"With this small place given to looking inward, because the material world is so much with us,

so all-absorbing that the inward things very easily slip away from notice and are in fact not apparent at all, unless one makes an effort to cultivate an acquaintance with them, there is very little room for "la ilaha illa Allah" - There is no deity (in the sense of the One Who commands all one's devotion and obedience and Who is the Authority) except God - because most of us human beings are so absorbed with utterances of "There is no diety [sic] except Man." The call of "Allahu Akbar" - God is the Most Great - cannot be heard amidst the clamor of exclamations over the Most-Greatness of Man. Western man has become so intoxicated with the wonder of his own power and creativity, so enamored of and so utterly bound up with the gadgets and devices he has invented, from which he believes he derives his life and sustenance, that the obvious fact has escaped him that a Power beyond himself gives them these capacities and sustains him, and that the inventions upon which he relies so completely are themselves dependent on that sustaining Power. He imagines that he must be able to see, handle, to measure and to analyze things in order to accept the fact of their existence, yet all the while his spirit as well as his faculties seem to be completely paralyzed in not perceiving that an unmeasurable, unanalyzable Being sustains everything which exists and keeps it functioning...

The capacity to believe in what is beyond man and the material world, to which the Holy Qur'an refers as Al-Ghaib - the Unseen, the hidden or distant things - is a grace from God, I think: the grace of being able to accept the existence of a greater Reality than that which is within the perception of the senses, within analysis and definition by the limited capacities of men. In the West today, such a frame of reference is largely non-existent except in name. Thus, one searching for faith must continually struggle with the disbelief which is rather a cynical and desperate conviction that man is all and everything, that there is nothing beyond, and that even if there should happen to be it hardly matters, combined with a weary disillusionment with life - even with the material pre-occupations which not so long seemed so bright and meaningful - for which it knows of no better remedy than involvement in humanitarian concerns or cultural activities. The West has, in the words of Muhammad Asad, assumed the non-existence of God as a positive fact simple because it cannot prove His existence empirically. As he says in his book, Islam at the Crossroads:*

As the intellectual and social atmosphere of old Rome was utterly utilitarian and anti-religious - in fact if not in open admission - so is the atmosphere of the modern West. Without having a proof against transcendental religion, and without even admitting the need of such a proof, modern Western thought, while tolerating and sometimes even emphasizing religion as a social convention, generally leaves transcendental ethics out of the range of practical considerations. Western civilization does not strictly deny God, but has simply no room and no use for Him in its present intellectual system. It has made a virtue out of an intellectual difficult of man - his inability to grasp the totality of life."

* Arafat Publications, Lahore, Pakistan, 1955.

Marian Kazi, Adhan Over Anatolia: The Diary of an American Muslim, American Trust Publications, Indiana, n.d., p. 18-19