3 Islamic articles on: Faith and Doubt in Islam

Table of contents for the topic Faith and Doubt in Islam
  1. When life’s difficulties cause you to doubt God
  2. Have I ever doubted parts of Islam?
  3. On unanswered prayers, and is it normal for a Muslim to doubt God’s existence?

IslamQA: When life’s difficulties cause you to doubt God

Salaam, I feel like everything in my life seems to be going wrong. I am losing my faith in Allah and his plan for me. I am a good and genuine person, all I want is to build for my future etc, I cannot find a job although I have two good degrees, I started my own business and that is not seeing any success either. These past 3-5 years I feel like I have been tested in so many ways and I keep getting told to trust in Allah's plan. I just feel so broken, every glimmer of hope I get it's taken away

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,

I have been in similar situations. The point is to show you your weakness and powerlessness in order to make you truly submit to God. True submission means there should be nothing that God does to you that would make you dislike Him or question His wisdom and mercy. When you reach this stage, you will know that no good or bad can reach you except with God’s permission. You will stop being impatient for change knowing God is already fully in charge.

You wish for change because you feel your present situation is wrong and unfit for you. It is very common for us to feel this way, but it is the wrong attitude to have. The correct attitude is to fully settle your heart to you present situation and be fully ready for it to continue this way for the foreseeable future. When you know in your heart that everything that happens to you is from God, you will stop being impatient for change. You feel like you are in a bus controlled by God and you will leave it to Him to take you where He wants.

It is very difficult to maintain such a state for long, which is why I recommend an hour of Quran-reading every day which helps maintain our awareness of God’s power and closeness. I always remind myself that nothing that happens should reduce my love for God. Accept life as it is and love God whether good or bad befalls you. This is true submission.

It is good to work to change your situation for the better. I am not saying that we should give up and do nothing. But our starting point should always be love and acceptance of God and acceptance of our situation as it is. We can work for change, but we are never guaranteed success. Everything comes from God, so we might as well attach our hearts to Him and leave it to Him to take care of our fate.

You have not achieved true submission until you fully feel in your heart that nothing that befalls you can reduce your love for God. It is a favor from God to put you in such a difficult situation that forces you to fully submit to Him in this way. Those who always have it easy never get this chance to truly submit. So consider it God’s love for you. He wants you to detach from everything so that your heart is attached to nothing but Him. And once you reach that stage, God can open all His doors to you in an instant and completely change your life.

So do not lose hope in God. Always try to be in state where nothing that befalls you can reduce your love for Him. And when you are this close to God, you will stop worrying much about your worldly failures and concerns. You will feel as if you have already achieved the greatest success and you will leave it to God to take care of your future.

Please also see my essay below:

Islam and Depression: A Survival Guide

Best wishes.

IslamQA: Have I ever doubted parts of Islam?

Salaam I hope you don't mind me asking this but have you ever had doubts about Islam or disagreed with certain aspects of it? How strong would you say your faith is.

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,

The strength of one’s faith goes up and down daily. Personally I do not remember ever having strong doubts about God’s existence. But some things at times have caused doubt in my mind, such as why evil people are allowed to be powerful for so long if God is really in charge.

Merely to exist in this universe and experience it constantly presses God’s presence upon us. So for me it is impossible to doubt God’s existence, it would be like doubting the existence of the sun.

As for Islam, I have had a close relationship with the Quran for much of my life. The Quran defines the shape and color of Islam for me, everything outside of the Quran is secondary. So when preachers say absurd and illogical things (often based on weak hadith narrations), this has no effect on my love for Islam since those things are all outside the Quran.

People often take their Islam mostly from the preachers, their families and other Muslims, who sometimes say absurd and superstitious-sounding things and say these things are parts of Islam. Due to this some people conclude that Islam is an outdated and illogical religion. Their mistake is that they do not take the time to understand the Quran and do not appreciate its status within Islam. The Quran is Islam’s center and defines its program and philosophy. We must develop our understanding of Islam not from what other people say but from the Quran, making it the foundation (as Imam al-Ghazali does).

Whenever I read or hear something strange or unsettling that people say about Islam, my thinking is this: it is not in the Quran, so it is not worth worrying about. The Quran defines our program in life. We should never let anything outside of it affect our love for it and for God. Everything else in Islam (hadith narrations, biographical and other scholarly works) are merely tools meant to help us apply the Quranic program better in our lives. When these helper tools malfunction, that should have no effect on our love for the the Quran.

Some people unfortunately lose sight of the Quran in their obsession with the non-Quranic materials and this sometimes leads to corruptions of the Islamic message. They hear a hadith whose meaning is unacceptable to them and form this conclude that there is a problem with Islam when the problem might be only with that hadith.

There have certainly been things in the Quran that were problematic to me, for example the famous wife-beating verse (4:34). I read many interpretations and justifications for it but nothing satisfied me. I have had a similar experience with some other issues. As for the wife-beating verse, it wasn’t until this year that I finally found a satisfactory solution for it (as I discuss in the essay: A new approach to the Quran’s “Wife-Beating Verse” (al-Nisa 4:34)). Before that I also had a problem with the existence of evil and why God allowed certain things to happen, this essay discusses my solution to it.

However, even though some verses have troubled me, I was always too aware of the beauty, uniqueness and intelligence of the Quran to ever doubt the whole book. For this reason I kept the problematic verses in the back of my mind, constantly coming back to them and trying to find solutions for them until eventually God enabled me to find a solution (another problem was Islam and Darwinian evolution, which I solved here). The problematic issues were never important enough to overshadow the rest of the Quran, which has always been so beautiful and powerful to me that reading a few pages is all it takes to take away all doubts that it is truly from God.

