Anything that man can perceive, however apparent it may be to his eyes or his mind’s concept, must be verified. This is the innate nature of man’s intellect, Fitrah فطره, whose standardized definition is ‘an inclination towards God’ but its more profound elaboration is that the inclination is not only to God as a hypnotic draw through space and time, but its unquenchable thirst to ‘know’ is to know the absolute, and the absolute is Allah, which is why it is inclined. This innate nature will never accept anything at face-value unless it has verified its authenticity, and that is not to say that it cannot be confounded by a false verification, but that it must verify all that it perceives because for it to ‘know’, it must know the ‘Truth’, and for the ‘Truth’ to be true to it, it must ‘Believe’ it to be True, and it will not believe until it has known the ‘Truth’.
It is this innate nature that defines the human characteristic of ‘skepticism’, where the initial impulse is always a negation, never an affirmation, until the affirmation is affirmed, that is to say the Truth has been established for Belief to be established. This is also one of the Divine attributes in the structure of the Shahadah شهادة in that it always begins with a negation لااله to be followed by the affirmation الاالله.
For those struggling with parenthood, know then that it is not with defiance that your children would refuse to what you ask of them, but that it is their innate nature to negate with skepticism until it has been clarified for them. So, do not impose doctrine and authority upon them, rather reason with them so that they may understand and affirm obedience and not defy out of ignorance.
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