THE RIGID AND THE MISINFORMED
It is one of the characteristics of man that he sometimes overacts and sometimes underacts. If he adopts the middle course, he endeavours to differentiate between the changes of the right type and that of the wrong type. He endeavours to push time forward with the help of his knowledge and creative power, and to identify himself with the manifestations of progress and advancement. He also tries to arrest perversion, and not to associate himself with it.
But unfortunately, man does not always adopt this course. He is liable to be afflicted by two dangerous diseases, the disease of rigidity and the disease of ignorance. The first disease results in stagnation and abstention from progress, and the second in perversion and ruin.
The rigid is averse to everything new and cannot reconcile himself with anything, except the old. On the other hand, the misinformed regards everything new to be modern and progressive and considers it to be the requirement of time. To the rigid, every new development means corruption and perversion, whereas to the misinformed, all new developments indiscriminately mean the expansion of culture and knowledge.
The rigid does not distinguish between husk and kernel and between the means and the end. In his opinion the duty of religion is to preserve all that is obsolete and antiquated. He thinks that the Qur'an has come down to arrest the motion of time and to nail down the world conditions as they were.
According to this view, old and outdated customs, such as to begin reading, from the last part of the Qur'an, writing with a reed-pen, using a cardboard inkstand, washing in the tank of the Turkish bath, eating with the hands, burning an oil lamp, and remaining illiterate, are religious rites which must be preserved. In contrast, the misinformed keeps his eyes fixed on the Western world to be able to imitate every new fashion and every new custom. He calls this modernity and the compulsion of time.
Both the rigid and the misinformed suppose that all old customs and usages are a part of religious rites, with the difference that the rigid wants to preserve them, whereas the misinformed may conclude that religion is tantamount to stagnation and inertia.
During the past few centuries, the question of contradiction between religion and science has been much debated among the people of the West. The idea of contradiction arose from two developments. Firstly, the Church had accepted some ancient, philosophical and scientific notions as religious beliefs, but the progress of science has proved their falsity. Secondly, science has changed the form and the conditions of life.
The rigid, who are apparently religious, want to make the external form of the material life a part of religion, just as they have unnecessarily given religious colour to some philosophical questions.
The uninformed and the misinformed people are also under the impression that religion has prescribed a particular form of material life, and as science has decreed a change in this form, religion should be abolished.
The rigidity of one group, and the ignorance of the other, have brought into existence the fictitious idea of contradiction between science and religion.
