ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam Lecture III: The Conception of God and the Meaning of Prayer We have seen that the judgement based upon religious experience fully satisfies the intellectual test. The more important regions of experience, examined with an eye on a synthetic view, reveal, as the ultimate ground of all experience, a rationally directed creative will which we have found reasons to describe as an ego.

In order to emphasize the individuality of the Ultimate Ego the Qur’an gives Him the proper name of Allah, and further defines Him as follows: ‘Say: Allah is One: All things depend on Him; He begetteth not, and He is not begotten; And there is none like unto Him’ (112:1-4). But it is hard to understand what exactly is an individual.

As Bergson has taught us in his Creative Evolution, individuality is a matter of degrees and is not fully realized even in the case of the apparently closed off unity of the human being.1 ‘In particular, it may be said of individuality’, says Bergson: ‘that while the tendency to individuate is everywhere present in the organized world, it is everywhere opposed by the tendency towards reproduction.

For the individuality to be perfect, it would be necessary that no detached part of the organism could live separately. But then reproduction would be impossible. For what is reproduction but the building up of a new organism with a detached fragment of the old? Individuality, therefore, harbours its own enemy at home.’2 In the light of this passage it is clear that the perfect individual, closed off as an ego, peerless and unique, cannot be conceived as harbouring its own enemy at home.

It must be conceived as superior to the antagonistic tendency of reproduction. This characteristic of the perfect ego is one of the most essential elements in the Quranic conception of God; and the Qur’an mentions it over and over again, not so much with a view to attack the current Christian conception as to accentuate its own view of a perfect individual.3 It may, however, be said that the history of religious thought discloses various ways of escape from an individualistic conception of the Ultimate Reality which is conceived as some vague, vast, and pervasive cosmic element,4 such as light.

This is the view that Farnell has taken in his Gifford Lectures on the Attributes of God.