Allah’s Ownership of the World: The Most Frightening Logic in History

Every empire begins with a claim of ownership, but none so total as Islam’s assertion that “to Allah belongs the dominion of the heavens and the earth.” What sounds poetic in prayer becomes political in practice: if all land already belongs to God, then conquest is not aggression—it is reclamation. The world is divided into submission and rebellion, believers and trespassers, Dār al-Islām and Dār al-Ḥarb. Within this moral geometry, expansion becomes virtue, and the unbeliever’s refusal to yield becomes sin.

That metaphysics of property created a civilization built on divine entitlement. It still shapes the headlines—from theocratic regimes that claim moral jurisdiction over law to militants who see slaughter as purification. When ideology begins with ownership by an invisible landlord, freedom becomes a lease revocable at will. The premise is terrifying not because it is ancient but because it endures.

Dialectical Materialism, Logical Empiricism, and Secular Humanism reject that premise at its root. They begin not with God but with matter, evidence, and empathy. Matter precedes mind; truth requires verification; morality arises from human suffering and flourishing. These systems assume that ethics evolve from the conditions of life, not from decrees in heaven. Islam, by contrast, fixes morality for all time. Its good is whatever pleases God; its evil is whatever defies Him. The result is a moral structure immune to revision and hostile to doubt—the antithesis of science, democracy, and freedom.

A dialectical materialist views ownership as a social relation, not a cosmic fact. Property belongs to those who labor and cooperate, not to a deity who commands from outside the universe. “All the world belongs to Allah” collapses under that logic because ownership presupposes duality—an owner and the owned—while claiming monotheistic unity. The phrase defeats itself. In a self-moving material universe, no external proprietor can exist. The world belongs to itself.

Logical empiricism exposes the same contradiction in knowledge. Revelation offers certainty without evidence; science offers evidence without certainty. One forbids testing; the other lives by it. The empiricist doubts to learn; the believer believes to end doubt. A claim such as “God revealed His will to one man” cannot be verified, reproduced, or falsified. It belongs to the category of statements that, in Reichenbach’s terms, are literally meaningless. Yet entire legal systems are built upon it, criminalizing skepticism as blasphemy. Revelation thus becomes the most successful closed circuit of thought ever designed.

Secular humanism defines ethics not by obedience but by consequence. Good is what reduces suffering and expands freedom; evil is what inflicts pain and curtails choice. Islamic jurisprudence defines morality by command. A believer may enslave a captive or execute an apostate because divine permission outweighs human empathy. Once morality depends on will, not reason, atrocity becomes virtue. To the empiricist, that is not faith—it is moral inversion.

The difference extends into law and governance. The Qur’an is treated as constitution; amendment is heresy. The modern democratic charter, by contrast, rests on consent. Law arises from debate, not decree. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins with the person; the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam subordinates the person to Sharia. One enshrines freedom of belief; the other limits it to divine approval. Rights conditioned on revelation are not rights at all—they are temporary licenses in a celestial bureaucracy.

Gender and class follow the same pattern. When scripture assigns hierarchy as natural—men “a degree above women,” believers above unbelievers—inequality becomes metaphysical. Dialectical ethics recognize hierarchy as historical and therefore alterable. Materialism sees injustice as a social construct, not a divine order. Revelation sanctifies subordination; reason dismantles it. That is why every attempt to legislate equality in theocratic states provokes fury: equality is not merely political rebellion—it is cosmic blasphemy.

The difference also shapes economies. The secular world measures justice by distribution of material power; the theocratic world measures it by conformity to divine property law. To forbid interest or profit may have once signaled fairness; now it often paralyzes growth. When obedience replaces productivity as moral currency, poverty becomes piety. The oppressed are praised for submission instead of liberated through change.

These moral architectures produce distinct kinds of politics. In a revelation-based order, compromise is treason because truth is fixed. Diplomacy becomes delay, not dialogue; peace means the silence of surrender. A secular order, by contrast, treats every truth as provisional. It assumes error as part of progress. That assumption—the right to be wrong—is the foundation of pluralism. The revelationist world cannot sustain it, because disagreement implies imperfection in the divine law.

The Dharmic and Confucian traditions of Asia arrived at this insight centuries earlier. They placed morality within causal law, not divine will. “Tat vam asi”—Thou art That—collapses the gap between subject and object. To harm another is to harm oneself; to question reality is to honor it. Such monism underwrites tolerance. The Abrahamic insistence on ownership divides the universe into ruler and ruled; the Dharmic sense of unity dissolves the distinction. One breeds empire; the other, introspection.

Secular humanism is the modern continuation of that monistic vision in scientific form. The atom, the organism, the person, the planet—all exist in interdependent causality. Ethics built on that realization do not need revelation; they require empathy and evidence. In that universe, conquest and conversion are not duties but crimes against reason. The moral task is not to expand God’s kingdom but to expand understanding.

The world’s deepest conflicts now follow these ethical front lines. Wherever law is subordinated to scripture, pluralism erodes. Wherever evidence governs, liberty endures. This is not a clash of civilizations but of premises—between revelation that forbids revision and reason that demands it. One treats contradiction as sin; the other treats it as progress. The question of our age is whether we will continue evolving or return to obedience.

Defending secular ethics does not mean erasing faith; it means preventing any faith from becoming compulsory. Private belief is a right; public imposition is tyranny. The state must serve the citizen, not the deity. Only secularism protects both believer and skeptic by refusing to legislate metaphysics. A government that enforces theology inevitably turns citizens into subjects. A government that enforces evidence invites them to think.

The accusation that humanism “worships man” misunderstands humility. To accept the authority of evidence is to admit fallibility; to claim infallibility is arrogance. Science revises itself precisely because it knows it errs. Revelation cannot revise itself because it claims it never did. Of the two, which shows greater modesty?

Reason is not perfect, but it corrects. Dialectical materialism does not promise paradise, only progress. Logical empiricism offers no salvation, only understanding. Secular humanism offers no eternity, only responsibility. These modest promises have produced the most peaceful and creative centuries in human history. They have given us medicine, democracy, and the rule of law—achievements born not of revelation but of relentless questioning.

The earth needs no celestial landlord; it needs caretakers who understand cause and effect. To protect the planet because it is holy is piety; to protect it because it sustains us is ethics. The first depends on faith; the second depends on reason. The first ends when belief fades; the second endures as long as life itself.

Ideas, not armies, will decide which ethic rules the future. If revelation continues to claim ownership of truth, humanity will remain a tenant on its own planet. If reason prevails, the world will finally belong to those who live in it. The choice is stark but simple: obedience or understanding, faith or freedom. History has already shown which path leads forward.

Citations

1. The Qur’an, 2:255, 48:29.
2. Al-Māwardī, Al-Aḥkām al-Sulṭāniyya (11th cent.).
3. Abdullahi An-Na’im, Islam and the Secular State (Harvard Univ. Press, 2008).
4. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (1844).
5. Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951).
6. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948); Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (1990).
7. Radhakrishnan & Moore (eds.), A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy (1957).
8. Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian (1927).
9. Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Vol. I: Our Oriental Heritage (1935).
10. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (1986).

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