Abstract

The current essay is an attempt to shed some light on the way materialism in the human community developed itself from a limited and tiny trend into an integrated and widespread system that had a great impact on augmenting the attitude to atheism. The essay thus shows that this development and change first took place in the European west as a result of certain reasons and circumstances that had not been available anywhere else. Thus, from that very place, atheism began to invade other territories and times. Accordingly, the essay concentrated on two major points; first, the actual conditions that paved the way to the growth of materialism in the European west and granted materialists a golden opportunity to rise forcefully and to enlarge the circle of their approach. Second, the means employed by materialists for spreading and controlling. As an attempt to survey the state of atheism for all aspects in order to come across the best remedy and the most successful solutions needed by human communities so that they should be able to survive the dangers of atheism, it was necessary to check the matter from its very beginning; so, the essay studies the earliest stages when materialism began to change from a very limited and insignificant view into a perfect and widely known system and studies the reasons so resulting. Also, the essay investigates the basic issues that formed the substance of the sway of materialism and reviews that methods used by materialism for reaching at such a highly developed stage. The talk about the spread of materialism and atheism could be focused on the Islamic and Arab world and could be restricted to the West. Nevertheless, it seems impossible to understand the spread of atheism in Islamic and Arab world unless we understand richly how and why it had found its way in the West originally, because it came to the Islamic and Arab world from the West, where it had been originated. However, to understand this matter fully needs returning to the beginning and, more precisely, to the time when materialism and atheism were no more than unfamiliarly weird and shameful views that it was too disgraceful to express. Besides, accusations would be launched at any one who might express such unwanted views. The essay thus studies what took place and what changed to turn this weird view into such a widely known opinion that is embraced by a good number of people throughout the world. More exclusively, the essay pays much attention to the earliest stage of the emergence of materialism in order to introduce to a further study about the reasons of the spread of materialism and atheism in the Islamic and Arab worlds and to another study of finding solutions to this problem.