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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books The Rights of Women in Islam Part Four: Islam and Modernity The exigencies of the age: In the introduction to “Man and his Future”[^1] in which I investigated the subject of the greatness and then decay of the Muslims, I recognized that the causes of the decline of the Muslims could be examined under three headings: Islam, the Muslims, and external influences.

In that introduction, one of the twenty seven topics which I thought required to be studied and examined with this very topic, and I promised to publish a short book with the title: ‘Islam and the Demands of the Age’, and I had already collected a good deal of notes for it. In this series of articles, it is not possible to put all the subject matter that should be get forth in a book.

I shall, however, explain matters to the extent that I may enlighten the minds of the respected readers on this matter. The subject of religion and progress is one of those subjects which has been brought up in other religions much more than It has been for us Muslim. Many of the world’s intellectuals have abandoned religion on because they thought that religion and progress were incompatible.

They entertained the idea that having a religion entailed the discontinuance and stopping of, and struggling against, movement and change. In other words they considered religion to be fixedness, a monotony and solidification of existent forms and patterns. Nehru, the late Prime minister of India, had anti-religious beliefs, and adhered to no tradition or religion.

From his writings it transpires that the thing that he abhorred in religion was its dogmatic aspect and its quality of seeing everything in only one perspective. In his later years, Nehru felt that something was missing and wanting both in his own self and in the universe, and that this vacuum or gap could not be bridged except by a spiritual force.

Despite that feeling, he was afraid of being attached to religion, because of that very stagnancy and uni-perceptiveness which, according, to him, was there in every religion. An Indian journalist, a Mr. Karanjia (?), had an interview with Nehru towards the end of his life, and that was apparently the last occasion when Nehru gave expression to his view on general universal topics.