Idols of Modernity

…these are nothing but names you have invented yourselves – you and your forefathers -for which Allah has sent down no authority. They follow not except assumption and what [their] souls desire, even though guidance has already come to them from their Lord. (Quran, 53:23)

Idol worship was never merely a reverence for figure or form; it embodied entire ways of life, cultural pride, and the privileges of priestly and elite classes, with inherited tradition supplying its authority.

Striking parallels exist in modern collective movements—liberal and secular philosophies, scientific frameworks, political forces, and diverse religious iterations—that, like the idols of old, often demand unquestioning adherence and shape the way people think and act. Beneath the claims about absolute truth, often lie assumptions that are taken for facts. Vanity and Collective Pride Vanity is pride without substance: grasping at trifles, inflated by borrowed praise. It chases validation that may fade as a fleeting thrill or sink into outright depravity.

When magnified within collective identities—national, political, or religious—it becomes a potent, even oppressive force, especially when fueled by exceptionalist slogans or contrived claims of divine sanction.

These currents of nationalistic pride and assertions of civilizational distinctiveness often manifest in narratives that define a people’s sense of self. Every nation has its origin stories and myths: some are historically grounded and harmlessly affirm belonging even when mingled with some fiction. Yet some are deliberately engineered, presenting inflated notions of glory, belonging, and destiny that serve the interests of those who craft them.

These are not mere fantasies: they have driven some of the worst excesses of human history—excesses that tragically continue to unfold today. Under the sway of collective conceit, chauvinistic agendas advance in the name of the greater good, national interest, or religious conformism, normalizing discrimination, persecution, injustice, and inevitably violence.

Enlightenment and Its Legacy Such narratives remain in correspondence with prevailing knowledge regimes—resisting them, opposing them, or selectively appropriating from them to reinforce their power. There is always a framework of knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions within which individuals reason and societies cohere.

Those that dominant today are traceable, in large part, to the European Enlightenment. They shape modern institutions, education, politics, economics, science, and even popular culture. Even where they fuse with older traditions that otherwise insist on a religious or civilizational self-understanding, the habits and aspirations of daily life often reflect an unwitting embrace of Enlightenment norms—most visibly among ruling elites, structures of governance, and civil society activism.

It is not that the core principles of the Enlightenment were wholly novel; many had precedents in earlier thought and religious tradition, including religious jurisprudence. Yet, combined into a coherent ethos, they proved powerful in displacing entrenched dogmatism, priestly and monarchical power that claimed divine sanction.

This paved the way for both remarkable progress and unprecedented power. The Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason, science, and liberty unshackled creativity, fostered a hunger for knowledge, and helped move Europe beyond the devastation of religious warfare. Advances in governance, education, and human rights followed.

Yet the same power when exercised overseas led to colonization, exploitation, and even genocides. The very movement that championed universal ideals of freedom and human dignity simultaneously revealed merciless exclusivist attitudes, many of which remain ingrained in Western imagination.

The reasons for this contradiction are not inexplicable. Human thought often claims universal validity without allegiance to any transcendent moral code. Yet time after time, lurking beneath the surface, are entrenched interests and cultural biases.

John Locke, often celebrated as a father of liberalism and champion of rights, illustrates the paradox well. While he argued for government by consent, natural rights, and religious toleration, he simultaneously invested in the slave trade, defended colonial expropriation of indigenous lands, and restricted full political rights to property-owning men. His vision of liberty was deeply conditioned by race, class, and property. In time, his selective freedoms were canonized in Western constitutions as if universal. Such vaunted ideals are rarely free of the limitations and prejudices of their time.

Whilst the watershed that this era marked opened new horizons of knowledge and progress, the enabling values and norms soon began to be treated as sacrosanct—unquestionable, like the idols of old. Chief among these was, and remains, the impact of science, whose power of persuasion has proved even greater because its conclusions and assertions invoke the authority of objective methods and empirical evidence. It was only a matter of time before judgements from such a powerful phenomenon began to encroach upon what had hitherto remained in the domain of philosophy, religion, and metaphysics.

Science as Origin Story By far, the most outstanding legacy of the Enlightenment is science. Its influence permeates deep into the human psyche, structuring thought and action in ways that often go unexamined.

Building on the foundation of empirical inquiry, science now asserts its crowning claim: that it has uncovered the mother of all origin stories—the universe itself. This ultimate origin tale has implications that go far beyond science. It seeks to redefine the meaning of existence, life, and purpose, shaping how individuals and societies imagine their place in the world. It represents the very concept of modernity.

When people looked at the heavens and wondered how it all began, an explanation that dominated for centuries was that it had no beginning at all—it was always there. The Book of Genesis told a different story, pointing to a moment of creation. But human pride held firmly to the worldview of an eternal universe, confident that the cosmos itself could yield to reason alone.

This conviction endured into the modern age. Even the great Einstein, who famously revolutionized our understanding of space and time, believed in a static universe. To preserve the idea of a universe existing forever by itself, he inserted the cosmological constant into the equations of general relativity—a mathematical fudge to ensure a desired outcome that was otherwise elusive. Ironically, he later called it his “biggest blunder.” Yet it illustrates how deeply ingrained the preference for a self-existent, eternal cosmos was, even among the most brilliant minds. It also precluded any appeal to a divine order.

The Big Bang unsettled that confidence, suggesting that space, time, matter, and energy all began in a single event—originating virtually from nothing and rapidly expanding into the vast cosmos we see today.

