By the same token...

By the same token, deficiency and backwardness are the results of ignorance and the complacent and self-deceiving notions of being perfect. But in what does human perfection lie? What is the path to attaining to perfection? There are divergent views regarding this question. We will limit ourselves to three views in addition to Islam’s assessment of each of them. The Ideology of Power According to this view, the perfect human is the strong human.

The stronger the human being is and the more firmly he controls his surroundings, the closer he is to perfection. Darwin’s theory of evolution—known as “competition to survive”—is based on this notion. For the exponents of this view, knowledge is valuable only in so far as it enables the human being to strengthen his grip on his environment, thus they exploit…