Mathematics’ Imperious Sway

by Abdassamad Clarke

Introduction
Pure Mathematics
Constitutionalism and the Declaration of Independence
Orientalism
Modernism: al-Maududi, a case study
Conclusion

Introduction

Mathematics has affected the age we live in in ways that most people are unaware of. Indeed, mathematics from having been the handmaiden of philosophy and something intellectually analogous to the physical exercises and training undertaken before combat and battle (in Arabic: riyadiyat), has come to signify the sole means by which certainty can be attained. It has expanded its influence to include all the sciences and philosophy, whether or not scientists and philosophers realise it. One aspect of that domination is quite evident to most of us: it is the quantitative approach to phenomena. Another aspect lurks in the shade but has arguably had far greater impact than the quantitative approach: It is this highly theoretical and abstract aspect of pure mathematics that I wish to treat here in this brief essay.

I will first outline this process theoretically and then quickly move to three areas in which the extrapolation of this way of thinking, without the necessary rigour that mathematics ordinarily displays, has had unexpected consequences the ramifications of which daily affect everyone on the planet from the remotest mountain tops to the depths of the huge megalopolises of the age.

First, we will look at what is one of the foundation documents of the modern age and thus a watershed in history itself: The [US] Declaration of Independence.

Second, I will look at the discipline of orientalism, ostensibly the study of Eastern cultures, but, as it affects many today most potently, the study of Islam in an apparently ‘objective’ academic manner.

Third, I will examine, the impact of this approach on just one figure from within the Muslim community whose writings and work have extensive influence far beyond his native India, Abu’l-A’la al-Maududi (September 25, 1903 – September 22, 1979). Disconcertingly, Maududi is regarded both as a modernist and as a fundamentalist, depending on whom one consults.

The reason for examining these three issues is that, in my view, they have all had deleterious consequences of exceptional gravity.

The paradox inherent in the Declaration of Independence and every other declaration of human rights has resulted in the democratic order proclaiming the highest idealism while presiding over our descent into the collapse of our societies and of the global world order. The danger in that criticism is to ascribe a causative nature to democracy, whereas it is probably symptomatic. Criticism of democracy by no means entails that one espouses totalitarianism, but all of that is probably beyond the remit of this article.

Orientalism, in its worst aspects, is the projection into our present age of ancient European prejudices about Islam. Of course, one does not gainsay its considerable achievements of bringing academic rigour to the study of some disciplines. Nevertheless, the maintenance of this age-old prejudice introduces a dangerous element into global politics that has pitched and is pitching the world into conflicts that no sane person wants to see get out of control.

Al-Maududi and his ilk are simply responsible for the introduction of banking and finance into the body of the Muslim community, thus allowing the extension of the globalised banking entities there, and granting them access to the previously inaccessible wealth of the Muslims. Indeed, it is with this element that we are perhaps unveiling the causative factor behind the previous two issues, but again that is a matter that is beyond the capacities of this article to deal with.

And so we turn to our study.

Pure Mathematics

Pure mathematics uses five main elements: definition, axiom, hypothesis, proof and theorem.

Definitions are created to ensure that the terms and concepts being used in the arguments are clear.

The axiom is a concept which is so obviously true one does not have to prove it; it is ‘self-evident’. Sometimes axioms are also called postulates. Axioms are propositions that are not and cannot be proven within the system based on them. Based on the axioms, mathematicians make hypotheses or propositions.

A hypothesis is an unproven idea, a jump in the dark. Having done that, the mathematician tries to prove it.

If he furnishes a proof for it by deductive reasoning, it is called a theorem. A theorem is not the same as the saying, “O, but it’s only a theory,” by which is meant ‘a hypothesis’.

Using this method, European mathematicians set about making a logical system out of the mathematics that already existed. They were doing the same thing that Euclid had done with geometry. By the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, they had built a very impressive building of pure mathematics. The mathematics of the preceding epochs was inextricably wed to physics and astronomy. Gradually the discipline called Pure Mathematics, which had no apparent practical uses, began to appear.

