Culture & Arts Chapter in Qatar University (QU) Alumni Association has organized cultural webinar entitled: (Contemporary Man’s Need for Faith), presented by Dr. Badrane Benlahcene, Research Associate at Ibn Khaldon Center for Humanities & Social Sciences in Qatar University (QU).
The webinar's purpose was to consider the reality of contemporary man, which is characterized by uncertainty, loss of meaning, and the reduction of human existence to its materialistic consumer dimension. This uncertainty has excluded faith from human life by virtue of modernity's discourse, which preaches rationality, humanity and which seeks to make man the center of the universe. It came to an end when man's religious purities were stripped away and replaced with ideals that appeared to restore man's centrality and dignity while also releasing his abilities, but they lost him in himself.
Commenting on the webinar, Amna Abdulkarim, Vice President of Culture & Arts Chapter- QU Alumni Association said: “We decided to discuss the topic (Contemporary Man's Need for Faith) because of the successive contemporary occurrences that shook man's conscience from war damages and their negative impacts on the religious and moral values and on the construction of human civilization in general”. “Due to the imposition of governments and international organizations restrictions on social distancing due to Corona pandemic, modern man has had to live in a social isolation for a long time, that emergences social chaos, and contributed in the growth of individualism, and other behavioral and socio-psychological illnesses.”
“By presenting this webinar, we wanted to discuss how faith can be a guidance for everything that is happening around us, and a pillar of stability, and a safe area to resort to when the rapid circumstances of contemporary life, afflict us,” She added.
For his part, Dr. Badrane Benlahcene, Research Associate at Ibn Khaldon Center for Humanities & Social Sciences in Qatar University (QU) said: “Instead of the mind being represented in its capabilities, rationality has reduced the mind to a formal dimension and transformed into an ideology, the search then shifted from science to scientific ideology, which was not presented. Insofar as it made science an alternative ideology to religion and faith, thereby substituting a religious sacred with a scientific sacred, man's scientific technique. This has led man to the post-modern stage, which is characterized by suspicion, doubt, relativism, the loss of standards, and fluidity in everything, and has caused man to lose his humanity and nearly destroy his instinct, due to his loss of the transcendent who appeals to him, and the spiritual dimension that gives him meaning, and raises his sight beyond his fragmentary diaries that lack the compass.”
“Religious faith is desperately needed by modern man in order for him to rehabilitate himself in conception, thinking, and behavior, and for humanity to restore its humanity. This is what we see in the return of the role of religion to our contemporary lives, not only at the individual level, but also in the public sphere, in various countries around the world, and this, in turn, directs us to pay attention to our educational, cultural, social, and even political systems, and to frame them with the expansiveness of faith and its values, in order to preserve the human being, society, and civilization.” He added.