2 views, one mistake

Descartes decided that his mind and the world were two logically distinct entities, neither necessarily entailing the existence of the other (i.e. either can exist without the other).

This assumption causes no end of problems and everything becomes uncertain and even unknowable except the fact that I appear to be thinking. It also introduces the treacherous idea that I am the owner of my mind and its contents and somehow responsible for them in an ultimately inexplicable way (for who or what is the ‘I’ to whom belong these ideas and perceptions and who, moreover, is the uncaused causer of them?)

This dualism proposes that I am the ‘subject’ of experiences of an ‘objective’ world: I am the reader of the universe.

A second fundamental assumption might be that, far from being the reader, I am in some way more the author of my world (and the world is always ‘my world’). The German for this is ‘eigentlichkeit’ or ‘mine-ly-ness’, usually translated as ‘authenticity’.

Someone who is authentic, in this sense, is someone who has accepted radical responsibility for their authorship of their own world. Not that anyone ever asks to be such an author, or decides to be; we are that inevitably. Recognising this and accepting the consequences dissolves Descartes’ problems.

Islam starts and ends here.