Introduction: The Epistemic Problem and the Question of the Age

Contemporary man stands amid an overwhelming flood of material and technological progress. This new reality has imposed upon human thought unprecedented epistemological challenges, and produced sharp questions about the usefulness of religion and the future of faith. This problem is summed up in two extreme tendencies: a hard materialist tendency that sees the digital revolution, artificial intelligence, and gene engineering as having abolished the need for heaven, so that the human being has become self-sufficient by his material power, dispensing with any unseen guidance; and a deficient tendency that sees in matter and scientific progress a danger to the purity of the spirit and the clarity of faith, and so calls for withdrawal and hostility toward the age.

Yet the sequential rational approach, resting on the deep philosophical and epistemic heritage of the school of the the Prophet's household (AS), presents a third, coherent, and comprehensive thesis. It is a thesis that dismantles the history of the messages, reveals the psychology and politics latent behind the deviation of the previous religions, and roots the decisions of the divine sealing, so as to arrive at the formulation of a balanced equation that negates the struggle between matter and spirit — indeed, that makes technology and material progress an instrument harnessed to serve spiritual perfection and to provide the time necessary for intellectual and existential elevation toward Allah, glorified and exalted.

1. The Law of the Universality of Guidance and the Psychology of Historical Deviation

1. Establishing the Argument and the Evolution of the Laws (Shari’as)

Sound rational logic sets out from a fundamental rule: that the Creator, glorified and exalted, is transcendent above futility, injustice, and favoritism. The requirement of absolute divine justice makes obligatory that no society be punished and no human held to account without a prior clarification and guidance; therefore the channel linking heaven and earth was continuous and flowing throughout human history. Allah sent, in every time and place, and to every people and nation, a messenger, prophet, or guide to establish the conclusive argument, and so that people would have no argument against Allah after the messengers.

Here two concepts must be distinguished precisely:

• Religion (al-din): which is the essence and beating heart of all the heavenly messages, and is a single, fixed truth that does not change with the change of the ages (divine oneness, absolute justice, moral sublimity, the safeguarding of human dignity).
• The Sharia: which is the legal, procedural, and devotional system that changes and develops according to the circumstances of time and place, and the observance of the environmental and social conditions and the intellectual development of the human being. Every people had a Sharia suited to their intellectual maturity and their historical circumstances.

2. Dismantling the Causes of Deviation and Distortion

If religion is one in its divine origin, then why did the beliefs diverge and the great deviations that we see today occur? This deviation was not random; it came as a result of the convergence of internal and external, psychic and political factors:

• The struggle between good and evil and personal caprices: the religions in their purity came to shatter egoisms, to forbid the monopolizing of wealth, and to impose moral equality among humans. This proposition clashes directly with the caprices of sick souls, and the greed of individuals who seek negative distinction and the monopolizing of privileges; so human attempts began to bend the religious text to agree with caprice and personal passion.
• The domination of the tyrants and despots: throughout human history, the tyrants, the mighty kings, and those of financial and political influence realized that direct confrontation with religion might be a losing one, because religion touches the innate nature. Therefore, they resorted to a more insidious strategy: “containing religion and distorting it from within.” The tyrants employed the preachers of the sultans and the beneficiaries to falsify the rulings, invent legislations that justify injustice, and legitimize class hierarchy and despotism; so religion in their hands turned from a revolution for the liberation of the human being into an instrument for his enslavement and anesthesia.
• The dilemma of the absence of documentation and the psychology of fading: in bygone ages, there were no instruments to record the heavenly messages precisely the moment they descended and to preserve them between the two covers of a mass-transmitted book. The message relied on oral memorization and personal transmission. And with the death of the learned, pure generation that heard the Messenger directly and lived through the descent of the revelation, “the generation gap” began to appear. The second generation receives the idea with less clarity, then the third generation comes to receive it tinged with stories and myths, and so on, generation after generation over hundreds of years, the pure epistemic content gradually fades.
• Withdrawal into inherited folklore: at the end of this fading process, society reaches a generation that knows nothing of the reality and essence of the religion for which it was sent. This generation has nothing left but “the husks and folkloric appearances,” the customs, traditions, and hollow rituals empty of any spiritual or legislative depth. And the historical and social paradox here is that these followers cling to this distorted folklore ferociously, and practice deviation and innovations regardless of whether they intend it or truly believe — as a result of the accumulated ignorance — that they are upon the absolute truth.

