Keep The Doubt!

Skepsis is the antidote to dogmatism and credulity. It is for this reason that Muhammad Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111) engaged in systematic doubt as a spiritual practice. The testimony of faith in the Islamic tradition is an exercise in metaphysical minimalism or negative dogmatism: There is no reality but the real and this was Muhammad's message.

Those who seek to encumber this simple formula with further dogmatic assertions are confessing their weakness, their failure of nerve. They do not attain the ideal state of the faylasuf: ataraxia.