Remember that they had originally set out to know the mind of God. It is like many human endeavours. Along the way they built a wonderful house of rigorously proved mathematics and they forgot God. They forgot the truth that Allah “creates you and what you make.”¹ They said, “We made this building.” Allah says, “If only you had said when you entered your Jannah (garden), ‘It is what Allah wills! There is no strength but by Allah‘.”² Imam Malik said that this is a dhikr to be said upon entering one’s house, because in Arabic a man’s Jannah is his house.  This is the ayah about the man who owned a wonderful garden, but who did not see the hand of Allah in his own work. Scientists didn’t think of themselves as discovering the order that is in Allah’s creation, but they thought they themselves had built an amazing science.

One day, the French mathematician Laplace presented his newest, most extraordinary work, Celestial Mechanics, to the emperor Napoleon. The emperor said, “Monsieur Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe and have never even mentioned its Creator.” Laplace is said to have answered, “I have no need of this hypothesis.”³ In other words, he assumes that the existence of God is just a hypothesis and this has paved the way to further unfold the unfortunate thinking of the mathematicians.

It was almost precisely at this moment in the history of mathematics that the cracks in the building began to show.

Allah says, “The building they built will not cease to be a source of doubt in their hearts unless their hearts are cut to shreds. Allah is All-Knowing, All-Wise.”⁴ They thought they had built a house which was truth, i.e. completely sure and certain knowledge. Then they discovered geometries other than Euclid’s which are equally correct mathematically. They cannot both describe reality, i.e. be true. That means mathematical theorems can be mathematically correct but not necessarily true. This was a tremendous blow to the emerging religion of mathematical science. Worse was to come.

Mathematicians found that the simplest things were not really proved clearly and without doubt. Euclid’s geometry was not as sure as they had at first thought. Some of the basic axioms he used were not so clear, and he used others without saying that he was doing so. Subsequent work based on Euclid or on his methods was also not so sure.

This was a great catastrophe. Mathematicians had to go back to the beginning and try to prove again a lot of what they had done. It was as if, having built a really wonderful skyscraper, the builder discovered that there were very serious flaws in the foundations. No one would want to demolish the building and start again, and neither did the mathematicians.

Yet more serious mistakes were found. In the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead wrote a book called Principia Mathematica. Russell, a philosopher, logician and mathematician, was trying to arrive “at a perfected mathematics which should leave no room for doubts.”⁵ Sceptics said that there is no absolute truth. Russell replied, “Of such scepticism mathematics is a perpetual reproof; for its edifice of truths stands unshakable and inexpugnably to all the weapons of doubting cynicism.” This book is in three volumes and even for a mathematician it is an almost completely unreadable attempt to prove all of mathematics logically from sure foundations.

Russell said later, “I wanted certainty in the kind of way in which people want religious faith. I thought that certainty is more likely to be found in mathematics than elsewhere… But as the work proceeded, I was continually reminded of the fable about the elephant and the tortoise. Having constructed an elephant upon which the mathematical world could rest, I found the elephant tottering, and proceeded to construct a tortoise to keep the elephant from falling. But the tortoise was no more secure than the elephant, and after some twenty years of very arduous toil, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing more that I could do in the way of making mathematical knowledge indubitable.”⁶ The work had failed. It was one of many blows to mathematics as a body of sure knowledge beyond doubt.

You might ask why this should matter. Most people react to pure mathematics with a commonsense, “Let’s get on with the real world.” However, science is increasingly mathematical. If maths has holes, then science has holes – big holes. Moreover, the effect of mathematics is much further-reaching than one would have imagined.

This axiomatic approach had already pervaded all of the sciences and created new ones, although many of the new ones, such as economics, were regarded as pseudo-sciences when they first appeared, as they are in reality. An example of how far it has gone is the idea of constitutional government one of whose foundation documents is the Declaration of Independence of the United States.

Constitutionalism and the Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence begins, “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” i.e. these are the axioms. This approach is mathematical without involving numbers or calculation. However, one does need to scrutinise each ‘truth’, which, even though it seems on the surface very wonderful and idealistic, contains a great number of contradictions.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, …

Of course, they are largely equal in having two eyes each, two legs, hearts, livers, love and hate, and in other matters, but are they equal in wealth, intellect, talent, beauty, social standing, strength, wisdom or any other thing? If the equality does consist in having two eyes and other physical attributes does this mean that invalids, crippled people and physically impaired people are less equal, an idea abhorrent to modern people?

…that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, …

How did their Creator endow them with these rights? Where is this written? In what revelation? Has the Creator revealed that in Christianity, Judaism, Islam or in any other historical revelation? Or is the writer of this declaration a new prophet with a new revelation?

