Name: Psychology of Doubt | Firm Roots
Uploaded: 2019-11-22T23:00:46.000Z
Channel: Dr. Zohair Abdul-Rahman
Description: Why do people have doubts about faith? What triggers it? Tune in as Zohair Abdul-Rahman breaks down the psychology behind doubt.

Why do people have doubts about faith? What triggers it? Tune in as Zohair Abdul-Rahman breaks down the psychology behind doubt.

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 JazakAllah khair for everyone again for coming out.  So inshaAllah ta'ala I'm going to be talking about the psychology of doubt.  And really what we're trying to address here in this session is answering the question,  why do people doubt Islam? Why do people doubt the veracity of Islam?  That's the question we're trying to answer.  Now when you ask this question, you can address it from multiple angles.  So when someone asks the question, you know, why did such and such a person leave Islam?  We can think about it from one angle of thinking, oh there was this intellectual issue that this person encountered.  Whether it had to do with women in Islam, whether it had to do with violence, whether it had to do with God,  the existence of God, whatever it might be.  And so that's one way. You can think, that's why they left Islam, because they encountered that particular question.  But there's another aspect that we need to really understand that I feel is often neglected.  And that's, who is the person that is encountering that intellectual issue?  Because you can look at the actual issues themselves, and actually there is a,  the first paper that was published on Yaqeen was actually a study done on Muslims,  seeing what is it that causes them doubt.  And there was a whole bunch of intellectual issues that were identified in the study,  and you can see it on Yaqeen Institute, and there's a beautiful chart that shows all the different issues,  and there's a mind map. And it's a lot.  But what's really interesting is that all those issues are not secret issues that Muslims who hold to their faith are unaware of.  The issues that pretty much everyone in this audience probably have understood, encountered, have asked,  and have been fine with, have been satisfied with the answer.  So you have two people, one person who is doubting Islam because they'd encountered this issue,  and another person who just simply asks a question and they're fine.  Both the same level of intelligence, it's not that one is smarter than the other.  Both have the same exposure to the same information.  So why is it? What is the difference between person A and person B?  It has to be perhaps something about the person themselves.  Doubt never exists in a vacuum. You can't isolate it within a particular intellectual issue and say,  this issue is causing doubt in the Muslim community on its own.  But rather doubt always exists within a person's mind, within a person's heart.  And so perhaps there's something about the psychology of an individual that makes them more susceptible  that when they encounter the same intellectual issues that many Muslims, billions of Muslims around the world encounter,  it makes them uncomfortable, doubt, and sometimes even leave the fold of Islam.  So that inshaAllah ta'ala is the area that we're going to be focusing on here.  And by the way, I want to make this clear, I'm not then neglecting and saying,  oh, it's not important to address the intellectual issues themselves. No.  But what I'm saying is we need to have an approach on both sides.  Because doubt emerges from this equation essentially.  The person and then the issue. You need both.  And so addressing it on both angles will really help alleviate the problem.  So what is the psychology of doubt?  Firstly, we need to understand that the phenomenon and the experience of doubt,  we have this idea that doubt emerges from a rational evaluation of the evidences and proofs for and against a particular conclusion.  And if in a person's mind, this rational evaluation that occurs does not add up,  they don't have sufficient evidence in their mind, then doubt emerges.  This is the classic view that people have.  They think a person doubts Islam because they're not convinced of it intellectually.  But when you look to the Qur'an, the Qur'an challenges this assumption.  And the Qur'an, the way it describes doubt is very fascinating, very interesting.  The Qur'an, for instance, right in the beginning, in Surah Al-Baqarah, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says,  في قلوبهم مرض In their hearts is a marad, is a disease.  So the Qur'an is referencing that there's something wrong on the inside of that person that's experiencing this doubt about Islam.  There's a marad, there's some sort of a disease, there's some pathology going on there behind the scenes.  And this is the place throughout the Qur'an, we're gonna come to that later inshaAllah.  That's just one verse there that highlights that.  Another very interesting, and I bring this story up, it's a very interesting story between Ibn al-Qayyim rahimahullah and Ibn Taymiyyah, who was his teacher.  Two very famous scholars of Islam, Ibn al-Qayyim is often dubbed as the most often quoted scholar in social media  because mashaAllah, his insights and profound wisdoms and such a short amount of Twitter space, character, length, gems,  they're able to be shared widely on WhatsApp, social media, Instagram, etc.  So I'm sure everyon…

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