The essence of the Islamic worldview

Since the dawn of humanity, people have been driven to seek answers to profound questions about their existence and the meaning of life. Caught in this perplexing condition, humanity has turned to prophets, philosophers, sages, and scholars to explain the purpose of life. As the world evolved from a primitive to a more modern setting, the expansion of human knowledge and understanding opened up many avenues for answering the once unanswerable questions. Though knowledge expansion in the world of science brought many positive changes in human life, on the philosophical level, humanity became so divided with countless contending ideas and ideologies that compartmentalized people into their own ways of thinking. In the West, the end of the Dark Ages, which gave birth to the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, brought about many different philosophical views on what constitutes the ideal way of life for maximum satisfaction. Most of these philosophical thoughts on a good life are focused solely on worldly aspects. Being secular, these paradigms of life were more concerned with the ‘here and now’ and paid the least attention to life in the hereafter. Since God and religion were rejected during and after the Renaissance era, they found little relevance in the lives of Europeans. In contrast, in the East, people hold fast to their religious and traditional ways of life. As such, the worldview embraced by the masses was a God-centered one. Before delving into the core of this essay, we will briefly define what a worldview is and examine some of the major classifications of worldviews followed by people around the globe. Upon achieving that we will highlight some of the main features of the Islamic worldview.