To Question Or Not To Question - Part 1

Salaam.

Is there room in Islam for muslims to question it? Does a need to question amount to doubt and disbelief? Can some things be questioned while others cannot? These are some of the disconcerting questions that come to mind when a muslim is driven to try to understand a particular aspect of Islam that maybe bothering him or has come to light through normal life experience. These are the very questions that bothered my mind when I first began my own journey of rediscovery into Islam.

Whenever I have felt the need to question something in Islam, I would discuss my concerns with my father hoping he would quell my concerns through his own knowledge and research or clarification by virtue of ‘second opinion’. One thing that I have always maintained with him is my belief (through social observation) that there are two types of muslims (regarding their hold on faith), there is the Follower and then there is the Believer. It is not easy to differentiate between the two, but there is an important difference which reaches out to the core of Islam. I will elaborate on this “core” in a while.

The difference is that the “Follower” resigns his mind to Islam even before he considers it. The reasons for which are varied but limited and mainly due to cultural persuasions. He follows because he believes in the one who preaches, or because it is his family legacy, or simply because everyone else does, and there are many such “cultural” reasons provided for the Follower.

The “Believer” is one who needs to understand, and resigns his mind to Islam after he has considered it, therefore “believing” in the true sense of the word. His reasons are varied also, but due to the fact that he will try to understand Islam through the lenses of his time (since he can never truly grasp the understanding of a time in the past or in the future), and all that the dynamics of history and science impose on his particular period, so his reasons, cultural or intellectual, will nevertheless be dictated by the dynamics of his time. Therefore, Islam as a universal message, has to stand the test of time, since it will be questioned by muslims of very different times. This “universality” is that core of Islam which I had mentioned earlier and no muslim today will question this universality.

A more detailed differentiation between Followers and Believers calls for its own article and inshaAllah I will get to that some day. For now, my purpose is to highlight the fact that there are some muslims who believe first and think later (or more commonly not think at all), while there are others who need to think first and then determine their beliefs. My intention is not to berate Followers here, for I truly believe that I myself was in this category not too long ago and such an approach to faith has benefitted both Islam and the world. My aim is merely to show that Islam has room for both, and mainly to prove that the implication of denouncing “questioners” is to go against the very core of the universality of Islam. All this without affecting the standing of the Follower.

The universality of Islam is evidenced in the many miracles of the Quran. The scientific prophecies in particular come to mind here. One of them is in Surah 57, Al-Hadeed in verse 25:

“...and We bestowed upon you from on high iron, in which there is awesome power as well as benefits for man...”

Here the Quran tells us that Iron was sent to us on earth, the amazing thing here is that the literal meaning of the verse was not clear until recent scientific research has proved that Iron as a material is not native to earth and rather arrived through various space phenomenon like asteroids and meteoroids. This scientific discovery gave new light to the words “We bestowed upon you from on high...” (often also translated as “We sent down to you Iron...”)

The other scientific miracle I wanted to mention was the verse in the Quran which explains the various stages of baby foetal formation in perfect order which has been the most popular miracle of the Quran quoted these days. (I will provide the verse reference and translation soon)

These two verses and the recent scientific discoveries prove the universal nature of the Quran and Islam for these scientific facts were not known (nor was it even possible to find out 1400 years ago considering the state of technology and scientific knowledge at the time) when the Quran was sent down. And more importantly to our topic, nor were these verses comprehensible when they were revealed to Muhammad (peace be upon him) at that time. And this universality of the Quran is attested to by our wise Prophet himself in his final Khutbah (sermon) where he says “...and may the last ones understand my words better than those who listened to me directly...”.

Now that we have affirmed that Islam is a universal message, we need to understand how it opens the door to future generations whose social values and behaviours will undoubtedly be different to ours (as testified to by history itself). This is where the need to question comes in. For without questioning through the various ‘lenses’ of different times, Islam’s universality will diminish while muslims adopt a rigid, inflexible, un-dynamic, interpretation of Islam. An approach that is doomed to failure. And we can see this already in the apathy of our youth and the hopelessness of our seniors towards Islam. While they still practice it as part of a social norm, the understanding and “belief” in it is withering under the pressure of a modern world that demands scientific reasoning of everything worth holding on to. When such reasoning cannot be provided for a particular aspect of social life, that aspect is either forgotten, enshrined in museums as snippets of history, or set aside from normal life and resigned to ceremonial significance to quench the cultural soul of mankind, but never allowed to interfere with life or society or politics or anything else deemed worthwhile in today’s modern world.

Muslims need to realise that this is the very time for Islam to shine for it fully quenches this “modern” outlook on life. Universality demands flexibility and dynamics, and Islam alone (as a religion and way of life) can stand through the test of time and the cultural, social, psychological, political and economic changes that are inherent in the very nature of time. And this has been proven time and time again by History. This is the crux of my argument, that ‘questioning’ is the very doorway to this universality. Without being able to question (and there can be no exceptions or we will fall into bigotry), without exerting the dynamics of Islam’s universality, we diminish Islam to the same mere “ceremonial significance” that has happened to the other major Religions of the world.

My friends this is where Islam is different, this is where we can hope to have Allah still in our lives and hearts and not only in our rituals. This is why Allah promised to protect the Quran so we always have access to the pure message throughout history and time, so that it can be applied, and we cannot apply it dynamically to every different stage in human history and scientific and modern development by keeping the Quran closed. We cannot resign our minds to stop thinking when we read the Quran when the Quran itself exhorts you to think, to reason! Why would we open the Quran except when we want to gain guidance from Allah? How can we expect to gain guidance when we open it only for ceremonial or cultural reasons, like reading for the sake of reading it (even when we don't understand it)? How can we ourselves expect to believe in the Quran when we leave the interpretations to “experts” we have no personal access to? Do they have something more than the Quran? Do they have something more than the lay muslim? And finally, as a believer of the Day of Judgement, do we not believe that Allah will hold us individually accountable for our beliefs and actions? Then how can we provide a time-specific interpretation (since all human endeavour to understand the Quran is bound to the natural dynamics of that particular time as explained earlier and as evidenced throughout history) for the entire future generation of mankind? How can we make sense, how can anything make “sense”, without being open to question? How can we close Islam to questioning when Allah opens Himself to questioning in the Quran and exhorts us to use our reason to see not only His existence, but His power as well? I will close this first part of the topic with the following verse from Surah 16, An-Nahl, verse 90 of the Quran:

“Behold, God enjoins justice, and the doing of good, and generosity towards [one’s] fellow-men; and He forbids all that is shameful and all that runs counter to reason, as well as envy; [and] He exhorts you [repeatedly] so that you might bear [all this] in mind.”