Minute with a Muslim #290 – Accounting For The Existence of Idolatry – an Islamic Theory of History

So people look around. And if you study religions, if you study it under kind of the rubric of world religions, then it's going to actually teach you certain theological commitments and a certain idea of history and a certain metaphysics, right? And it's not really very clear. They're not naming their kind of ideas that they're teaching you. So world religions, right, they're saying, Okay, well, we have, these are the religions that we find on Earth right now. Okay, we have Islam, and we have Christianity, and we have Judaism, and we have Buddhism, and we have this and that, and that cetera, et cetera. What are the message metaphysics behind organizing these sorts of communities are

these sorts of traditions in this way world religions, it gives you the sense that they are all equally valid, it gives you the sense that they are generated by human beings in the first place. And it gives you the sense that,

that human beings are the ones who get to kind of human experience is the ultimate criteria for what is religion and what isn't. Right? What is Islam while it's what Muslims do? Okay, well, who is a Muslim? Well, someone who believes in Islam, well, that's kind of circular, right? But that's kind of what is being implied.

Whereas a person of faith in general and a Muslim in particular, we have a different metaphysics when it comes to understanding how is it that these other faiths or traditions or communities exist, okay. And so we have rather than sort of an evolutionary model of history, which imagines that,

you know, people started believing in idolatry and kind of crude animism, and then evolved towards like, more sophisticated forms of polytheism. And then evolved after that to monotheism. Right. And that's kind of along the evolutionary model. We believe in the opposite, we believe in entropy, historical entropy, that when the Creator created the universe, that

the original creation was upon clear guidance when it came to understanding its role in the whole system, and who the creator was, and what was expected from the Creator. And then history is entropic after that, so it's constantly falling apart. Okay, like the room, everybody gives the example of entropy as like your bedroom. Okay, you you clean it? And then how easy? Is it that it gets dirty again, and disorganized? Well, the tendency is it for, for it to get disorganized, and then you have to actually input energy in order to put everything back in its proper place, right? Well, that's a similar sort of metaphor, let's say it's a useful metaphor to understanding kind of a

person of faiths understanding of history, and especially a Muslim person's understanding of history that we began at this point of, of monotheism, that that was the original teaching. That was the original authentic teaching from the Creator, because religion, for a person of faith is not something generated by me and you. It's something that is communicated by the Divine, that religion is how the divine wants us to be, how the divine wants us to interact with this world. How does the divine want us to regard the divine? Right? And we believe as people of faith that the divine entity gets to decide that not me, not you, not anybody here opinions, whatever, right? And so revelation

is this communication of what does the divine want from us, or for us, okay? And then

history is entropic, okay? So people fall away from that ideal. And then they require activation energy to be inserted, so that they come back up to that ideal that's prophethood, the divine sending prophets, and then people kind of come back around, and then the Prophet dies or he's killed or something happens, and then people fall off again, we kind of have this cycle, right, but we're moving perhaps like as we get closer to the day of judgment, because most people of faith believe in some sort of end, some sort of Day of Judgment. It gets more and more entropic, especially since as Muslims we believe that the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu sallam was the last prophet. So there's no

more cleaning up the room.

Right, the entropy is only going to continue. And maybe there's the Magette deed, right? There's the person who's like the reviver of the faith that comes every 100 years that kind of like cleans things up a little bit, but in general, that entropy is going to continue happening until things get worse and worse.

Until the day of judgment, which is why something like

progressivism, or a progressive idea of history is very alien, to people of faith and to Muslims, or at least orthodox Muslims in general. This kind of what I would call a delusion that we are just progressing more and more and more as we go on. More and more freedom, more and more prosperity, more and more happiness, more and more technology.

And people have a blind spot when they forget to acknowledge we have more and more disaster, more and more ecological turmoil more and more. Inequality, more and more.

hardship, right more and more poverty. And so, to a person who has a progressive theory of history or an evolutionary model of history, it's hard to reconcile these facts. It's hard to reconcile these things. At the same time, they have to account for the for the, for the failures as just blips in the system, right glitches in the program, you know, things that require even more progress, even more technology, even more freedom, in order to solve whereas a person of faith and as a Muslim, we say, no, no, no, these things are actually the cause of one another. This so called freedom that you're progressing in the freedom to do whatever I want, right, which is not freedom at all. It's

actually slavery to yourself, the freedom to

take any substance, do anything with my body, change my body into whatever I want it to be like, This is not. This is a useless definition of freedom. This is actually servitude, in the guise of freedom. And it is actually part and parcel of the ecological destruction that we find and the inequality that we find and the depression and the psychological fragility that we find