On the quest to attaining certainty (Yaqin) of my beliefs: The belief of One Allah, the messenger, the Angels, the Books, Qadar wa Qada2, and the Day of Judgement.
There are degrees of certainty: in the terminology of the Quran, these are
`ilm al-yaqin (science of certainty),
`ayn al-yaqin (vision of certainty) and
haqq al yaqin (truth of certainty).
Doubt, the very evil within one's heart (soul). I want to disect and analyze the nature, function and spirit of doubt within the faith of islam. I must go back in time and reflect upon the past scholars and their achievement over this disease, such as Imam Al-Ghazali and what was later called "Ghazzalian doubt".
Ghazzalian doubt: consisted of two parts: Taqlid and Sect doubts. Following a ruling blindly is the very essence of non-certainty, although, he believed, some knowledge should be accepted since we are mere less than knowledgable to distinquish faith rulings, True IMAN. Moreover, the 70 or so sects that the Prophet warned us about served as another sense of doubt to Ghazali, since each sect believes that its "madh'hab" or "group" is the ONE that's saved.
"Men are asleep: then after they die they awake"
"In ones act of faith one participates in the truth through both reason and heart, faith already implies a particular level of knowledge and of certainty. Thus, from the beginning of al-Ghazzalis quest for the true knowledge of the Real, a certain element of certitude 'the removal of deformations of the soul such as pride, passional attachment to the world and a host of other reprehensible habits and vicious qualities, all of which stand as obstacles to the realization of that knowledge, in order to attain a heart empty of all save God and adorned with the constant remembrance of Godwas always present."
...Before him now lies the most important decision he has to make in his life.
For about six months he incessantly vacillated between the contending pull of worldly desires and the appeals of the afterlife....The intellectual and spiritual tradition in which al-Ghazali lived and thought made him fully aware of the fact that what veils man from this highest reality is the darkness of his own soul. Therefore in turning to his own inner being, al-Ghazzali was merely following that traditional path which alone could guarantee, by divine grace, the removal of that veil. This is the universal path of all the real seekers of the Truth, of which al-Ghazzali was an outstanding example.