From here, we see rationally that the three documented heavenly religions today (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) are, in the depth of history, an extension of a single connected message. And Islam does not see itself as setting up enmity toward those before it; rather it believes in all the prophets and Books, but it presents itself as a necessary corrective link that came to repair and remove all those deviations and the folkloric fading that afflicted the previous messages through the tyrants and the loss of documentation.

2. The Philosophy of “Necessity” and the Inevitability of the Divine Sealing

After this historical exposition, the logical question imposes itself: if human development and the psychology of fading require the continuous renewal of the messages, then why did this chain stop after Islam? And why do we not await a new messenger in our age?

The scholars and thinkers of the school of the the Prophet's household (AS) answer by relying on “the logic of necessity”; the act of Allah, glorified is He, is transcendent above futility and superfluous excess, and the sending of the prophets and messages is not an honorary luxury; it is a response to an objective necessity required by the need of humans. And whenever this necessity ceases, the act ceases automatically.

The necessity of sending new messages ceased after Islam for three philosophical and structural reasons:

1. The Attainment of Intellectual and Human Maturity (the Transition of Humanity from Childhood to Awareness)

In the previous ages, humanity lived in the stage of “intellectual childhood,” where the human being needed material, temporary sensory miracles (such as the parting of the sea, or the staff of Moses, or the reviving of the dead) to be convinced, and needed a direct prophet who walks with him in the details of his daily life and lays down for him partial, temporary rulings suited to the limitedness of his awareness.

But with the sending of the noblest Messenger (PBUH), humanity reached “the age of intellectual and comprehending maturity.” In this context, the Islamic thinker and philosopher, the martyr Murtada Mutahhari (1338–1399 AH / 1920–1979 CE), explains this transformation in his thesis on “the Sealing” in his book (The Final Development), saying:

“The successive legislative prophethoods were like the stages of the schooling of humanity in its intellectual childhood, where humanity needed constant instruction and temporary local laws. And with the sending of the noblest Prophet (PBUH), humanity reached its rational maturity, which qualifies it to dispense with new prophethoods, for there was placed in its hands a fixed universal method containing a continuous rational miracle and general laws broad enough for reasoning and application to the developments of the ages.”

This legislative structure grants the human intellect, through the instrument of reasoning (ijtihad), the ability to derive solutions for all the developments of the ages without the need to change the original text.

2. Addressing the Dilemma of Documentation (Decisive Preservation)

The corrective necessity that used to call for the sending of a new prophet to repair the deviation resulting from the death of the learned generation and the loss of the text has completely faded in Islam. For Allah, glorified is He, undertook the preservation of the noble Quran, with its letters and words, in precise documentation and decisive mass-transmission:

“Indeed, it is We who sent down the Reminder, and indeed, We will be its guardian.”

And since the pure original text is preserved and available and cannot be totally distorted by the tyrants or the vicissitudes of time, the necessity for the sending of another corrective message has fallen.

3. The Line of the Imamate as a Living Guarantee of Dynamism and Application

Legislative revelation was cut off because the legal and existential method was completed, but divine providence did not leave humanity to the storms of political and social caprices; rather it made “the line of the imamate” (represented by the infallible Imams of the Household) a rational and functional extension of prophethood, but without a new legislative revelation.

The task of the infallible Imam is to preserve the religion from field deviation, to clarify the obscurities of the preserved text, and to apply it and dismantle it according to “the circumstances and conditions of each time and place.” And after their occultation, this task passed to the line of jurisprudence and scholarly reasoning resting on their foundations and rules.

The philosophical conclusion: Islam’s saying that it is the last of the religions is not a racist decision taken by the Muslims out of partisanship for themselves or haughtiness toward others; it is a firm divine decision and a wise crowning of the march of human guidance after the need and the objective justification (the necessity) for any new sending had ceased.

