‘Anyone who does not doubt will not investigate, and anyone who does not investigate cannot see, and anyone who does not see will remain in blindness and error.’
Abu Hamid al-Ghazali
I always thought that Islam is something in which you either believe, or you don’t believe. If you want to call yourself a ‘Muslim’, it’s sort of an all-or-nothing deal. You’re either in or you’re out. I thought that the path of a believer, particularly a Muslim believer, is a straight path. You’re placed on it at birth, and you just start walking. You know precisely where you are going, and you know which steps to take to get there. You don’t wander, veer in any direction, or get lost. Contrary to what I was actually experiencing in my own life, the path of a believer was not, as far as I understood, characterised by clawing one’s way through a lifetime of doubt and disillusionment, hoping to arrive at a resting place.
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