ABSTRACT
Islam is the Last of the nostalgia religions. During the thousand years that stretched from the rise of Alexander the Great (336 B.C.) to the death of the prophet Muhammad (A.D. 632) the principal motivation of worship had been the yearning of man to return to his true home outside of this world of generation and decay and, if possible, to subdue and slough off his worthless human part and redeem his innate divinity while still imprisoned in bodily existence. 1 Revelation replaced reason as the fountainhead of intellectual authority, the existence of evil emerged as the principal emotional preoccupation, man came to view himself as an aggregate of conflicting forces, a battleground of the demoniacal and the divine, the goal of his existence became escape into transcendence, to be in the world but not of it the motto of his conduct.