3. Negating the Struggle Between Matter and Spirit (the Universe Is Harnessed for Human Perfection)

Among the greatest epistemic errors into which the modern materialist philosophies fell (such as dialectical materialism and extreme empiricism) — and in which, unfortunately, some superficial and folkloric religious readings shared — is the idea of the existence of an “eternal and inevitable struggle between matter and spirit,” or the portrayal of religion as an enemy of scientific progress and material welfare.

In the deep Islamic epistemic view, there is no clash or struggle between spirit and matter; for the human being is a being of dual composition (a spiritual, unseen breath that settled in a material, clay body), and each part of him has its epistemic and existential field:

• Science and technology: are concerned with the world of matter (the world of the dominion of kingship, or the witnessed), and rest on the empirical, sensory method to facilitate life and cultivate the earth.
• Religion: is concerned with the world of the spirit and the metaphysical, to grant the human being the purpose, the meaning, and the moral regulator.

The Commander of the Faithful, Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib (23 BH–40 AH / 599–661 CE) (AS), formulated this balanced theory of matter and the world intellectually when he heard a man disparaging the world entirely, from a monastic perspective that sees the struggle between matter and spirit as inevitable; so the Imam rebuked him and corrected the concept for him, saying, in eloquent words:

“Indeed, the world is the trading-place of the friends of Allah; in it they earned mercy, and in it they gained Paradise.” (Nahj al-Balagha, Saying 131)

For the world and the realm of matter are not evil in themselves; they are the “trading-place” and the only material platform available for moral and spiritual elevation.

The Philosophy of Purposeful Harnessing

This vast material universe, with all its physical laws, natural energies, and chemical elements, is “completely harnessed for the human being,” by the text of the Quranic philosophy:

“And He has harnessed for you whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth — all from Him.”

But what is the purpose of this harnessing?

The true religious perspective affirms that harnessing the universe and developing science is not for the sake of “futile luxury” or blind ostentatious consumption; it is harnessed as an instrument and an aiding station for the human being on the journey of his spiritual and intellectual perfection. In this regard, the martyr Mutahhari affirms in his book (The Human Being and the Universe):

“Islam sees in the harnessing of nature a great merit, and matter in the Islamic view is not a veil for the spirit; it is the ladder upon which the spirit ascends toward its human perfection.”

The Model of Medical Progress

Let us take the science of medicine and the technology of treatment and surgery as a clear and deep example: when medicine advances and the instruments of diagnosis, treatment, and medical artificial intelligence develop, the direct result is the saving of millions of human lives from death and pain, and the extension of the span of the human being’s healthy life.

From a religious perspective, this extended lifespan and sustained health are not a luxury; they are a “precious temporal and biological opportunity” that enables the human being to remain longer on the earth to cultivate it with good, to increase in conscious worship, to offer benefit to humanity, and to ascend the degrees of nearness to Allah. For the physician who spends his night in the laboratory developing a medicine is providing humanity with a material means that supports the spiritual purpose of safeguarding and purifying the self. Material progress here is transformed directly into a spiritual and human asset.

4. Technology as an Instrument for Intellectual Liberation and the Journey Toward Allah

Let us free thinking from the traditional molds and look at welfare and technological development from a deep philosophical, economic, and social angle: what is the loftiest essential aim of inventions and machines?

It is the liberation of the human being from the enslavement of matter and the subjugation of nature.

1. Crushing the Bond of Biological Subsistence

In the previous ages, the human being would spend his entire day — indeed his whole life — in arduous, exhausting muscular effort merely to provide “the basic necessities for biological survival.” He would cross long distances to obtain water, spend hours grinding wheat by hand, and consume his entire bodily energy in primitive agriculture or gathering firewood for warmth, to return at the end of the day physically exhausted, possessing neither energy nor time for thinking, reading, deep philosophical contemplation, or spiritual sublimity. The human being was like a biological machine turning in the waterwheel of providing his daily bread.

Technological and mechanical progress came and crushed this bond; so machines, factories, and algorithms accomplish those arduous, exhausting tasks in a few minutes, with the least possible human effort.

2. Providing “Surplus Time” for the Great Questions

The true philosophical aim behind this temporal and effort-related shortcut is not to push the human being toward laziness and disappearance into the pleasures of the body; it is the liberation of his intellectual and spiritual energy.

