When the Quraish of Makkah despaired from comprehending the Prophetic directive, they desired to seek out its discrepancies. They sought out learned Jews residing in Yathrib to help them unfold the mystery. As the tradition goes, the Jews asked the Quraish to question the Prophet regarding three things: the Soul, the Sleepers of the Cave and King Dhūl-Qarnain. The nature of these questions indicates the centrality of the soul in religious traditions.
The secular world rejects sacredness categorically, yet admits inability to say anything categorically—odd? Many of those that take science as religion and induction as revelation deny the soul, yet are epistemically idealistic and skeptic—how can one deny a thing when there is not a thing to deny? The postmodern world is liquid. Liquidity is the new spiritual sidekick of science. Although liquid itself, it wishes to make firm statements about things absolutely that it denies existing absolutely. Why is there so much confusion? Why does this all seem odd? It is odd because what the science-worshipper forgets is that the role of science is not to provide absolutes for even particulars, let alone absolutes for universals. Science deals with probability only.
It is for this reason that as a subscriber to a metaphysical world-view, this idea that one who admits he can say nothing about anything so avidly rejects the soul. The premise that the soul does not exist because we cannot see it is a fallacy of ‘personal incredulity’; not understanding or knowing something does not entail that it is untrue. “What is it that, when present in a body, makes it living? — A soul”, spake Socrates. It is deeply significant for us to uphold the truth of the soul. For Islam, the soul is a concept given to us in the Quran. The Quran is a revelation that was reported to us by way of mass transmission. So many reporters, both individually and collectively, reported it throughout every age; this affords us certainty in knowledge. One does not deny that a man called Jesus, upon him be peace, walked the earth. In the same way, one does not deny that the Quran is from a man called Muhammad, upon him be endless blessings and peace.
The Muslim does not doubt that there is a Maker for all that we know and do not know. An unmovable mover. We know Him through His creation. We employ all of the rational and spiritual arguments, from the teleological arguments of design and providence to the cosmological and contingency arguments, to satisfy our minds. We observe the life of the Prophet, upon him be endless blessings and peace, and see a perfect model. We see the mass-transmitted reports of his miracles, his character, and his teachings. This knowledge satisfies our minds and hearts that he was truthful. Once we employ all of these avenues in our reflection, we become sure that this man, his message, and his Maker are true. If this truthful and trustworthy man says that there is a soul—and if we are satisfied that he is a Prophet, then all that he says must be true—then by God, there is a soul. This route that we took to accepting the existence of the soul was not through speculative induction, rather by demonstrative deduction.
The reason for science's triumph today is not because it is factual and religion is fictional. Instead, it was due to an uneasy relationship between Science and the European Church. Perhaps a vivid, though unpleasant, display of this was the upset caused by Nicolaus Copernicus—and those that adopted his theory, most popularly Galileo—achieving the Church’s damnation. Anathematising the progressives was followed by official rebuttals from the Church and theologians, the likes of Spina, Tolosani, and Ingoli, to name a few. Despite every effort being exhausted by the clergy, the scientific avalanche was well underway—the genie was out of the bottle. A snowball effect grew from the renaissance to the Scientific revolution, out spinning into the enlightenment that gave birth to the modern Word. Quite an extraordinary happening.
Nevertheless, as amazing as the scientific revelation was, one must not overlook the epistemic nature of science; the speculative nature of inference based knowledge. For the metaphysician, its epistemic value stands beneath that of certainty achieved from deductive reasoning. Unfortunately, efforts from the likes of Popper and Kuhn—although correct in their treatment of the philosophy of science—have not found a home in what forms public opinion. Although, there is a democracy of knowledge, but not in an absolute sense, rather in a selective sense.
It is for this reason that we, armed with this understanding, stand firm that the soul does, indeed, exist, and we know it deductively. The nature of the soul is indeed quite unknown to us, but its ontological existence is verily known. It is not just a mental concept. Al-Ghazālī, mentions that the Rūh has an ontological and extra-mental existence which dwells in the heart. It vibrates life throughout the entire body. Some modern studies point to a particular heat that spreads from the heart and disappears at the time of death. However, this is still research in progress.
Despite what we say about the soul, Modernity has clawed deeply into the hearts of man uprooting memory of the soul; the memory of alastu bi rabbikum, when the soul was home and unburdened by the body. It is a world in which materialism stabs daily into the humanity of man and clouds over our economics and social structures. A material—survival of the fittest world-view—is what breeds the racist, the classist, and the sexist. It is the one who possesses knowledge of the soul that recognises that there is something beyond colour, social class, and gender. Therefore, knowledge of the soul is imperative for humanity to unweave itself from this web of the material and re-find that which makes humanity human.
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