…that among these are Life,…

Life is a fact rather than a right. Disease, natural disaster and accident may terminate it. People who haven’t read the Declaration of Independence or who do not agree with it may put an end to it.

…Liberty, …

Where does liberty end? Am I at liberty to take my neighbour’s life? Obviously not, due to the fact that he has the “inalienable right” to life. But am I at liberty to sleep with his wife or his daughter if I so wish and if we all think that we are not going to hurt anybody? Perhaps my neighbour even agrees to that. If I am not so at liberty, why not?

…and the pursuit of Happiness.

If my pursuit of happiness makes someone else miserable, then what? What happens if I do not want to be happy? Perhaps I would like to be miserable. For example, perhaps I want to accumulate a great deal of money and be resented, feared and disliked by large numbers of people, like the late Howard Hughes. Did Genghis Khan want happiness? Did he want to be liked? Had he the inalienable right to do what he did and to seek his fulfilment? Did he care whether he had or not?

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, …

Here the passive verb “are instituted” cleverly avoids confronting the question “who institutes them and how?”

…deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. …

How do the governed show their consent? This is not a small problem. Is it the consent of all of the governed, or most of them. How do ‘most of them’ get defined – we have not even broached the problematic nature of statistics in this work. What questions do you ask them to find their consent?

…That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, …

What defines its being “destructive of these ends” and who is to decide that it is so? Who are the people? If I disagree with the majority am I then not one of “the people”? If the majority are ignorant and one person is knowledgeable, must he bow to their will? If he knows that some activity is suicidal or destructive and the majority do not care and indeed rather like it, must he be silent?

…and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

“Seem most likely” was what the Bolsheviks thought when they formed the Soviet State, and that resulted in almost eighty to a hundred million dead people in Russia, China, Cambodia, etc., and an incalculable amount of human misery.

As you see, whatever seems axiomatic to one person is not always going to be so to another. In fact the people who drew up the above document were as aware of all of the above objections as we are, but they thought that it was only a matter of filling in the details, e.g. by defining the people as “the majority of the people” as shown in elections, etc. This leads to the great complexity of detail involved in constitutional government, to the plethora of paragraphs and sub-clauses, amendments, plebiscites, referendums, etc.

Orientalism

Another example of the spread of this technique into other areas than mathematics, and perhaps the most anti-scientific and dishonest example of which we can think is the contentious subject of orientalism. We use this term here to refer to western studies of Islam. Orientalism too contends that it is a scientific discipline. However, the Muslims have largely failed in dealing with it because they deal piece-meal with its multitudinous propositions, whereas what should be dealt with is its dishonestly unstated axiomatic base. Euclid and subsequent mathematicians stated all their definitions of terms and their axioms; orientalists state none of these things.

For example, what is perhaps the bible of orientalism is the Leiden-published Encyclopaedia of Islam. This is a distressing and ugly, but apparently erudite, set of tomes. It is the clearest evidence of the entirely unscientific axiomatic base of orientalism – we seek refuge with Allah from the evil of it and His forgiveness for mentioning it – that is that the Messenger of Allah was a perfectly ordinary human being who did not receive revelation but compounded the entire edifice of Islam from fragments of poorly comprehended jewish and christian materials, and that where it disagrees with the Qur’an, the Biblical literature is always decisive. They insist that subsequent Islamic thought elaborated Islam on this basis, and added into it stolen pieces of Buddhism and neo-Platonism, etc., etc. The proof that these axioms are false is that they have never been clearly stated as being the axioms and the premises of orientalism. An axiom, to be a correct basis for a scientific study, must be so self-evidently true that it needs no proof. This ‘axiom’ is a mere prejudice, and at best a proposition which is impossible to substantiate and which, if stated as a proposition, would be easily refutable.

If these were not the axioms of orientalism we should expect at least an equal amount of literature examining propositions based on the opposite axioms, i.e. that Muhammad, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, is the Messenger of Allah and the seal of the Prophets and Messengers, and that the Qur’an is the revealed Speech of Allah confirming that which came before it of other revelations to other prophets and messengers and clarifying the many distortions to be found in other scriptures. However, the sceptical orientalist regards this as merely a proposition which has to be proved, whereas the other, he thinks, self-evidently true and needs no proof, only needing subsidiary propositions merely to fill in the details in this prejudicial picture.