As far as I am aware, there is nothing left in the Quran that gives me any trouble.

As for the hadith literature, that is a completely different story. But since I place the Quran above hadith, problems that arise from hadith are only secondary to me. Solving these problems is like the icing on the cake. The important issues, the Quranic ones, are solved for me.

IslamQA: On unanswered prayers, and is it normal for a Muslim to doubt God’s existence?

As a Muslim is it normal to ever doubt Allah's existence? I pray 5x daily and have completed Umrah, but i feel like my prayers have never been answered.

That’s normal, and that is why faith is rewarded. We are supposed to believe in God without having physical proof of His existence. Believing in God while having physical proof is like believing that the sun or the moon exist. There is no virtue in that. This world is designed to test our faith by making us feel abandoned, or making us think that good and bad things happen randomly, or that it is evildoers who are rewarded with the best life. These are very much part and parcel of the design of the universe, seeing these things around us is as normal as seeing furniture in a house.

It is normal to doubt God’s existence when you feel your prayers are not being answered. The question is whether you will keep your faith in Him despite this, whether you will continue to put your hope and trust in Him, or whether this world’s difficulties overpower you so that you turn your back on Him, doubt His existence and abandon serving Him. The Quran says:

Do you expect to enter Paradise before God has distinguished those among you who strive, and before He has distinguished the steadfast?1

God will intentionally make us go through periods of suffering and abandonment to bring out our true nature. Instead of letting us stroll into Paradise while we continue to be selfish, greedy and disloyal toward Him, He will make us suffer exactly the type of circumstances that brings out the best and the worst in us. And this way He distinguishes between His servants:

  • These are those who continue to love him and work to please Him despite the worst suffering.
  • There are those who are on the whole patient and faithful but whose faith is almost overwhelmed every time difficulty and abandonment hits them.
  • There are God’s fair-weather friends who are faithful during times of ease and abandon Him when their faith is tested.
  • There are the ex-believers who, after suffering a number of tragedies, turn their backs on Him, refusing to submit to His decree, thinking the worst of Him and even fighting against Him and His believers.

The Quran has this important passage on the issue of unanswered prayers:

47. To Him is referred the knowledge of the Hour. No fruit emerges from its sheath, and no female conceives or delivers, except with His knowledge. And on the Day when He calls out to them, “Where are My associates?” They will say, “We admit to you, none of us is a witness.”

48. What they used to pray to before will forsake them, and they will realize that they have no escape.

49. The human being never tires of praying for good things; but when adversity afflicts him, he despairs and loses hope.

50. And when We let him taste a mercy from Us, after the adversity that had afflicted him, he will say, “This is mine, and I do not think that the Hour is coming; and even if I am returned to my Lord, I will have the very best with Him.” We will inform those who disbelieve of what they did, and We will make them taste an awful punishment.

51. When We provide comfort for the human being, he withdraws and distances himself; but when adversity befalls him, he starts lengthy prayers.

52. Say, “Have you considered? If it is from God and you reject it—who is further astray than he who is cutoff and alienated?”

53. We will show them Our proofs on the horizons, and in their very souls, until it becomes clear to them that it is the truth. Is it not sufficient that your Lord is witness over everything?

54. Surely they are in doubt about the encounter with their Lord. Surely He comprehends everything.2

As believers, it is normal for this world to continuously challenge our faith and tempt us to abandon God. The question is whether we remain faithful despite these challenges, whether we continue to humbly submit and say “It is all from God, we belong to God and He can do anything He wants with us”, or whether we arrogantly reject His decree, become enamored of this world and start to disbelieve in Him.

The principle of Plausible Deniability (which I discussed in a previous answer) means that God will never, or almost never, answer our prayers in a clearly miraculous way. You may wish to get high marks on an exam, pray ardently for this and work hard, and once you do get the high marks, you will look back and wonder whether God had anything to do with it or whether it was all your own hard work.

That is how God answers our prayers; subtly, always keeping Himself hidden, and always leaving us room for doubt. He will not miraculously answer our prayers, because that would be physical proof of His existence.

If you wish for your prayers to be answered, become the type of person who deserves such a favor. Do you deserve having your prayers answered? Even if we pray ardently for something and worship God, if we regularly disobey Him, or selfishly ignore His commandments (such as those regarding giving charity to one’s relatives, etc.), or are involved in something sinful (such as having an interest-bearing savings or retirement account), then we are in effect asking for God’s help while also insulting Him by our disobedience. Such a person will have a very low status in God’s eyes.

Therefore we must first work on ourselves. We must purify ourselves, rededicate ourselves to God, give up all sin and disobedience, do everything we can to raise our rank in God’s eye, then we should expect Him to give us what we wish for.

The majority of people are only half-dedicated to God, so it is no surprise that God does not elevate their ranks. They serve Him with one hand while insulting Him with the other. God, out of His generosity and kindness, still protects such people and blesses them in countless ways that they cannot see:

That is because God is the mawlā (Protecting Friend) of those who believe, while the disbelievers have no protecting friend.3

There are millions of Muslims who have worse lives than we do. Why should we expect to be treated any better by God than those Muslims? What is so special about us that our prayers should be answered? Unless we have attained a special status in God’s eyes, we should not expect special treatment. God takes care of the faithful and ensures that they will have a generally good life, as the Quran promises:

Whoever works righteousness, whether male or female, while being a believer, We will grant him a good life—and We will reward them according to the best of what they used to do.4

But if we want more than that, if we want a life that has special blessings that we desire, than we should turn ourselves into the type of believer who deserves those special blessings.