Issue 20 (October - December 1997)

The modern Western world-view is said to be founded almost entirely on materialistic notions excluding, even denying, the spiritual or metaphysical dimension of existence. This is a controversial point but many so-called intellectuals in the Muslim world who do no more than blindly imitate what the…

Introduction The main duty and purpose of human life is to seek understanding. The effort of doing so, known as education, is a perfecting process though which we earn, in the spiritual, intellectual, and physical dimensions of their beings, the rank appointed for us as the perfect pattern of crea…

Introduction In recent years, we have realized that the world's supplies of coal, gas and oil are limited. Nuclear power has been used as an alternative solution to fossil fuels. However, the use of nuclear power and fossil fuels incurred environmental problems so there is widespread public antipa…

The universe has been made in the form of a book, intelligible, so as to make known its Author. The book addresses man. The aim is to make him read the book and its parts, and respond with worship and thanks to the will of the Author. Man attains to that worship by uncovering, through scientific st…

Out of the three famous papers that Albert Einstein published in 1905, On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light explicitly stated the quantum hypothesis for electromagnetic radiation, and On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in Stationary Liquids Re…

For man this world is like a foreign land, a fearful ocean, where he flounders a whole lifetime among waves of anxiety. At every step and every station, he expects a dawn of hope to break; Morning begins with pains, evening comes with the hopes of union. Over and again, winds of mortality blow…

The Qur'an has four essential aims: explaining and proving Divine Existence and Unity, the Resurrection, Prophethood and Divine worship and justice. All its explanations and injunctions, and its accounts of the histories of previous peoples, are to establish those four principles in people's minds…

'In the creation of the heavens and the earth; in the alternation of night and day; in the sailing of the ships through the ocean for the benefit of mankind; in the water which God sends down from the sky and with which He revives the earth after its death, and dispersing over it all kinds of bea…

The second Caliph after the Prophet Muhammad, upon him be peace and blessings, 'Umar ibn al-Khattab has a world-wide reputation for justice and simple life-style despite ruling a very vast area stretching from Abyssinia to Caucasia and from Egypt to Afghanistan. Every year during the Hajj season he…

Recombinant DNA technology has not developed quickly. Only after decades of basic research and the accumulation of extensive knowledge did the current technology become feasible and available to the many scientists who now use it. It was the direct result of two previous revolutions in the biologic…

The nature of jinn Jinn are conscious beings charged with Divine obligations. The word jinn literally means something hidden or veiled from sight. As mentioned earlier (The Fountain No. 15), jinn are a species or kind of beings that cannot be seen with the naked eye, nor can we see them with tele…

Nasr al-Din Khodja is one of the most famous philosophers of humour in world history. His anecdotes, told over a vast area from Germany to Japan, contain lessons aiming to highlight a human defect or weak spot and thereby improve people's understanding of it and cure it. Nasr al-Din Khodja is known…