Thus, many naive Muslims strive mistakenly within the academic nexus thinking that orientalism is a rather well-meaning judaeo-christian affair which just needs to be guided aright. They combat bravely various sub-theses of this monstrous lie, without ever confronting the central thesis, the deceitfully unmentioned axioms.

Modernism: al-Maududi, a case study

Within Islam too, this mathematical approach has found a home. Muslims who believe in deriving shari’ah from ‘Islamic principles’ are following a mathematical method. Thus, the ‘principles’ are axioms, and are not the same as the traditional usul – ‘roots’ or ‘sources’. These latter are the sources of the din – among which are the Book, the Sunnah, and the consensus of the people of knowledge, etc. By following ‘Islamic principles’ one very often arrives directly at a result that contradicts the well-known shari’ah of Islam.

Further examples can be seen in the work of Abu’l-A’la Maududi, founder of the Jama’at al-Islamiya in India and Pakistan. Some of his work is a classic case of someone who follows this method.  We take a few examples at random from only one of his books, The Islamic Way of Life, to illustrate this approach.

In Chapter one, “The Islamic Concept of Life”, Maududi says, “There are certain postulates which should be understood and appreciated at the very outset.” Postulate is another term for axiom, so here Maududi has clearly set out his intention to create a new type of Islam based on this mathematical approach, rather than on the traditional usul.

Under “Basic Postulates” Abu’l-A’la includes as number one, “Man has also been invested with freedom of will and choice and the power to use the resources of the world in any manner he likes. In short, man has been given a sort of autonomy while being appointed God’s vicegerent on the earth.” First, although the author invokes the mathematical approach with the use of the term postulate, this postulate which he uses has none of the rigour, tight definition and exactness of mathematical postulates. There are so many elements in this one statement that it is meaningless to call it a postulate.

Without entering the fruitless and forbidden debate between advocates of free-will and advocates of predestination, Maududi has clearly and immediately given very strong indications that he is ideologically a member of the group who used to be known as the Qadariyyah – the proponents of free-will and those who deny the decree of Allah. The second part of that assertion is more evident by emphasis and omission than by any declaration. When the angel Jibril, peace be upon him, asked the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, to describe Iman – belief – he enumerated its elements as, “That you believe in Allah, His angels, His books, His messengers, and the Last Day, and that you believe in the Decree, the good of it and the bad of it.”⁷ The last two terms deal with the great apparent paradox of human existence that everything is decreed by Allah, exalted is He, from before the creation of the cosmos, and that the human being must face a reckoning for his deeds.

Imam Malik said, “The people who believe in the doctrine of free-will (al-Qadariyyah) are the worst of mankind. I see them as fickle people of shallow intelligence and innovations because of many ayat which there are against them, of which there is the words of Allah, mighty is He and majestic, ‘The building they have built will not cease to be a bone of contention in their hearts‘ (Surat at-Tawbah 9:111), and of which there is ‘And He revealed to Nuh, “No one of your people will believe except for he who has already believed”,’ (Surah Hud, ayah 36) and He said, ‘And they will not give birth to any but wicked disbelievers,’ (Surah Nuh, 27), ‘You will entice no one to them except for him who is to roast in the Blazing Fire,’ (Surat as-Saffat, 163) and He said, ‘but Allah was averse to their setting out  so He held them back” (Surat at-Tawbah, 9: 46) and in many other ayat.'”⁸

The Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, is reported to have said a number of things about the proponents of free-will, including that they are the worst of mankind. Imam an-Nawawi narrated, “It is established as an authentic statement that he said, may Allah bless with him and grant him peace, ‘The Qadariyyah are the Magians (i.e. dualists) of this community’”⁹. It is not our purpose here to refute them or to enter into a polemic on the matter. Rather we want to show how much a modernist like Abu’l-A’la al-Maududi has imbibed the mathematical approach as shown by his language of postulates. His first postulate contains by omission and by emphasis something, which is further repeated and elaborated throughout his book, entirely against the Sunnah.

Again in Chapter three, “Essential Features of Islamic Political System”, Maududi begins, “The political system of Islam has been based on three principles, viz., Tawheed (Unity of God), Risalat (Prophethood) and Khilafat (Caliphate).” Here postulates are exchanged for principles, but the thinking is the same. We only note that the equation here fails in the first term “political system of Islam” because it introduces two terms which would not be recognised classically: “political” and “system”, and introducing matters into Islam is called classically bid‘ah. Maudud was enamoured of all things Western so much that he wanted to remake Islam entirely in its image. Yet, he did not have enough knowledge of Western society to know of the immense literatures in criticism of ‘politics’ and ‘systems’.

