People of faith come in for a good deal of grief for believing, whether on the strength of scripture or on a deeply felt intuition, in things that lie beyond the grasp of the five senses. Some of these things strain the rational mind. A divine being and an afterlife are obvious examples. How does one believe in something, like life after earthly death, that no one living can directly attest to? Yet there are useful lessons in this aspect of faith even for those who may find it absurd.
Muslim theology calls unseen dimension the ghayb—literally, that which is “hidden” or “absent” from our immediate perception and consciousness—and regards it a core tenet of faith. God, the Quran asserts, “possesses the keys to the hidden realm.” In encouraging people not to discount this realm, the Quran invites people to consider the innumerable things in the mundane world that they do not or cannot know. Even as our knowledge expands about what lies within the earth and under the sea and in the cosmos, we do not know everything there is to know and probably never will. We cannot be aware, as the divine is, of “every leaf that e’er falls.” The Quran reminds people that they often do not know the things that they so commonly experience—when the rains will fall, whether the unborn child will live and what it will be like, where each soul will earn its sustenance, and when we will die. We observe such things happening all the time, but no matter the power of our cognition and technology, we cannot know with perfect certainty when. Like a two-foot snowstorm that turns out to drop only two inches.
If there is one thing that the mess we’re all in has taught—and there are many—it is that we really know a great deal less than we think we do. What many honest and reputable minds thought might be overcome in a few weeks or months has dragged us along for near on a year. Who could have known? Who really knows, even though we hope for and work toward better days, whether the coming months will bring the respite we seek? That is all, until it comes to pass, in the unseen realm. And the best way to cope with the uncertainty of the unseen, in my view, is to adopt the epistemological humility that our humanity demands yet we often refuse to adopt. All we know is what is before us now. If we strive to do better now, leaving the future until it arrives, we may in fact secure a better future than we had expected.
