“I asked my teacher whether we just have to believe without knowing if any of it is true. He said yes.”

A bad answer from a teacher is a bad answer from a teacher. It is not the position of the tradition, and it deserves to be corrected rather than defended.

Faith in the Islamic sense has never meant assent without grounds. It has been understood as a conviction with a moral and an intellectual basis, an affirmation of a truth together with surrender to the truth affirmed. Strip away the first and it is blind. Strip away the second and it costs nothing. Both are required, and the tradition has said so consistently.

The underlying assumption in the objection is worth examining as well. It runs: if something cannot be perceived directly, the reasonable conclusion is that it does not exist. That principle would not survive an afternoon in a physics department. A great deal of what is known is inferred rather than seen, and the absence of a particular kind of evidence is not itself evidence of absence.

None of which proves the case. It clears the ground, which is a different and more modest thing.

What is worth saying plainly is that a religious teacher who tells a child to stop asking has failed at the one task he was given. Islam produced centuries of scholars who argued about metaphysics, law, logic, and the natural world, and who were held in high esteem for exactly that. A classroom that treats a question as insubordination is not transmitting that inheritance. It is losing it.

Ask the question again. Ask it of someone who can answer it.