Such a trend of thinking is not approved by Islamic jurisprudence...

Such a trend of thinking is not approved by Islamic jurisprudence, for in spite of its concern about the intellectual aspects brought forth by the hadith: "An hour's contemplation is better than a year's adoration," it also believes that pious worship, no matter how deep, cannot totally fill man's self or occupy his leisure, nor can it attach him to the Absolute Truth in all his existence, for man has never been purely an intellect ... !

From this realistic and objective starting- point, rites in Islam have been based on both intellectual and sensous bases. The person per forming his prayers is practising by his intention an intellectual adoration, denying his Lord any limits, measurements, or the like.

For when he starts his prayer with "Allahu akbar (God is Great)", while taking at the same time the holy ka'bah as a divine slogan towards which he directs his feelings and movements, so that he lives worship by both intellect and feeling, logic and emotion, non-materialistically as well as intellectually.

The other trend goes to the extreme in the part related to the senses, changing the slogan to an idenity and the hint to reality, causing the worship of the symbol to substitute what the symbol really stands for, and the direction 70 towards the hint instead of the reality it points to; thus, the worshipping person sinks, in this manner or that, 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 change - through false intellectual stripping of the mat- ter - to 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 norms, smash- ing its idols and putting an end to all false gods, refusing to take any limited thing as a symbol for the True Absolute, God, the Glorified, or as a personification of Him.

But it deeply distinguish- ed between the meaning of the idol which it crushed and that of the qiblah it brought, which meaning conveying nothing more than a particu- lar geographical spot has been divinely favoured by linking it to prayer for the sake of satisfying the worshipper's aspect related to the senses.