In the verse 22 - 23 of the same chapter it says...

In the verse 22 - 23 of the same chapter it says: "And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: " [^1] According to this conception of man, God, knowledge and disobedience, God wants that man should not be aware of good and evil. The Forbidden Tree is the tree of knowledge.

Man attains knowledge only if he rebels against God's command (disobeys the teachings of religion and the Prophets), but for that very reason he is driven out of God's Heaven. On the basis of this conception all evil insinuations are those of knowledge, and reason is the insinuating Devil. In contrast, we learn from the Holy Qur’an that Allah taught all names (realities) to Adam and then ordered the angels to prostrate themselves before him.

The Devil was condemned because he refused to prostrate himself before the vicegerent of Allah, who was aware of the realities. The Prophetic traditions have told us that the Forbidden Tree was that of avarice, greed and such like things, that is the things related to the animality of Adam, not to his humanity. The insinuating Devil always insinuates what is against reason and what answers the base desires. It is concupiscence and not reason that represents the Devil within man.

Contrary to all this what we find in the Book of Genesis is really very amazing. It is this conception which has divided the European history of culture during the past 1500 years into two distinct periods, namely the age of faith and the age of science, and has placed science and faith in opposition to each other. In contrast the Islamic history of culture is divided into the period of advancement of knowledge and faith and the period in which both of them declined together.

We Muslims should keep ourselves away from the wrong conception which has caused an irreparable loss to knowledge, faith and humanity, and must not blindly regard the contradiction between knowledge and faith as an indisputable fact.

We now propose to make an analytical study of this question and see whether each of these two facets of humanity exclusively belongs to a distinct period or age, and whether man in every age is condemned to be only a semi-man and always to suffer the evils ensuing either from ignorance or from infidelity. As you will see every faith is inevitably based on a particular way of thinking and a special conception of cosmos.