Religious thinkers naturally saw in this an echo of their ancient teaching of creation ex nihilo—before creation, nothing existed: no time, no space, no matter and no physical laws to govern them. Natural scientists, however, were not eager to concede the point. So new models were offered, claiming that even when there is nothing, that non-space is still seething with energy, fields and laws that can give rise to a universe. In the ordinary sense of its meaning, true nothingness is the absence of space, time, matter, energy, and even laws. But naturalistic models do not allow that, and some tangible is always smuggled in as the starting point.

Naturalism as Dogma What began as a method of investigating nature gradually became a worldview. Naturalism—the conviction that only matter, energy, and natural laws constitute reality—took on the role of an ultimate explanatory framework.

What emerges is less a neutral description of reality than what may be called a Naturalistic Ontological Dogmatism—an insistence that nature must contain its own origins, that nothing outside its bounds can be permitted even as a possibility. As evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin once admitted:We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs… because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

Knowledge, Power, and the New Idols Beyond cosmology, the same structures that shape scientific thought seep into everyday life. Foucault’s concept of the episteme helps us see this: it embodies the underlying structure of knowledge in a given historical period—it evolves through discourse, social norms and customs, and repeated practices and forms a deep, often unconscious framework that influences how people think, what they say and believe. In modern times, the naturalistic episteme—the assumption that only material causes and empirical laws define reality—bears a significant influence on how we experience the world without necessarily our conscious awareness.

Antonio Gramsci captured the paradigm in another way. He described how ruling groups maintain dominance by influencing culture itself. They instill a hegemonic common sense—a set of beliefs and assumptions disseminated through institutions such as schools, media, and organized religion.

Today, the convergence of various interests produces a worldview in which life is measured in data, progress by technology, and success by consumption. This common sense enters ordinary thought almost invisibly, creating tastes, guiding assumptions, and altering moral standards. It is powerful because it feels neutral, when in fact it reflects the priorities of those who set the terms of our age—digital entrepreneurs, large corporations, and the mainstream media, with the ubiquitous secular distillation originating in the naturalistic gospel.

The Denouement of Naturalism Life is meaningful when the choices we make are guided by a moral compass. When our search for knowledge admits limits and anchors itself in transcendence. When the marvel of creation—its staggering beauty and majestic infinite expanse—instils the humility necessary to grow in reverence and virtue rather than wallow in the hubris of imagining ourselves masters of a material destiny.

Today, however, we are told that: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no purpose, no design, no good or evil—nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” — Richard Dawkins

This is an honest and unvarnished verdict of naturalism and atheism. Others have attempted to salvage human purpose by relying solely on expedient forms of humanism. Yet the logical implications of such declarations are stark: if morality is nothing more than a human construct, it remains forever susceptible to the vagaries of selectivity, arbitrariness, and subjectivity. In such a framework, a life of selfishness, greed, or lust for power and pleasure cannot be denounced with any ultimate authority.

Similarly, physicist Steven Weinberg (who shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Dr. Abdus Salam) spoke of the universe’s apparent pointlessness. Together, these reflections encapsulate the philosophical denouement of Naturalistic Ontological Dogmatism: a cosmos in which meaning, value, and moral content are absent, leaving human beings to confront existence in the light of whichever idols are in vogue —whether exclusivist ideologies, corporate religion, or the naturalistic dogma itself.

Towards the end of his life, Weinberg himself, in a tone of melancholy, admitted: “I do think that as we learn more and more about the universe, we see that there is no point in the laws of nature that refer specifically to human beings, there is nothing that gives us guidance. I think the position of human beings is eternally rather tragic—that we have no guidance, we have no script, we are not acting out our part in the cosmic drama.”⁴⁴

Yet if the late scientist had been more open to possibilities beyond the atheistic manifesto, he might have realized that humanity has never been left without a script. His lament about the absence of a script could itself be read as a clue to what humanity has always sought and, in fact, received; revealed guidance in the form of scripture to establish foundational morality, purpose and accountability, and a vision of ultimate destiny.

This is a Scripture which We have sent down to you [Prophet] so that, with their Lord’s permission, you may bring people from the depths of darkness into light, to the path of the Almighty, the Praiseworthy One. (14:1)

We have sent the Scripture down to you [Prophet] with the Truth for people. Whoever follows the guidance does so for his own benefit, whoever strays away from it does so at his own peril…(39:41)

Whether it is the haughty, self-righteous indignation of the cleric who sees heresy in every reasoned exposition of religious thought, the opportunist politician leading people up the garden path or whipping up hysteria for grandiose schemes and mob rule, or the natural scientist presuming to act as the final authority on what constitutes reality—vanity finds its way into every facet of the contemporary human condition.

At times it appears as certainties garbed in religious idiom, at others as a people’s exalted destiny, and still at others as the refusal to recognize the limits of knowability while presuming mastery all the same. These patterns of thought and conduct are absorbed and perpetuated by the multitude ensuring their persistence across all levels of society.

…He has been aware of you from the time He produced you from the earth and from your hiding places in your mothers’ wombs, so do not assert your own righteousness: He knows best who is mindful of Him. (53:32)

“All conflicts arise from the vanity of claiming sole possession of truth. Stand instead in humility: I am human. I seek the truth. I may err, and I am willing to learn.” Javed Ahmed Ghamidi