By the process of these three principles Maududi further arrives at ‘the State’ and ‘Islamic democracy’. The State was no part of early Islamic thinking and is clearly another innovation. If we examine the Arabic term dawlah, which is often translated as ‘state’, it means a ‘turn of fortune in battle’. The word does not occur in the Qur’an but another word from the same root does, doolah and it means a ‘turn of fortune in terms of wealth’. The former is ‘political’ and the latter ‘economic’. However, our term ‘state’ is related to ‘static’ which is precisely the direct opposite of the Arabic term. The obsessive drive to create a state is a desperate fear of the dynamic nature of history and of the turning this way and that way of fortune, i.e. Allah’s eternal decree of winners and losers. The state in Western thinking is also something which legislates, i.e. creates laws. The dawlah for the Muslims may never create laws, but it can only implement Allah’s revealed law.

With respect to Islamic democracy, another innovation, Maududi says, “Every person in an Islamic society enjoys the rights and powers of the caliphate of God and in this respect all individuals are equal.” Here we see the ‘equality’ of the French Revolution raising its not so unexpected head. These words hark back to a group called the Khawarij – literally ‘seceders’ – who also affirmed a kind of radical understanding of equality, which led them to murder Sayyiduna ‘Ali, may Allah honour him, murder being the ultimate weapon of egalitarians.

Again later in the same chapter, Abu’l-A’la introduces the concept of Fundamental Human Rights for all mankind. This is clearly another innovatory introduction of something foreign into Islam.

In Chapter IV “Islamic Social Order”, he begins, “The foundations of the social system of Islam rest on the belief that all human beings are equal and constitute one single fraternity.” We have already questioned the concept of equality. It is doubly questionable here because Allah, exalted is He, specifically refutes it in many ayat in the Qur’an, e.g. where He says, “Say: ‘Are the blind and sighted equal? Or is darkness and light the same?‘” (Surat ar-Ra‘d 13:17) And, “Do you make the giving of water to the pilgrims and looking after the Sacred Mosque the same as believing in Allah and the Last Day and doing jihad in the Way of Allah? They are not equal in the sight of Allah. Allah does not guide the people of the wrongdoers. Those who believe and emigrate and do jihad in the way of Allah with their wealth and themselves have a higher rank with Allah. They are the triumphant.” (Surat at-Tawbah 9:19-20) In this latter ayat, Allah differentiates the people who struggle in the way of Allah from other believers. The ayat which differentiate Muslims from jews, christians and other unbelievers are too numerous and too well-known to mention. It is complete nonsense to say that humans are all equal and one great brotherhood. But of course ‘brotherhood’ is the last term from the slogan of the French Revolution. That brotherhood was to be achieved, as Marat proposed, by the removal of, “Two hundred and sixty thousand aristocrat heads.”¹⁰

Al-Maududi continues in the same chapter to say, “The foremost and fundamental institution of human society is the unit of the family,” but the family is not the unit of the society, but a unit possibly of a clan or a tribe or a race. Islamic society begins when people pledge allegiance to their leader, not because of any familial relationship or tribal culture.

Most significantly in Chapter V, “Economic Principles of Islam”, Maududi, says, “Islam has laid down some principles and prescribed certain limits for the economic activity of man…” Note here that Islam rather than being ‘submission’ and ‘surrender’ has now become an active entity laying down principles. This leads on to something quite crucial, “Islam does not concern itself with time-bound methods and techniques of economic production or with the details of the organisational pattern and mechanisms.” The statement is ambiguous. It can lead easily to the interpretation that the economic patterns of the right-acting first generations are not a source for our shari’ah. That cuts us off from a clear model of a non-usurious economy and leaves us adrift in the sea of ‘Islamic Principles’. That was what actually and quite conveniently led many of Maududi’s followers into directorships of Islamic banks and other similar usurious institutions.

Conclusion

Perhaps, this is sufficient to show the penetration of this type of mathematical approach into the thinking of just one of the exponents of now out-dated modernist Islam. However, please note that any mathematician, philosopher or person trained in that type of thinking would faint at the weakness of thought displayed here, the falsity of its logic, and the emptiness of its conclusions.

