or another, in shirk and paganism.

Such a trend totally annihilates the spirit of worship and it stops its function as a tool linking man and his civilized march to the True Absolute, converting it to a tool for linking him to false absolutes, to symbols which changed-through false intellectual stripping of the matterto an absolute. Thus, false worship becomes a veil between man and his Lord, instead of a link between both of them.

Islam has rejected such a trend because Islam convicted paganism in all its forms, smashing its idols and putting an end to all false gods, refusing to take any limited object as a symbol for the True Absolute, God, the Glorified, or as a personification of Him.

But it deeply distinguished between the meaning of the idol which it crushed and that of the Qibla it brought, whose meaning conveys nothing more than a particular geographic spot to have been divinely favoured through linking it to prayers for the sake of satisfying the worshipper's aspect related to the senses.

Paganism is really nothing but a deviated attempt to satisfy such an aspect, and Islamic jurisprudence has been able to correct it, providing a straight path in harmonizing between the worship of God, as being dealing with the Absolute Who has neither limit nor personification, and the need of man who is composed of feeling and intellect to worship God by both of his feeling and intellect! Previous…