Faith and Doubt

By Naseer Ahmed, New Age Islam

4 November 2025

Faith and the Necessity of Doubt

Faith and doubt are opposites — yet inseparable companions on the journey to truth. Doubt is natural, even necessary. There can be no strong faith without first entertaining, wrestling with, and resolving one’s doubts. Faith is not the absence of questioning; it is the calm that follows honest scrutiny.

A belief untested by doubt is brittle. Running away from doubt, or glossing over it, weakens faith. A strong faith demands intellectual courage — to face every uncertainty honestly and to modify or abandon belief if found wanting. We have no moral or rational duty to believe what fails the test of reason and evidence.

Ashrof’s Confusion: The Jizya Debate

In his article “Reclaiming the Battlefront: A Methodological Clarification and Rebuttal to Naseer Ahmed's Critique” V. A. Mohamad Ashrof writes that “Jizya was progressive for its time, but involved institutionalised inequality. Acknowledging this does not diminish its historical significance but allows for a more honest and self-critical historical engagement.”

This statement reveals less historical insight than theological confusion. Jizya, according to the Qur’an (9:29), was divinely ordained. If it was indeed commanded by God, how can “self-criticism” apply? To critique divine legislation as “institutionalised inequality” is to imply that the Qur’an is a human product — a fallible historical document rather than revelation. Ashrof’s phrasing thus betrays not scholarship but disbelief, cloaked in academic language.

Jizya as a Moral Institution

If Jizya was divinely mandated, it must have served a moral and social function beneficial to humanity, not merely to Muslims. Did it? The historical record says yes.

In an age when religious persecution was the global norm, Jizya provided a structural mechanism for protecting religious minorities — their persons, property, and faith — from the majority.

Under Christendom, minorities were hounded, exiled, or forced to convert. Under Islam, they were guaranteed safety, autonomy, and freedom of worship. Jizya was not a penalty but a reciprocal arrangement: non-Muslims were exempt from conscription and military service, and in return contributed a modest tax to the state that defended them. Whenever a community volunteered for military duty, their Jizya was waived. A tax for value rendered — not “institutionalised inequality.”

Misreading Tabuk and the Early Campaigns

Ashrof’s historical missteps do not end there. He writes:

“Was the march to Tabuk against the Byzantines, or the later conquests of the Sassanian Empire, solely defensive? Such claims stretch historical credulity... They were wars of expansion justified by a doctrine that included inviting others to Islam or submitting to Muslim rule (Da’wa and Jizya).”

If taken at face value, this implies that the Prophet ﷺ himself engaged in imperial conquest under the banner of “Islam, Jizya, or war” — a doctrine later championed by Maulana Maududi, which other scholars recognise as an innovation and a distortion that gave birth to political Islam.

But if Ashrof truly believes the Prophet acted on such a doctrine while he himself rejects it, he accuses the Prophet of moral error — and thereby removes himself from the fold of faith he claims to defend.

The Qur’an’s Position on Expansionism

The Qur’an provides no sanction for “wars of expansion.” The Prophet ﷺ could never have acted against divine command. Historical evidence confirms that the Expedition of Tabuk (630 CE) was entirely defensive — a precautionary measure against a looming Byzantine threat.

The Expedition of Tabuk: Facts, Not Myths

1. The Historical Context — A Real Byzantine Threat

After the Battle of Mu’tah (629 CE), a Muslim delegation was massacred, and relations with Byzantium collapsed. Arab Christian tribes allied to Byzantium — the Ghassanids and Lakhmids — began mobilising on Arabia’s northern frontier. Intelligence reached Medina that Heraclius had assembled an army at Balqa’ in Syria and was preparing to invade.

Classical historians — Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Hisham, Al-Waqidi, and Al-Tabari — all attest to this. Even Western historians hostile to Islam, like Sir William Muir, concede that Tabuk was “a precautionary measure against a threatened invasion by the Romans.” Modern scholarship concurs (Fred Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests, 1981).

2. The Prophet Did Not Attack — He Withdrew Peacefully

The Prophet ﷺ marched north with thirty thousand men — not to conquer but to deter. He encamped at Tabuk for twenty days. When no Byzantine army appeared, he ordered a peaceful return to Medina.

