AL-ILḤĀD: ASBĀBUHU WA MAFĀTĪḤ AL-‘ILĀJ [ATHEISM: ITS CAUSES AND KEYS TO TREATMENT]. By Muhammad Nasir. Karbala, Iraq: Mu’assasat al-Dalīl (affiliated with the Holy Husseiniya Shrine). 1447 AH/2026. Pp. 301. Paper. 3,000,000 IRR.
Reviewed by Alireza Maktabdar, Editor-in-Chief, Al-Afaq (Arabic journal)
The book Al-Ilḥād: Asbābuhu wa Mafātīḥ al-‘Ilāj is the work of the contemporary scholar Muhammad Nasir, head of the Theology Unit at Mu’assasat al-Dalīl, an institution affiliated with the Holy Husseiniya Shrine in Karbala. Composed in a single 301-page volume, the book is a response to the recent wave of “New Atheism” in the Arab world and the broader Muslim world. Focusing on new theology (kalām jadīd), philosophy of religion, and comparative studies of science and religion, the author seeks to establish himself among the methodological critics of contemporary atheism; the book’s specialized domain may be described as “rational apologetics,” approached with a critical stance toward the epistemological foundations of the empirical sciences.
The book’s significance as an introduction for an international scholarly audience lies in its departure from the traditional patterns of Islamic apologetic literature. Whereas many contemporary Islamic works addressing atheism rely on moral exhortation or simple polemical argumentation, Nasir adopts a structured methodology that divides the phenomenon of atheism into cognitive, methodological, theological, and empirical components, weighing the logical value of each on its own terms. The work thus reflects a broader shift in Islamic theology from responding to scattered doubts toward structural analysis and epistemological root-tracing of rival intellectual currents — an approach that can help Western researchers understand how contemporary Islamic theology engages the tools of philosophy of science to address challenges arising from modern physics and quantum theory.
Rather than treating atheism as the simple proposition of “denying God’s existence,” Nasir analyzes it as a comprehensive intellectual system that is continually reproduced within the context of modern science, civilizational transformation, and the existential crises of contemporary humanity. The book’s argument unfolds across three major axes, in each of which the author first formulates the rival claim before subjecting its epistemological value to critique.
The first axis addresses science and the challenge of quantum physics. One of the book’s most notable sections analyzes what the author terms the “emergence of quantum physics and its deployment in the service of atheism”. Because quantum mechanics describes subatomic particle behavior in probabilistic terms and rests on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, it has, over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, given rise to numerous philosophical interpretations; some atheistic currents have argued that because quantum events appear to occur without a determinate material cause, or because particles can seemingly arise from nothing, traditional causality — and by extension the need for a Creator or orderer of the universe — is thereby rendered obsolete. Nasir engages this scientific debate directly, seeking to distinguish physical data itself from the philosophical interpretation attached to it, and introduces the concept of the “necessity of methodological separation between the sciences”, arguing that the conflation of distinct epistemic domains — a category mistake — is the primary source of much confusion: empirical science, bound by its own methodology of sense perception, experiment, mathematics, and measurement, is entitled only to describe intra-material causal relations and has no authority to pronounce, affirmatively or negatively, on metaphysical questions.
In further delineating the boundaries of science, the author devotes an extensive section to “the process of theorizing: its principles, characteristics, and epistemic value”, reminding readers that scientific theories are, in their essence, provisional mental constructs for better explaining phenomena — a matter of instrumentalism versus realism — rather than absolute, unchanging ontological truths; generalizing a provisional scientific theory into a stable atheistic worldview is therefore logically unwarranted. Nasir extends this argument to the relationship between civilizational progress and atheism, contending that the technological and scientific advancement of modern civilization bears no formal or logical necessity to the correctness of the atheistic worldviews often advanced alongside it: civilizational progress is the product of accumulated empirical method, whereas atheism is a philosophical position, and linking the two is a form of propaganda or psychological fallacy.
