Is Islamic faith irrational

The claim usually rests on an anecdote: a teacher, asked whether belief is required without knowing, answered yes. The anecdote may well be accurate. It settles nothing about the tradition, and the tradition answers it directly.

What faith is held to be

Faith in the Islamic sense has never been defined as intellectual assent to a dogma, nor as an emotional response to a compelling personality. It has been defined as a volitional and dynamic reaction to belief in one God, a conviction that assimilates both the intellectual and the emotional response. It is at once an affirmation of a truth and a surrender to the truth affirmed. Absent the first, it is blind. Absent the second, it is inert.

Both halves are required. That is a demanding standard, and it is the opposite of a demand to stop thinking.

The buried premise

The objection assumes that what cannot be perceived directly may reasonably be assumed not to exist. Stated plainly, the principle collapses. A great deal of what is known is inferred rather than observed, and the absence of one kind of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Clearing that premise away does not prove the case for God. It establishes only that the argument offered against it does not work, which is a smaller claim and a defensible one.

The teacher

A religious instructor who meets a child’s question with an instruction to stop asking has failed at the single task he was given. Islam produced centuries of scholars who argued over metaphysics, jurisprudence, logic, and the natural world, and who were honoured for precisely that. A classroom that treats a question as insubordination is not passing on that inheritance. It is losing it.

The reader who asked the question was doing what the tradition asks. The person who shut it down was not.