Islam: The principle of correct human development – Part 26

Going back once more to what I had already said, when you truly grasps what it means to submit to the will of God, the result you will get is in the true and practical meaning of faith. Also, when the understanding of the principle of Islam truly focuses your attention on the understanding of the nature of God and His will, you will also begin to understand the secret of what went into the development of people like Jesus and Mohammed but also the truly remarkable men in all history. These were the people who were already living ahead of their times. They were like unusual human beings with remarkable powers. Their remarkable display of abilities was the evident demonstration of the truth that they submitted to some powers greater than them to work through them. Religion calls it the Holy Spirit. Psychology will call it Genius.

Nobody can attain to this level if such a person has not mastered the method of faith development. But the religious truth in this is that this privilege goes to somebody who has a sure belief in the existence of a Supreme Being with an intelligent mechanism of operation that is evident in the created universe we can all see. Nothing in nature is colliding except in the activities of man, nature seems to operate in harmony. Nothing operates in harmony without the mechanism of order, which is why some people will tell you that order is the first law in heaven.

When you have order and harmony going hand–in-hand, that is what you call intelligence. In other words, it could easily be deduced that the very nature of the Supreme Being or God or Allah if you are prepared to recognise it, is of the embodiment of intelligence. When you know the method of keying into this intelligence, that is in the nature of truly submitting to the will of God to use a religious language. You cannot key into intelligence if you yourself don’t know how to be intelligent. To know how to be intelligent lies in the proper cultivation of the use of your will and it is all about the correct development of your personality; the way you think and the way you direct emotions to be creative and to effect harmony.

This is the true road of Islam for all mankind in their method to know how to submit to the will of God. It is simply a method of learning to be intelligent so as to be able to develop the mechanism of keying into the operations of the Supreme Being or Intelligence i.e. God or Allah in religious parlance. You cannot nor can you ever know how to be truly intelligent when you have never developed the strong sense of what is right and what is wrong and the courage to uphold in any given situation what is right. This is the nature of the true Muslim, which enlightenment will reveal to all of us one day that the ultimate title we all aspire to, is to become a Muslim.

Ayo-Vaughan, a psychologist, lives in Lagos
babatund_2@yahoo.com