The second axis turns to divine providence and the question of human need or capacity to receive it. Nasir divides atheism into two cognitive roots connected to this theme: the denial of human capacity to receive divine providence — the claim that humanity is too insignificant within the vastness of the cosmos for the Creator of so immense a universe to concern Himself with guiding or legislating for such a being, a claim the author challenges by showing that the material immensity of the cosmos does not negate the rational and moral standing of the human being as a moral agent — and the denial of human need for divine providence, the claim that modern humanity, relying on science, technology, and human law, has become self-sufficient and no longer requires transcendent guidance or revelation. Against this, Nasir argues that the human need for an ultimate source and absolute ethics exceeds mere instrumental and technological needs, and that technology can never supply the ultimate meaning of life.
The third axis addresses classical and modern theological, ethical, and historical objections to religiosity. The author first takes up the problem of evil, critiquing its logical value as an argument against God’s existence and reinterpreting evils within the framework of divine wisdom and human freedom. He then addresses the claim that there is “no objective effect from the relationship with God” — the objection that there is no empirically observable difference between the material lives of the religious and the non-religious, and that prayer and religious ritual exert no influence on the physical structure of the world — responding by explaining the moral, psychological, and teleological functions of religiosity and rejecting an instrumentalist reading of the human-divine relationship. Nasir further engages the objection concerning the “negative effect of religious law on religious believers themselves” — the claim that religious law obstructs human freedom, creativity, and psychological growth and leads religious societies into stagnation — countering it by explaining the rational role of Sharī’ah in preserving a society’s moral cohesion and the spiritual formation of the individual, while distinguishing the behavioral deviations of believers from the essence of the law itself. Finally, addressing the “human origin of religion” thesis, the author critiques naturalistic-historical approaches to the phenomenon of revelation and reinforces the epistemological foundations of Islamic revelation.
The book’s principal audience spans a broad segment of the academic community, including professors and graduate students in theology, philosophy of religion, new theology (kalām jadīd), science-and-religion studies, and comparative theology; it is also valuable for religious preachers, family counselors, and educators confronting the doctrinal questions of the younger generation in Muslim societies, serving as a methodological and diagnostic guide. Within Islamic studies, the work makes a meaningful contribution to elevating the level of theological discourse, and its scholarly standing derives from the constructive overlap it establishes between traditional rational theology and contemporary philosophy of science: by engaging directly with quantum physics and the methodology of the empirical sciences, Nasir demonstrates that the contemporary Muslim theologian cannot adequately critique atheism without a precise understanding of contemporary scientific achievements. Among the work’s most notable strengths are its analytically differentiated methodology — separating the grounds of atheism into scientific, methodological, and ethical categories, which guards against the generalizations common in theological texts — its sustained focus on the “logical value” of competing arguments, evaluated independently in discrete sections, which lends the text an academic and even-handed character, and its cultural translation of complex modern challenges, rendering discussions of quantum physics and scientific theorizing in precise language within the conceptual framework of Islamic theology, such as divine providence and causality.
The book is not, however, without shortcomings. Its most significant limitation is the absence of detailed engagement with the major works of contemporary Western philosophers of religion — whether atheist thinkers such as Michael Martin, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, or theist philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne; engagement with such primary Western sources would have added considerably to the book’s scholarly depth and international relevance. In certain chapters, the author also assumes the ontological presuppositions of Islamic theology without providing sufficient epistemological argumentation for a genuinely neutral or non-believing reader, which may limit the book’s effectiveness in fully secular dialogical contexts.
Al-Ilḥād: Asbābuhu wa Mafātīḥ al-‘Ilāj, by Muhammad Nasir, is a coherent, scholarly, and forward-looking work within the field of new Islamic theology, seeking through causal examination and methodological analysis to identify the roots of modern atheism. By delineating the boundary between empirical science and positivist or materialist philosophical interpretation, the author provides a rational framework for defending concepts such as divine providence, religious law, and revelation in the contemporary world. The work is recommended to all researchers in Islamic studies, comparative religion, and philosophy of science; it offers not only a window into how Muslim thinkers engage the challenges of modern science but also a useful model for writing educational and research texts on the critique of atheism in language that is academic, even-handed, and free of sectarian bias. Translation and publication of this work in international languages could make a valuable contribution to the vitality of cross-cultural dialogue on the relationship between science and religion.
