The word Muttaki is a word of very wide application. Basically Muttaki means that before taking a decision he refers it to his conscience, which is referring it to Allah in fact, because Allah has created the conscience so intact and so sure an answer to such questions that if anybody who refers the issue to his conscience and abides by the answer of the conscience will never err and will always be guided to the right path.
Now this is the fundamental which is required for every type of knowledge in sciences as well as otherwise. If a man is not Muttaki in this sense then he will never gain from anything. Wishful thinking is something which is contradictory to this meaning of Muttaki. Some scientists have been trying this in the East. They want to create gold and instead of following blindly the laws of nature, wherever the laws of nature led them, instead of following those directions they tried to follow their wishes. That means they were not Muttaki because if they had applied this issue to their conscience the answer would be the facts of life cannot be ignored. You can’t force the facts of life in any direction.
You must take the direction from the facts of life. This is the answer of conscience. So because they ignored it, they spent billions of rupees and turned them not into gold but into earth or ashes. They burnt things, the money down to ashes. So they turned gold into ashes. That was the answer of not being Muttaki in that department. On the other hand the Western scientists followed the dictates of conscience. Why Galileo was persecuted? Simply for the reason that he was following the dictates of his conscience. That is to say he passed the preliminary examination of Muttaki and he was led by Allah to greater discoveries.
So when the Holy Quran mentions word Muttaki, the first fundamental has been referred to in this sense and later on Muttaki expands in meaning in various verses of the Holy Quran, acquires larger dimensions and is used in those larger dimensions with higher values added to the word Muttaki. So it is not just one meaning that you can attribute to Muttaki. To begin with this is the meaning and later on it goes on expanding.