This bodily liberation for the sake of intellectual freedom was set down by Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq (83–148 AH / 702–765 CE) (AS) as a great philosophical and economic rule in his famous dictation to his student in the book (Tawhid al-Mufaddal), where the Imam dismantles the wisdom in the human being’s movement, work, and the provision of periods of rest, saying:

“Reflect, O Mufaddal, upon these blessings that have manifested upon the human being… Were the human being to attain everything he needs without toil or effort, life would not be pleasant for him… and he would go out, from wantonness and insolence, to what would be his destruction. So the matter was balanced for him with toil and work, to occupy him from what is not fitting for him, and so that there would remain for him a surplus of leisure for what is obligatory upon him of the obedience of his Lord and reflection upon His signs.”

Here the Imam (AS) defines the purpose clearly: the aim is to bring about a “surplus of leisure” (surplus time) in which the mind and body are freed, so that the human being may devote himself to what is obligatory upon him of the obedience of his Lord, reflection upon His signs, and the great questions of existence. And technology today is the great instrument that produces this “virtuous leisure” by subduing the hardship of bodily labor.

3. The Crisis of Social Justice and the Hijacking of Technology

Here we reach a delicate, problematic juncture: if technology possesses this ability to liberate and to provide “surplus leisure,” then why do we see contemporary man more anxious, psychologically pressured, and alienated, spending longer hours at work?

The problem here is not in “technology” as an instrument; it is in “the ill distribution and the absence of social justice and the religious moral system” governing it. This dilemma is dismantled precisely by the philosopher and founder of the contemporary economic school, the martyr Sayyid Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (1353–1400 AH / 1935–1980 CE), in his mainstay book (Our Economics), where he holds that the crisis is not in the scarcity of matter or the tyranny of the machine; it is in human greed and the absence of justice, and he says, in clarifying the role of material development and divine harnessing, what amounts to:

“Nature is rich in its resources and its laws, and Allah harnessed it for the human being so that he may subdue material need through it. And if the human being is freed from the subjugation of biological need and poverty by virtue of science and justice, he is able to break free from the clay to move toward the Absolute (Allah). For scientific progress provides the material ground for the emergence of a society devoted to Allah, in which the human being devotes himself to his intellectual and spiritual creativity instead of being drained by his daily bread.”

Today, captive technology and the machine have fallen into the hands of utilitarian greed and the pressure of the contemporary tyrannical caprices, and instead of being used to reduce the human being’s working hours so that he may devote himself to awareness and spiritual elevation, they have been used to increase production, multiply profits, and amass fortunes, while keeping the worker turning in the waterwheel of continuous consumption. Were the values of the final religion to prevail, technology would be the greatest aid for humans to devote themselves to worship, awareness, and spiritual elevation.

Conclusion: The Integration of the Compass and the Instrument

Based on this firm logical sequence and the epistemic witnesses, the falsity of the claim that technological progress has abolished humanity’s need for religion or made it self-sufficient becomes clear. Science and technology grant the human being “the instrument, the power, and the abundance of time,” but they cannot grant him “the compass, the purpose, and the moral regulator.” Science tells us how to operate the machine and manufacture the rocket, but it cannot tell us whether it is ethical to use it to destroy humanity or to cultivate it.

The deviation of the previous religions through the struggle of good and evil, the caprices of souls, and the intervention of the despotic tyrants, together with the absence of documentation that led to the fading of the contents and their transformation into folklore, has been averted and radically remedied by the Islamic message. This message, whose divine text was preserved from distortion, and was supported by the line of the imamate and reasoning to keep pace with the ages.

This final religion did not come to war against matter or to stand as an obstacle before the machine; it came to redefine matter as a “harnessing means” — as the narrations of the the Prophet's household and the sayings of their scholars clarified — whose ultimate purpose is to lift bodily suffering from the human being and to provide his time and effort, so that he may move with his full awareness, his complete intellect, and his intellectual maturity toward his loftiest and eternal existential purpose: conscious wayfaring, voluntary servitude, and continuous elevation toward the Creator, mighty and exalted.