Islam: The Principle Of Correct Human Devpt (16)

I BELIEVE we got to a very crucial point of our discussion in the last essay to begin to prove how the principle of Islam ought not to be a concept in the development of religion but in the development of creative intelligence in the human being when we touched on that significant truth that FAITH and ISLAM mean the same thing. This is because submission to the will of God, which Mohammed called Islam is located in the teachings of Jesus as faith. Jesus statement ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ is clearly another version of submission to the will of God and the explanation of faith in the teachings of Jesus suggested the development of creative ability. 

  This development is resting on the understanding of the process of intelligence. To inculcate the method of intelligence into man is to embark on the true process of the development of man. This is where we derive the authority to tell you that ISLAM is about the principle of correct human development. Now to begin to move on from here, it was Jesus who said that ‘if you can believe everything is possible to him that believeth’. This is the real truth in the understanding of faith. 

  The truth about faith is about a certain process of belief. That process of belief is about conviction. Belief generally is about a thought process in the acknowledgement of a certain idea. But conviction is not only about a thought process in the acknowledgement of a certain idea but passionately so. The applied passion involves the vivid use of creative imagination — the fundamental basis of the activation of intelligence that enables a man to be capable of visualizing things that are not yet in existence but highly possible to be brought to practical realization. This explains what Jesus meant when He said that if you can believe, everything is possible to him that believes. This was why Paul described faith in the bible as the substance of things hoped for and the imaginative existence of something not yet seen. What this means is that nobody can ordinarily come into the application of faith if there is no special training towards it and that training has a lot to do with the control of your will. 

  When Jesus said in His Lord’s prayer that let the will of God be done on earth as it is in heaven, He gave us a pointer as to how the method of faith could be intelligently developed to achieve the kind of qualitative results we want in our lives. The statement is simply telling us that whenever you have any purpose in life, endeavour to make sure that your purpose, which, of course, must be resting on the use of your will power to achieve must never contradict what you must first of all try to understand is the comprehensive purpose of God for man and His creation. This is the practical explanation of the fundamental meaning of Islam, thereby confirming further what I concluded upon in the last write-up that both faith and Islam are two concepts that are synonymous and inter-changeable. It further consolidated what I also said that the primary concern of both Mohammed and Jesus was to set man on the road to that development that will let him know the method of submitting to the will of God in order to get practical results. 

  When Mohammed in this respect said that Islam is the only religion before God Almighty, it was His own way of saying that the only thing that matters before Allah is for man to know how to cultivate the spirit of faith. 

 Ayo-Vaughan, a psychologist, lives in Lagos 

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