On this very day, five years ago, the world bid farewell to the renowned physicist and visionary cosmologist Stephen Hawking. He left us after spending most of his scientific life confined to a wheelchair, paralyzed, and speaking only through a computer-generated voice.
Hawking made groundbreaking contributions to cosmology and the physics of the universe, especially in the study of black holes, where he unveiled many of their hidden mysteries.
Hawking departed this world with his dream-filled eyes still reaching for the deepest secrets of the cosmos. Through his vision, he illuminated the most complex scientific enigmas, offering unprecedented answers that opened entirely new horizons for scientific research.
Despite the illness that baffled doctors—who initially gave him only two years to live—he defied all odds, dedicating his long, unexpected life to the pursuit of knowledge.
Five years ago today, his spirit returned to its Creator, armed with an extraordinary strength through which he overcame his illness. While trapped in complete physical paralysis, his mind soared beyond its limitations, producing insights so profound that they enriched humanity’s collective understanding of the universe and shaped the global scientific community.
He did all this within the boundaries of the scientific data available to him, guided by the thundering voice of knowledge echoing through his consciousness. He journeyed fearlessly through the atomic age, the advent of NATO technologies, and the ever-expanding cosmos, tracing its story back to the very moment of the so-called Big Bang.
Hawking’s thoughts journeyed along a scientific path where he grappled with death itself, a mystery that left doctors perplexed. He pursued the ultimate secret, the one through which, as he described, “the mind of God” reveals the design of our universe—not to diminish faith, but to test us as we sail back toward Him, each interpreting our symbolic connection with the divine in our own personal way, filled with the wonder of a child confronting the infinite.
Since the publication of his famous book, “A Brief History of Time”, Hawking seemed as though he was, with remarkable persistence, searching for himself within us—we, the healthy humans, whom God distinguished from His other creations by entrusting us with a sacred intellectual legacy, a gift He placed deep within us—eternal, undying.
Perhaps God never intervenes directly for a reason known only to Him—allowing us instead to craft our own existence, testing how far our creative potential can go as we symbolically mirror Him, the Creator.
It is as though God, through Stephen Hawking—the brilliant, boundary-breaking scientist—wanted us to prove that we, His human children, cannot truly find our way back to Him—to love Him, revere Him, and worship Him as we ought—except through knowledge and beauty.
But how?
Perhaps each of us carries a unique path and a personal approach that will guide us toward His light—whole, fulfilled, and dignified—empowered by the wisdom, will, and creativity He instilled within us. Each of us must navigate this journey alone, sailing toward Him.
Indeed, we cannot triumph in this journey collectively; we return as we came—individually, stripped bare of everything. God is not a single gate through which all must pass, for if He were, we would cease to be individuals and become herds instead.
This, precisely, is what God wills for us: to return to Him individually, each following our own unique path. And that path, for every one of us, can only lie beyond the illusions of religious institutions that exploit humanity through ignorance and hypocrisy.
I believe Hawking was never afraid—neither of ignorance nor of the way institutions operate, those very institutions that deliberately promote ignorance, spread poverty, and foster darkness, so they can ride on our backs and herd us like flocks of cattle.
This is why he always insisted that the real danger to humanity does not come from ignorance itself—for ignorance has always been widespread—but rather from the pretense of knowledge.
The illusion of knowledge is, in fact, humanity’s greatest threat. It is even more dangerous than ignorance because it is the perfect tool through which religious and political institutions now control nations and populations, using the power and values of wealth and political-economic capital to accomplish this difficult mission.
According to Hawking—at least based on what I have read of his writings—the illusion of knowledge is the primary threat facing humanity today. It is far more dangerous than ignorance because it serves as the ideal mechanism for religious and political powers to manipulate the world and its people, relying on the overwhelming influence of capital and economic dominance to maintain control.
Today, this dangerous phenomenon resurfaces—in an age of scientific breakthroughs, splitting atomic nuclei, and preparing for humanity’s leap to Mars. It has returned in a new form: reshaping artificial intelligence itself and using it to exploit us under ever-evolving consumerist traditions, now powered by science itself.
Through this, it threatens to erode human resilience and destroy our emotional immunity, undermining the achievements of civilization—the knowledge, medicine, philosophy, literature, and art humanity has gained through revolutions, struggles, and intellectual endeavors.
It is now reconfiguring its predatory capabilities, strengthening its grip over us by feeding off the immense wealth and capital accumulation that artificial intelligence will inevitably generate, further inflating their banks and their pockets.
This is how the illusion of knowledge, empowered by absolute freedom in exploiting the fruits of artificial intelligence, will seize control of the world and reshape it according to strange, ruthless traditions—swallowing up the very achievements of humanity.
Achievements for which entire nations sacrificed deeply to build the health, relative peace, social well-being, intellectual prosperity, and cultural richness we enjoy today.
And yet, the Arab media chose to handle Hawking’s passing in the cheapest and most superficial way imaginable—a tragedy that continues even five years after his death.
For them, he was nothing more than an atheist or an agnostic, and they built their laughable, absurd, and shallow judgments around that label. They condemned him to hellfire, portraying themselves as if they were God’s exclusive representatives, holding a divine franchise alongside religious authorities to categorize humanity—deciding who belongs in heaven and who burns in hell.
This mindset continues to reenact the tragedy of Averroes (Ibn Rushd), repeating the same disgraceful mistakes without learning anything from that catastrophe, nor from the decline, setbacks, and humiliation that followed.
