Principle Fifty-Four: Allah often negates a thing whenever its benefit and intended fruit are absent, even though its outward form is still present.

Allah created the human being and implanted within him faculties such as hearing, sight, and the heart so that, by means of them, he might recognise his Lord and fulfill His right. That is their purpose; when they serve that purpose they themselves are perfected, and so is the person who possesses them.

If that purpose is lost, the very existence of those faculties becomes more harmful to a person than their absence, for they then stand as Allah’s proof against His servants and as the favour through which the interests of religion and worldly life are obtained. Consequently, they are either a complete blessing when joined to their intended end, or they become a trial and a conclusive argument against their owner when he employs them for something other than what they were created for. For this reason Allah, Most High, frequently denies these three faculties to certain classes of deniers who are shackled by the chains of blind imitation of their fathers, masters, and leaders, who have stripped themselves of Allah’s signs—even though they may bear Islamic names and don academic garb and titles. Such people are the very ones to whom Allah refers when He describes the disbelievers and the hypocrites.

He says, “When it is said to them, ‘Follow what Allah has sent down,’ they reply, ‘Rather, we follow what we found our forefathers upon.’ Even though their forefathers understood nothing and were not rightly guided? The parable of those who disbelieve is that of one who shouts at something that hears nothing but a call and a cry—deaf, dumb, and blind; so they do not reason.” (al-Baqarah 2:171)

And in Surat al-Aʿraf He says, “When your Lord took from the children of Adam, from their loins, their progeny and made them testify against themselves, ‘Am I not your Lord?’” (al-Aʿraf 7:172).

These are the signs of His Lordship—clear and eloquent—within yourselves: in your very formation in the loins of your fathers and the wombs of your mothers, in your emergence from them as sound human beings, and in His subjugation of everything in the heavens and the earth for your benefit. The verses then go on to depict the end result of a person’s heedlessness toward those signs.

He makes the cause of that heedlessness plain when He says, “Recite to them the story of the one to whom We gave Our signs, but he cast them off” (al-Aʿraf 7:175),

meaning that he threw them away and stripped them from himself in aversion: “Had We willed, We could have raised him by means of them” (al-Aʿraf 7:176). We granted him those signs only that he might reflect on Allah’s creation and wisdom and thereby ascend the ranks of perfection, yet he clung to the animal earth and was content with blind imitation, a trait characteristic of cattle. The passage concludes with the evil end of this apostate imitator: “They have hearts with which they do not understand, eyes with which they do not see, and ears with which they do not hear. Such people are like cattle—indeed, more misguided; they are the heedless.” (al-Aʿraf 7:179)

Thus He informs us that while the physical forms of the animal senses remain, their human benefits are lost. Hence His saying, “It is not the eyes that go blind; rather, it is the hearts within the chests that go blind” (al-Hajj 22:46).

And He says, “You cannot make the dead hear, nor can you make the deaf hear the call when they turn their backs and flee; nor can you guide the blind out of their misguidance. You cause none to hear except those who believe in Our signs, and they are those who submit.” (al-Naml 27:80-81)

Verses with this purport are exceedingly numerous.

The Exalted also says, “Indeed, those who disbelieve in Allah and His messengers and seek to make a distinction between Allah and His messengers, and say, ‘We believe in some and disbelieve in others,’ and wish to take…”