Faith & Certainty | In
Pursuit of Conviction
بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِيْمِ
Abstract
Muslims trying to hold on to their faith in environments hostile to Islam—or to religion in general—often find themselves struggling to achieve a calming sense of certainty for the beliefs they hold.
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The ‘In Pursuit of Conviction’ series aims to restore clarity and conviction in the fundamentals of our faith as Muslims through an interdisciplinary approach that combines revelation and theology with research in psychology, neuroscience, and other academic fields. With this approach, we will be examining the six core beliefs that serve as the foundation of faith: belief in God, Angels, Scripture, Prophethood, Afterlife, and Destiny.
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Through this analysis, we hope to nurture conviction in the hearts of Muslims around the globe who are struggling to understand the value of their faith. This first article serves as an introduction to the series, focusing on understanding the phenomena of faith and certainty themselves.
Preface
In this article, we mainly build on the work of modern Muslim thinkers, Allama Iqbal (d. 1938 CE)
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and Malik Bennabi (d. 1973 CE)
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as well as the medieval polymath, Ibn al-Qayyim (d. 751 AH)
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regarding the nature of faith, knowledge, and certainty. Iqbal and Bennabi wrote extensively on a problem that they foresaw would arise in the Muslim conscience due to the influence of western thought on Muslims around the world at the turn of the 20th century. They were concerned that Muslims would adopt a Cartesian approach to knowledge and, as a result, start to lose confidence and conviction in their faith due to failing to realize its intellectual underpinnings. Bennabi writes in The Qur’anic Phenomenon,
For a long time, our faith on this point has depended on the principle of authority, which can hardly keep pace with the demands of the minds of an elite already captivated by positivism.
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And
Whatever it may be, the problem of Qur’anic exegesis arises at two levels: firstly, the problem of religious conviction at the level of the intellectual and secondly, the problem of the popular ideas at the level of the layman.
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While many thinkers attempted to construct arguments and proofs from within the western paradigm, Iqbal and Bennabi recognized the weakness of that approach and provided strong critiques against rationalism and empiricism. Iqbal describes the fall of rationalism in the Western and Muslim world in The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam,
With the elimination of dogma came the utilitarian view of morality, and thus rationalism completed the reign of unbelief. Such was the state of theological thought in Germany when Kant appeared. His Critique of Pure Reason revealed the limitations of human reason and reduced the whole work of the rationalists to a heap of ruins…Ghazali’s Philosophical scepticism which, however, went a little too far, virtually did the same kind of work in the world of Islam in breaking the back of that proud but shallow rationalism which moved in the same direction as pre-Kantian rationalism in Germany.
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Ibn al-Qayyim lived in a very different time in Islamic history but, as Iqbal explains, medieval scholars were also under the influence of a radical rationalistic approach to knowledge. Ibn al-Qayyim, like his teacher Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 728 AH), criticized the trend within the Muslim scholastic tradition of attempting to articulate philosophical proofs for the existence of God. Ibn Taymiyyah writes in his introduction to Radd alaa Mantaqiyeen,
I have always known that Greek logic is not necessary for any intelligent minded person and it does not provide any benefit to any light-minded individual…and it is clear to me that most of what they mention regarding the Divine reality and logic comes from false assumptions regarding God.
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In the same vein, Ibn Qayyim also criticized these philosophical proofs,
They are not able to affirm the existence of the Lord (rabb), the messenger, nor any other of the foundations of faith that are necessary for the happiness (sa’adah) of the servant.
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He saw these arguments as coming from the Greek Hellenistic tradition that failed to engender any true knowledge of God:
They wish to show that a possible existent (mumkin) requires a necessary existent (waajib)…As for the existence of God, the One who is the only worthy of our devotion, the Ever Living, the Sustainer of all, the Irresistible…Who has knowledge of the hidden matters, Who Sees, Hears, Speaks, is Pleased…then their proof and logical premises do not prove any of these essential realities of faith that are shared by the believers.
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Iqbal also recognized this problem regarding the rational and empirical attempts to prove God,
I hope I have made it clear to you that the ontological and the teleological arguments, as ordinarily stated, carry us nowhere…This view of thought gives us a mere mechanician in the one case, and creates an unbridgeable gulf between the ideal and the real in the other.
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From this perspective, Ibn al-Qayyim provides powerful insights into the nature of faith and certainty in many of his works including Tareeq ul-Hijratayn, As-Sawaa’iq al-Mursala, Miftaah Dar as-Sa’adah, and Madarij as-Salikeen.
Building on the legacy of these scholars, we will integrate research from fields such as neuroscience and psychology, as well as examine revelation to provide further insight into the phenomena of faith and conviction, while demonstrating the inadequacy of dogmatic rationalism and empiricism. The paper is divided into three sections: i) The Spiritual Instinct, ii) The Necessity of Faith and iii) Attaining Certainty. The first section describes the starting point when it comes to approaching questions about the unseen world. The second section explains faith and its relation to values and reason, demonstrating its necessity. The last section focuses on understanding certainty as a spiritual-emotional experience rather than a theoretical property of a specific argument. We hope that this article provides a framework for Muslims to understand the role of faith in their lives and an alternative Qur’anically-rooted approach to discovering the Truth of this world.
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