"At the deepest level of the human consciousness

there is the capacity for yaqin. There is an openness to Allah's hidaya, whereby we look at things not through the fallible and the limited machinery of reason, but through the fitra. And that's what it is to be hanif. One who looks at the world and can feel at the depth of his consciousness - and science has not defined consciousness yet, it has not even begun to do so - the deepest mystery of what we are, we open to that, and we say, balaa shahidnaa, yes, we bear witness, we know that behind this there is a reality, that complexity emerging from nothing at all, from al-'adam is staggering impossible as the philosophers all say, but the fact there is a unifying principle behind it all, the one who is al-Qayyum, sustains the heaven and the earth is the most obvious explanation, but it's before reason, before math, before logic, before all of those things, its to do with the essence of what it is to be conscious.

Sayyiduna Ibrahim alaihi salaam got there when he was little. He didn't need to go to university to figure that out. Theologians and philosophers argue about it and seem to be no nearer to a conclusion. Sayyiduna Ibraham as a little boy got it. Why? Because of Allah's hidayah and because of his fitri hanif openness to yaqin. This is what humanity needs, we need to broaden our minds, we need to get away from a narrow materialistic definition of what knowledge is and how we can know, and open ourselves up to a deeper, more intuitive level of knowledge which is the fitra and what is natural and this part of the beauty of Islam because Islam is based on cultivating and growing this iman and this yaqin through contemplating the heavens and the earth. That is what the Qur'an asks us to do "wa yatafakarruna fi khalqi samawaati wal ardh" they think about the way the heavens and the earth have been created, not how does this atom interact with that atom - that's just the detail, and the detail goes on forever. It's about the deep mystery and the deep reality of how this could possibly come into being without there being a unifying conscious totality which sustains it, which brings it about and which ultimately will bring it all together again and reduce it to unity. So this is the yaqin we ask for and its the most precious thing any human being could have.

 -from "Belief and Conviction" a khutba by Abdal Hakim Murad, 10/22/2010