When confronted with the unknown, a human’s response can be of two types – of humility or of arrogance.
Humility is accepting that I don’t know and that’s ok because my understanding of the world and all its intricacies is very limited. I don’t have the knowledge or the experience or even the brain capacity to comprehend the unknown.
Arrogance is rejecting the underlying concept just because something didn’t make sense to you.
This comes from a preconceived notion that you have the ability to understand and know everything and when something doesn’t make sense to you, it is obviously wrong.
One example of this unknown is the atrocious tragedies or unfortunate incidents in this world – from poverty to hunger to terminal illness to disasters including the recent pandemic, hurricanes and tornadoes in North America and earthquakes in Turkey and Syria.
One possible reason /explanation some people like to say in response to tragedies like this is that this is a test from God. It is a test to see who among the afflicted will practice patience – a quality worth of reward.
Some say this is from the ‘azaab of Allah – wrath of God. God brings tragedies in response to the heedlessness of the community to warn them.
This is true to a certain degree, at least in my personal life. Whenever something unfortunate befell me, it actually helped me get closer to the Faith.
We can talk about all the numerous reasons for these types of incidents.
But the truth is, we don’t know. Only Allah knows. And Allah knows best.
This dawned on me when I had a child recently – a baby boy.
One of the instructions from the nurses and the doctors was that the newborn has to be fed every three hours without any delay.
So even though the baby was sleeping peacefully in his own crib, they would come and wake him up just so the mom could feed him.
This seemed like a nuisance to me at first. Because every time we would wake him up, he would cry a lot and I felt bad.
How authoritative of us in taking care of the baby that we get to decide when he needs to be fed?
Why would you want to disturb the peaceful sleep of the baby and cause him pain just to feed him?
If the baby is hungry, he will get up and ask for the food himself.
But… the baby doesn’t know, and we do!
The baby does not even have the brain capacity to understand this, so there is no point in explaining.
Extrapolating this to adults, we have a similar situation.
When a tragedy befalls you and causes you pain, one way to interpret that is that it’s God waking you up from sleep. And you don’t know why HE is doing that?
You can try to make sense of it, with your limited knowledge and understanding.
But the truth is, you don’t know. Only Allah knows. And Allah knows best.
How then, can we reconcile with this lack of understanding and yet have firm and unwavering Faith?
For me at least, the way I am able to come to terms with it is that for all the known things, the things which can make sense to me and am able to process, I want to be able to get to a point where I have full confidence on what is being talked about, so much so that I have to be fully convinced of the message.
Once this is attained, coming to terms with the unknown becomes easy.
Take for example, the Quran – it checks out on all the things which the mind can make sense of, enough to build a confidence within oneself that this a true word of God without any inconsistencies or shortcomings.
Once this is established, everything else in the Book is easily acceptable to be the truth coming from God directly.
Similarly, for Prophet SAW, you get enough confidence in him through his character, his demeanour and the way he conducts himself, that when he says he went to seven heavens and back in one night – you believe him, without any question.
There is a beautiful phrase which often gets repeated in the Quran and throughout Seerah (Biography of Prophet SAW) which goes like this:
Sami’na wa ata’na.
We hear and we obey.
Companions of the Prophet SAW often said this in response to his statements.
When confronted with the unknown, a human’s response can be of two types – of humility or of arrogance.
The response of a believer is perfectly summarized in Surah Nur – Chapter 24, Ayah 51 of the Quran:
The only response of the ˹true˺ believers, when they are called to Allah and His Messenger so he may judge between them, is to say, “We hear and obey.” It is they who will ˹truly˺ succeed.
Some may call it Blind Faith.
I call it Conviction.