Page 263 - For Men of Understanding

But the unbelievers, their deeds are like a mirage in sandy deserts,
which the man parched with thirst mistakes for water; until when he
comes up to it, he finds it to be nothing: But he finds Allah [ever]
with him, and Allah will pay him his account: and Allah is swift in
taking account. (Surat an-Nur: 39)

Logical Deficiencies of the Materialists
From the start, this chapter has clearly stated that matter is not absolute, as
materialists claim, but rather a shadow that Allah creates out of nothing and
whose original we can never reach. In an extremely dogmatic manner, materi-
alists resist this evident reality which destroys their philosophy, and bring for-
ward baseless counterclaims to refute it.
George Politzer, for example, an ardent Marxist and one of the twentieth
century's biggest advocates of the materialist philosophy, gave the "bus exam-
ple" as the greatest evidence proving that he could reach the original of mat-
ter. According to Politzer, even idealist philosophers run away when they see
a bus about to run them over, and this proves that they do confront the actu-
ality of matter. 9
Samuel Johnson, another famous materialist, was told that one can never
reach essential matter, and tried to "prove" that he could make contact with the
essence of stones by giving one of them a kick. 10
A similar example is given by Friedrich Engels, the mentor of Politzer and
along with Marx, the founder of dialectic materialism. He wrote that "if the
cakes we eat were mere perceptions, they would not stop our hunger." 11
There are similar examples in the books of famous materialists such as
Marx, Engels, Lenin, and others along with impetuous sentences such as, "You
understand the existence of matter when you are slapped in the face."
The disordered comprehension that engenders such examples arises from
materialists' interpreting the explanation "We cannot reach the original of mat-
ter" as involving the sense of sight only. They think that perception is limited
to sight, and that touching can get us directly to the essence of matter. A bus
knocking a man down makes people say, "Look, it hit him! Therefore, he con-
fronted the original." They don't understand that all the perceptions experi-
enced during a crash-hard metal, the force of collision, pain-are in fact formed
in the brain.

The Example of Dreams

The fact is, whichever of the five senses we take as a starting point, we can't
ever actually reach the original of the external world that exists outside. A sig-

Matter and the External World 261