Religion is and still remains the single greatest discovery of mankind in history. It was religion that midwifed the soul at its ignition, nurtured and cultivated it to the adolescent wave it stridently rides today.
Like the philosopher Ibn Khaldun theorised, human civilizations are indeed not any different from organic life, in that they are born, mature, experience the decline of old age and eventually die away. In adolescence, rebellion is natural as the subject transitions into a whole different world before completely being rid of the functional cluelessness of infancy. This is like the confluence of two mighty rivers – the violence is raw, and for a boat, there can be no heed to command and control at that juncture. To steady it, what you need is exactly what Euler did with the introduction of the imaginary number “i” to rationalise the square roots of negative numbers – the type humanity cannot yet conjure without input from the paranormal.
That was what religion set out to do for mankind at the ignition of the soul the day he was cast out of Eden. From the agony of helplessness and hopelessness, and with the complication of the pitch black terror of the unknown – a penalty of arrogance and the Original Sin, he was reduced to a vanquished silhouette that must rediscover itself through the humility of total submission.
As he walked his way back to God and Eden, that is, discovering the knowledge that was taken from him, he began building a ladder back up. That ladder had to be made of matter and must obey the dictates of primal reality – that was the birth of empiricism. It was religion that first conceived and articulated the extent of human weakness, and provided the specifications for the design of the vehicle back home – the mortal fear of the unknown, helplessness before nature. It is upon this proto-anthropological foundations the gear shift to empiricism was meditated and execution begun.
The theorems of science are all derived from activities of the supernatural spirit – the Qur’an says in 3:190, “Lo! In the creation of the heavens and the earth and (in) the alternation of night and day are tokens (of His Sovereignty) for men of understanding” – this was about the curiosity about the secrets of nature, or the Face of God, and from that emerged the imperative for a diversion to “matter”, the only thing that persists long enough for a reality to be built around it. Verse 191 identifies who these men of understanding are: “Men who celebrate the praises of Allah, standing, sitting, and lying down on their sides and contemplate the (wonders of) creation in the heavens and the earth, (With the thought): ‘Our Lord! not for naught Hast Thou created (all) this! Glory to Thee! Give us salvation from the penalty of the Fire.’”
Every material coup of human intellect, from mastering fire to the invention of the wheel and down to the race for the picture of reality pre-Big Bang through the String Theory is locked and loaded within these 79 odd words. Popular culture formally credits this pivot to the Copernican Revolution, so let’s go with that narrative on a provisional basis. That signified the first instance of institutional rebellion against religious canon, with a hypothesis that challenges the flat-earth theory advocated by most early intellectual civilizations – for obvious reason. There is a reason why Euclidean planes precede the Riemannian Sums of the Cartesian coordinate system even within the sequences of our education systems, so the fact that the earth transitioned from a 2D plane into a 3D solid amounts to nothing more than a nondescript natural sequence – never mind all the drama. It was not a case of freethinking, indulgent heresy. It is a matter of cause and effect, the journey to oneness with God. If you look, you will see, and what you see may not conform to your own vision of rectitude, nonetheless you would have closed some distance between you and God in an equation expressed as a function of a newfangled empiricism.
For the first men, the dream was no more than a land that was safe for basic habitation. And the security they had in mind was from incidents like marauders who pillage and enslave, and from resident evils that are beyond individual control. Now most people on earth can live their whole lives without such fears. And how was that solved? Through the invention of the society and the state, usually superintended by a king. That was what Abraham asked of the Lord in Qur’an 14:35, “My Lord, make this city one of peace and security…” and that was what was fulfilled by his progeny. The first accomplishment did not however take place in Makkah, but in the Levant with the ascension of David. All they did was band together and create a kingdom and a king to guarantee this security, actualising a dream reposed in the Face of God.
Another dimension of this security was the mitigation of natural disasters; droughts, earthquakes, plagues and whatnot. Humankind already possess viable options for the complete elimination of the prospects of famine occasioned by droughts and other meteorological and biological events. For the most part, human beings can also live quite comfortably in the shadow of active volcanoes and on sites known for volatile seismology confident they will not be caught unawares. In 2014, following a cholera outbreak, the Zamfara State governor claimed the people had incurred the wrath of God and should therefore observe penance as a remedy. I remember the dethroned emir of Kano Muhammadu Sanusi II giving him a public dressing down. Now, Shehi, the governor of Zamfara in 2014 was only talking in the language and from the perspective of the first men. To them, the solution was spiritual penance, but what Muhammadu Sanusi II wanted to hear were drastic measures taken to improve public hygiene and sanitation – empirical penance!
All these are deliverables of empirical intellect – but the inspiration is supernatural, through and through. Interestingly in the same Zamfara and contiguous territories there are a lot of people who still live with the fear of raiders today. And of course, we still have Somalia in the throes of a terrible famine today, Turkey and Syria are still reeling in the aftershocks of catastrophic quakes, and the COVID-19 scare is still fresh in our minds. These are clearly still problems, but they will be surmounted completely someday. They are already negligible compared to what the first men asked from their God and what their progeny delivered through empiricism in a remarkable polar regeneration.
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