Advice of Scholars - BELIEF IN THE RULES OF ISLAM

Scientists’ experimentations are believed when they are heard of. Things reported and experienced by Awliyâ’ are communicated in the same manner. Also, the benefits of most things enjoined by Islam have been seen and experienced.

Furthermore, some medicinal preparations which have been found useful by scientists and doctors by means of experimentation and bought eagerly for considerable sums of money by everybody are frequently found out to be harmful afterwards. Lists of such preparations, each concluded with a sentence banning their sale, are regularly dispatched by health authorities to drugstores. Factories manufacturing such drugs are closed down by governments. It has become a usual topic for daily newspapers that some much-sought-after medicines have proven to be harmful afterwards. It has appeared again in daily newspapers repeatedly in recent years that hundreds of popular medicines that are called antibiotics cause heart disease and cancer and that some detergents are deleterious to health.

Even if the advantages within the rules of Islam were not revealed by experimentation, it would still be reasonable to believe in them and to fulfill their requirements. Let us suppose that a physician’s wise son, who does not know anything about drugs, becomes ill. He has heard from many people and has even read in newspapers about his father’s achievements and knows that his father loves him very much. His father gives him some medicine and says that if he takes it he will recover immediately, for he has tried it several times. But when he sees that the medicine will be injected and hurt him, would it be reasonable for him to react to his father by saying, “I have never tried this way. ” Who in the world would approve such an answer?