Moreover, al-Maududi and his ilk espoused this approach, completely enamoured with its apparent rigour, and equally completely unaware that a man called Gödel had just demonstrated conclusively by means of the very mathematical logic we have outlined that this logic cannot be extended indefinitely as a system of knowledge. It is not that logic does not work, but that it is a limited tool that can work with a limited number of axioms in a limited domain. Even more decisively for the modern age, Alan Turing’s ‘Halting Problem’ showed in highly abstruse language what every user of a computer knows: sometimes the computer will just go into a spin and you have to force a restart. The implications of this result need much deeper examination.

We cite as examples here the Declaration of Independence, orientalism and Islamic Modernism as exemplified by al-Maududi to illustrate how widespread is the basic idea which is at the core of the mathematisation of science and of our worldview.

It might appear from this that we are positing an anti-scientific and pro-religious view of existence in opposition to this mathematical and ‘scientific’ view, but this is far from the truth.

We belong to the tradition that divides knowledge into three areas each of which has their proper disciplines and limitations:

1. Rational sciences, such as mathematics but more significantly such as the core teachings of the science of ‘aqida according to the two major schools of al-Ash‘ari and al-Maturidi. In fact neither of these two depend upon revelation or on experience and experiment.

Those who describe ‘aqida as ‘dogmatic theology’ make a major mistake for this is a cool and clear rational science and indeed a ‘logical’ one with arguments and proofs which have stood the test of time, even if Allah ta’ala shows us some of that argumentation and of those proofs in the Qur’an.

2. Revealed sciences which cannot be known rationally or by experience and experimentation, such as why the salat of Maghrib has three rak‘as and such as the existence of the life after death and the Garden and the Fire.

Although this is true of all of shari‘ah legislation, nevertheless the ‘ulama have a further science called Maqasid ash-Shari‘ah which, although it does not define ‘principles’ from which judgements can be derived, does suggest the purposes for which the various parts of the shari‘ah are legislated, and this is a science which helps the Mufti, when he has to give fatwa, or the Qadi, when he has to issue a judgement or make an ijtihad, to look more deeply into the cases before them.

3. Sciences based on experience and experiment such as medicine, and, in my view, tasawwuf.

Medicine is not an entirely rational science such as mathematics but depends a great deal on the practitioner’s expertise and experience. Nor is there any basis for considering at-Tibb al-Islami or at-Tibb al-Yunani to be a prophetically revealed science, although there are indeed wonders in the Qur’an and in the Sunnah for the thinking medical practitioner.

Similarly, although tasawwuf has its clear outlines and sources in the Book of Allah and the Sunnah of His Messenger, salla’llahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, yet the core of it is the transmitted wisdom and self-knowledge learned by experience by the men and women who have travelled the spiritual path (tariq) from the very first generation of Islam.

So, Muslims are intrinsically people of these three types of knowledge, but we must never confuse them or make one of them subject to others even if often in reality the three types of knowledge become mingled in various ways such that it is hard to discern the edges between them.

The reality is that in a dark age it is only knowledge that can show the way forward and the key to all knowledge lies in this clear tripartite understanding that removes confusion and in comparison to which all other knowledge is always partial and thus dangerous. But this wholesome and holistic understanding is vouchsafed as a trust on behalf of all mankind. May Allah help us in carrying this trust and conveying it. Amin.

Notes

¹ Surat as-Saffat 37:96.

² Surat al-Kahf 18:39.

³ Kline, Morris, Mathematics, the Loss of Certainty, p.73.

⁴ Surat at-Tawbah 9:110.

⁵ Russell, Bertrand, My Philosophical Development (1959) as cited by Kline, Morris in Mathematics, the Loss of Certainty, p.218.

⁶ Russell, Bertrand, Portraits from Memory (1958), as cited by Kline, Morris in Mathematics, the Loss of Certainty, p.229-30.

⁷ Sahih Muslim, narrated by ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab.

⁸ al-Qayrawani, Abu Muhammad ‘Abdullah ibn Abi Zayd, The Madinan View (a translation of Kitab al-Jami‘), p.30, translated by Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers Ltd., London, 1999.

⁹ An-Nawawi, Imam Muhyi’d-Din, The Complete Forty Hadith, p.23, translated by Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers Ltd., London.

¹⁰ Carlyle, Thomas, The French Revolution. Chapman and Hall Ltd., London, 1907.