ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Resurrection Judgement and the Hereafter Lesson Nine: The Sovereignty of the Spirit We are aware of two realities in our being: one the external compound that is our body, fully accessible to empirical science, and the other, consisting of thought and perception, love and affection, hatred, and conscience.

These cannot be considered as a mere series of sensory needs or bodily reactions; they are beyond the scope of empirical science and cannot be measured by material criteria. They represent realities that are both different from the material body and superior to it, being capable of dominating it.

For example, a person might be ready to die in the course of a hunger strike in order not to suffer the shame of servility at the very same time that biological forces are destroying his body and urging him to surrender and eat. In other circumstances, too, a person may be hungry, but he continues to fast. Here we have a perfectly concrete and observable case of an iron will sacrificing the body for the sake of an idea, an abstract ideal.

This is something that cannot be explained by the logic of materialism. Those who claim that man is simply a collection of physiological and material functions have to provide a serious and logical explanation of cases such as this. If I am nothing more than my material form, how is it possible that I should command my body and make it obey me? The answer, of course, is that there is a reality separate from the body and empowered over it.

The fact that the will can issue commands and establish a kind of inner dominion over man's various instincts and bodily aspects is a clear proof for the existence in man of a sublime, supramaterial element from which his will draws its power. The duality of these realities in man, and the dominance exercised by one of them over the other, points us to the existence of something higher than matter.

The Noble Qur'an proclaims: **“** By the soul and the One Who created it in perfection and inspired in it knowledge of good and evil deeds” (91:7-8). This means that man has been adorned with an essence which possesses perception and motion: it has perception because it has received inspiration, and it has motion because it is the origin of a series of deeds oriented either to piety and virtue or to corruption. What is this essence that is qualified by awareness and ability?

None of the parts of man's earthly body possess these properties.