Not a single arrow was fired.
No land was seized.
No people were subjugated.

The only Jizya collected was from border tribes who voluntarily sought Muslim protection. This is the only “war of expansion” in history that ended without battle, booty, or conquest — which is to say, it was no war of expansion at all.

The Broader Geo-Political Reality

Islam’s Rise Between Two Empires

The Prophet lived between two decaying superpowers — Byzantium and Persia — locked in a century-long conflict that had bled their empires dry. Arabia was their pawn: plundered, taxed, and exploited. Islam’s rise was therefore a threat to both, not because it sought conquest, but because it offered a moral alternative to imperial domination.

When the Prophet sent letters to Heraclius, Khosrow II, the Negus of Abyssinia, and other rulers, his invitation was not a call to empire but to moral awakening. Their responses varied — some courteous, others hostile — but none were coerced.

After the Prophet’s Death

After his passing, Muslims fought primarily against the two empires that had long oppressed Arabia. Once Byzantium and Persia were defeated or neutralised, Muslim armies halted further expansion despite unmatched military strength. Their wars were defensive, not imperial — aimed at dismantling the structures of foreign domination that had strangled the region for centuries.

Moral Restraint in an Age of Empire

Nowhere is this clearer than in what the early Caliphate did not do. Having defeated both Rome and Persia, the Muslims did not lunge eastward toward India, the richest land within reach. Their campaigns halted at Sindh, and even that annexation was pragmatic, prompted by piracy, trade obstruction, and attacks on Muslim merchants.

Likewise, the Muslim entry into Iberia in 711 CE was not an ideological war on Christianity but a response to internal Christian appeals. Count Julian of Ceuta, a Visigothic noble, invited the Muslim governor of North Africa, Musa ibn Nusayr, to intervene against the usurper King Roderic, who had allegedly violated Julian’s daughter and seized the Visigothic throne.

Musa dispatched Tariq ibn Ziyad with a modest expeditionary force that, aided by disaffected Visigothic factions, rapidly succeeded. When Muslim armies reached regions that resisted, they halted; when invited, they administered. This was not empire-building by creed, but a stabilising intervention welcomed by those oppressed under Roderic’s rule.
(Source: Wikipedia, “Conquest of Iberia”)

Once the threat ceased, so did the campaign. This restraint was not political fatigue — it was moral principle. The Caliphate fought where aggression existed, established justice where tyranny reigned, and built peace where cooperation was possible. Its armies expanded the reach of order, not the geography of oppression.

When the Text Is Clear but the Mind Is Clouded: The Psychology of Faithless Scholarship

Had Ashrof engaged his doubts honestly, he might have discovered the truth about Islam. But having long surrendered faith to fashionable scepticism — fortified by the bigotry of classical polemicists and the politics of Maududi — he now writes not to serve Islam but to serve his livelihood. There is, after all, a lucrative market for soft Islamophobia — for Muslims who write against their own under the noble pretext of “self-criticism.” Ashrof has simply chosen his niche in that market.

Once this is understood, the enigma of Ashrof unravels. Here is a man who calls the plain meaning of the Qur’an “a fallacy,” yet defends every inherited distortion of it as “hermeneutics.” To him, interpretations that mutilate the Qur’an’s message are acceptable; what is unacceptable is its unambiguous clarity. This is Orwellian logic at its finest — turning truth into falsehood and falsehood into intellectual virtue.

For if he accepted the Qur’an’s clear and coherent meaning, he would have to praise it — and then how could he preserve his credentials as a “Good Muslim” in the salons of Western academia? He must therefore revile the Qur’an while feigning reform, upholding every patriarchal and sectarian misinterpretation as the literal Qur’an, and then pretending to “liberate” the very text he secretly regards as flawed.

Thus, he perfects the art of pious betrayal: indulging in soft Islamophobia while posing as a conscientious believer.

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Naseer Ahmed writes on Qur’anic theology, moral philosophy, and the historical record of Islamic civilisation.

 

URL:   https://newageislam.com/islam-spiritualism/faith-doubt/d/137515

 

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