BELIEF IN THE UNSEEN (AL-GHAYB)

BELIEF IN THE UNSEEN (AL-GHAYB)

The contemporary intelligentsia, disciples of jāhilīyya, refuse to acknowledge anything called the Unseen (al-ghayb) in their historical analysis, because their academic culture will not admit God. They lay out various social, political, and economic factors behind history, emphasizing that factor given most prominence in their particular school of thought. Hence, communists focus on economics, private ownership, the means of production, and class relations in the production sector in order to define the progress of the class struggle. Idealists focus on those philosophies and intellectual trends that provide politics with its ideological basis. And so on and so forth. Believers, by contrast, who believe that God decrees and measures out all events (al-qaḍā› wa-l-qadar), do take into consideration the outward chain of cause-and-effect – knowing full well that their analysis would be incomplete without it – but they also look at God’s absolute dominion over His creation. The believers appreciate that the Almighty can bring about whatever He wills, with or without the normal laws of nature. Most of all, their worldview posits that the physical degeneration of the natural and social world is nothing but a reflection of man’s spiritual turpitude: “Corruption has appeared on the land and in the sea as a consequence of what people’s hands have wrought; and so will He let them taste the consequence of some of their doings, so that they might turn to Him.” [30:41]

 https://siraj.net/ar/books/Reflections-on-Islamic-Law-and-History/pages/46