Issue 4 (October - December 1993)

Self-renewal is the first condition of survival. Those who cannot renew themselves when necessary face annihilation sooner or later, no matter how powerful they may be. Everything lives and continues to live through the effort of self-renewal. When renewal ceases-as it has ceased for a corpse-decom…

Mothers shall suckle children for two whole years, for those who desire to complete the suckling. It is for the father to provide for them and clothe them honourably. No soul is charged save to its capacity: no woman should suffer because of her child, nor any man because of his. The same respons…

How many people now know who Ibn Hazm, Al-Mu’tamid, Ibn Tufayl, Abu Ishaq al-Butruji were, or even where they came from? Most probably, not many. Yet these were among the most important scientists and thinkers of their age and lived in Al-Andalus. The year 1492 has long been a historical landmark…

People give different answers when asked what ‘intelligence’ means. Some say it means ‘knowing a lot’; others say ‘thinking quickly’; or ‘putting things together in a particular way’. Psychologists also differ on the definition of intelligence. But it is agreed that among the important constituents…

More than a billion human beings on this planet are chronically hungry: every 24 hours some 40,000 die directly or indirectly from lack of food; a child starves to death every 2.5 seconds. In short, more people die every two years from hunger than were killed in the First and Second World Wars…

Islam, in the tenth century, was the main religion, or at least, the religion of the majority of peoples in an area covering more than half of the civilized world stretching over three continents from the Pyrenees and Siberia in West and North Europe to the farthest end of Asia, up to China and New…

The image (rather than the word) has come into power as a result of technological possibilities not available before the second half of this century. First Western cinema and then Western television have been used to embed particular negative images of non-Westerners in the minds of their ever-grow…

One a clear night having fixed their hearts upon the Light they set out for eternity. And wherever the journey led, they carried their gift of radiance   Gleams of Beauty unfading so entranced their souls, they heard at night in their dreams angels singing of bliss and the music of other…

In the April 1992 issue of Scientific American, Allan C. Wilson and Rebecca L. Cann published a study of DNA samples taken from people around the world. They write: ‘Our genetic comparisons convince us that all humans today can be traced along maternal lines of descent to a woman who lived about 20…

Fifth Remark Man has been sent to this world as a guest with a special responsibility, and endowed with important potentials. He has been assigned important duties corresponding to these potentials, and strongly urged to carry out those duties and gravely threatened if he fails to do so. In order…

It is barely three and a half decades since the Soviet Sputnik entered orbit in 1957. It was taken that space, long regarded as the last frontier, began to be thought of as the newest area of human dominion. A glance at the history of the ‘space age’ reveals that it was proclaimed from the outset t…

The long corridor with a hole at the end of it-a doorway, of course-made him feel uneasy. The sound of his fellow-students’ footsteps, their talking to each other, their smart, white coats, was somewhat reassuring. Selim kept up with them and entered the room. It was spacious but darkened by the s…

The ideology of Western civilization claims the concept of human rights as its invention. In fact, Islamic Law had long since recognized basic human rights and established principles and safeguards which have only recently been incorporated in various international conventions and declarations. The…

Those who put this question imply: ‘Since we believe in God and His Prophet, we will go to paradise. But those who were born and live in non-Islamic countries do not benefit from the Divine Light and Guidance, so they will go to Hell’. The question is a debating ploy, claiming on the one hand a gre…

Hibernation or ‘winter sleep’ how and why it happens is one of the mysteries of nature that has fascinated observers since the time of Aristotle. It occurs in some form, to some degree, in all vertebrates except fish, if we define hibernation, for the time being, as the act of resting in a dormant…