I don’t want to believe, I want to know

The above are the words of the great Carl Sagan. Almost everyone has associated his words with his belief that there was no God and religions were merely the creations of the human brain. Every faith asks its followers to believe without proof and that literally is the textbook definition of faith. But maybe the meaning of that phrase could be that the proof is not something the limited human capabilities and the enormous human frailties are fit to decipher. Human intelligence is limited regardless of how intellectually taller we find ourselves from the monkeys.

Going back to the words of Sagan, he might have intended them to mean exactly as people understood those words to be: to convey his aversion to faith and faith in science. But something similar happens to me every time I visit the mosque, especially on Fridays when the Imam gives a grand lecture where he encompasses culture, religion, politics, and so forth.

It is with deep sadness that I say this but those sermons are some of the most unintelligent, ludicrous and unhinged words I ever hear. I feel like I should put my hands on my ears and remove them only when it’s time for the Jamaat prayers. Sometimes I wonder if some non-Muslims walked in here with the intention of converting to Islam and if they heard the Imam give a speech, they would wonder if this is how unintelligent they would become if they converted to Islam.

We are told that we are the ashraful makhluqaat, meaning superior to all life forms because we have intelligence and these large brains that we carry. But then the Imam turns around and instills this idea that we should never question the teachings in Islam. How could both those ideas be true at the same time? I have asked the Imams and other scholars several questions that have been baffling me over a significant period of time. Some of those questions include the following:

Are there life forms on other planets and if there are, what’s their religion? When we say Allah Almighty sent Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) for the benefit of all humanity, which humanity? Because there were other human forms that came before us whose fossils we find every now and then, and what about the life forms on other planets? If mankind colonised another planet tomorrow, and let’s say Muslims also happen to be some of those astronauts, in which direction would they lay out their prayer rug? And when exactly was Adam born? I mean there have been several human species in the past, some of which lived on earth at the same time. Some of the human species that are now extinct include Homo Denisovans, Homo Erectus, Homo Neanderthals, and so forth. We are Homo Sapiens. Which human species was Adam?

The typical response to these and some of the other questions I ask is that I must talk to a scholar. Fair enough. But there is a problem. The scholars are scholars of Islam and Islamic history. The scholars of science are mostly Christians and Jews and they are also scholars only in science. They are not scholars of the Bible or the Torah. There is no Muslim who would be a scholar of the Holy Quran and also science and astrophysics or astrobiology. This is a wide gap that is crying to be filled with a scholar who possesses the best of both worlds.

Every time I mention the issue of climate change to some of my Muslim friends who may have read a science book in the form of textbooks in school and college, they say the world will come to an end one day and climate change may be the way Allah has planned for it to happen. It is this lack of interest to do serious thought and serious research both of Islam and of science that makes me want to hit them with some construction tool.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 14^th, 2024.

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