This I Believe

Truth vs. Extremism: where does truth exist?

Extremism is a branch in the previously-dealt-with issue: Exclusivism and secularism. The key difference here is that the later tend to rationalize their discourse and hide their rage; whereas Extremists move towards exhibiting their emotional ignorance by resorting to one side of the coin, isolating themselves in one of the two extremes of the reality.

The tragedy of Extremism shows clearer in the loss of equilibrium between the descriptive doubts of self and the prescriptive realities of truth. This radical antonymy is the first factor to prepare the scene for truth assassination. The immediate outcome of such event is the denial of the duality of the existence. The later, from this eye of perception, is seen or unseen, concrete or abstract, bad or good, physical or metaphysical…etc. These descriptive doubts manifest the very basis of the “either-or policy, which glorifies the doubts of self/subject over the truth of reality/objects.

The question of human nature, for example, was and is till one of the fundamental concerns throughout human history. The debate brought about three universal tendencies; two of them stand on the two far extremes, and the third sticks to the middle. One of the two extremes, in an attempt to dispel their existential stress, glorifies emotions over rational solutions and, therefore, forgets about human bodily, social, and mental demands, in terms of marriage and scientific research. This tendency exists throughout the whole world as in the Christian monasticism and the extremist Suffism in the Arab Islamic Civilization.

The other extreme, however, was a revolutionary act against the mythical interpretation of truth which displayed an absolute dictatorship against people’s minds and their thirst for mental freedom and human natural rights. This mental revolution, which responds to the call of human intuition, have scored many fruitful results and made a radical shift from the irrational thinking of the Christian elites at that time, toward Mind-Centred views of the universe.

Yet, unfortunately, that victory didn’t last for a long time; the birth of epistemology was the turning point in the development of human knowledge. The rise of the Relativity and the Incertitude Principle proved that the so-called exact

sciences are not 100% exact, and that the nature of the Object/Truth is still questionable and amazing. These deficiencies touched, without exception, all branches of empirical sciences, and consequently led to a global scepticism in which scientists have but to review their views and attitudes toward both physics and metaphysics.

It has been clear by now, that truth has got something to do with both faces of existence, and that the crux of the dilemma lies behind the mentalities of action and reaction, which escaped the occasion for effective interaction and self-reflection to take lace on both parts of the debate. This ideal tendency is the key word of the middle approach to life and whole existence: Islam.