How Freedom Becomes the Foundation and Cornerstone of Islam
Because Islam defined life as a test and a trial.
It is because Islam gave life exactly that meaning and purpose — a test and a trial.
“He who created death and life to test which of you is best in deeds.” (Qur’an)
Freedom becomes the foundation and cornerstone of Islam because within that test, submission to the one universal power called Islam must be — and can only be — a choice each person makes individually, for themselves alone.
In any test, there is only one correct answer. That is true.
But the fact that there is only one correct answer does not mean that single answer can or should be forced upon anyone during the test.
That is what a test is, that is how a test works.
That is the freedom Islam guarantees — the freedom that a test itself guarantees.
The test can only be conducted, and each person’s choice within it can only take place, if people are allowed to stand freely, to remain free.
This means that submission to the one universal power — Islam — must itself take place, must be carried out, freely and by one’s own choice.
Helpless-compelled submission (islam in the lower-case sense) exists in, and drives, everything in the universe.
That helpless-compelled submission occurs with no other option.
In other words, in such helpless-compelled submission, nothing and no one has any alternative or choice.
But what is being discussed regarding human beings is a submission that must occur voluntarily, by will, by choice.
That voluntary submission of the human being must, in Islam’s view, be tested and chosen in complete freedom.
Being born as the child of a Muslim father and mother, by birth alone, does not mean one is submitted, without choice, Islam, to the One God.
This test and choice exist so that a person may arrive at the precise knowledge and clear conviction that there is only one universal power worthy of submission — and so that he may declare this both to himself and to the people of the society he lives in.
That is why it came to be that no one is in Islam or Muslim by birth, nor can be.
That is why freedom came to be obligatory.
That is why it follows that no mother or father may impose Islam on their children or force them to become Muslim simply because they are their children.
That is why the very first obligatory step to becoming Muslim is that each person must personally testify (shahada).
This is a testimony as certain as an eyewitness account — not mere belief or recitation.
This testimony (shahada) is the first of the five pillars of Islam.
Only after this first pillar (the testimony/shahada) is fulfilled do the remaining four pillars become applicable at all.
Becoming Muslim requires a spoken declaration — firmly held in the heart and openly voiced by the tongue — that carries the certainty of something seen with one’s own eyes.
This testimony (shahada) is not something that can rightly be brought about through others’ influence or compulsion.
The testimony (shahada) is a state each person must arrive at on their own.
A person becomes Muslim — accepts Islam as the complete, total path of submission — only when each individual, on their own, comes to know and become convinced that there is no power worthy of submission, obedience, and surrender except the one universal power (the one God), and then testifies to it.
Islam and Muslim-hood are not something one becomes through birth, nor through mere imitation and following.
Islam and the shahada are not confined merely to belief and ritual observance — they are meant to be comprehensive, to be reflected throughout the whole of life, and to be practiced.
No parent may compel their children to become Muslim.
If they were kept within it by such compulsion, that would not constitute true Islam (submission), nor a true Muslim (one who submits), nor a genuine shahada — the seeing, the conviction, and the repeated declaration it entails.
What has been said above is not about the “Muslim” category used in a country’s communal census.
That is merely the ethnic, communal, sectarian “Muslim” of a country’s census records.
Islam, as the path of submission for the entire world, is not an ethnic, communal, or sectarian religion. Nor is the Muslim an ethnic, communal, or sectarian individual or community.
What has been discussed above concerns the Islam and Muslim made possible by the conviction called iman (faith) and the testimony called shahada.
That Islam and that Muslim-hood come about only through one’s own choice.
That Islam and Muslim-hood do not come about merely through birth, heredity, community, ethnicity, or nationality.
In other words, Islam and Muslim-hood are not something one becomes ethnically, sectarian-wise, or nationally.
“The Bedouins say, ‘We believe (we are secure).’ Say: You have not believed (attained security); rather say, ‘We have submitted (become Muslims in the communal sense)’ — for faith (security) has not yet entered your hearts.” (Qur’an)
In a test, the fact that there is, in the final answer, only one correct answer does not deny freedom — rather, it is precisely what secures freedom.
It is freedom itself that ensures one can journey toward, and eventually arrive at, that single correct answer.
Once a person becomes convinced of that single correct answer, they no longer need or want the freedom to choose otherwise.
That is not extremism or a loss of freedom.
Freedom to search continues until the path is found.
Once the path is found, the freedom and the searching and the wandering that came before are set aside, and only the walking along the path now found remains.
Only the submission needed for that walking remains. That submission is, and must be, Islam.
A person’s freedom lies precisely in finding and choosing that one thing which becomes his own conviction.
Once he finds that one answer, he himself will regard his freedom (to choose otherwise) as having ended, as no longer needed.
Thereafter, even if he were given, however freely, the freedom to write any answer he liked, he himself would set it aside. That setting-aside is itself submission — Islam.
Setting aside everything else in this way is not extremism; it is natural.
Submission (Islam) that sets aside everything else is like a leaf withering and falling off from the heat of conviction — not something forcibly torn away.
It is not extremism, not intolerance — it is simply no longer being wanted.
This is also the basic fact underlying every test we conduct at our own level: that there is only one correct answer, and that everyone should, if possible, reach that one answer.
But the fact that there is only one correct answer must never deny the freedom of the one taking the test — that too is our own strict requirement.
Rather, the test and the choice must — and should — guarantee the freedom to write the wrong answer, even while there is only one correct one.
It is precisely because no test, trial, or choice can be conducted without granting freedom that Islam — having defined life itself as a test and a choice — became the religion, the very ideology, of freedom alone.
Because no test or trial can be a test or trial at all without granting freedom.
Therefore, saying that there is only one correct answer is not extremism, nor a denial of freedom — it is, very often, simply a fact.
Within every test, the thing that makes a test a test is precisely this: the cornerstone and foundation that there is only one correct answer.
But the fact that only one predetermined answer is correct is no reason not to conduct the test.
Every test exists precisely to find those who arrive at that one correct answer.
Which means that every test, by necessity, grants the freedom needed to reach it.
Perhaps it is precisely because there is only one correct answer, and because it is chosen through knowledge and conviction, and because freedom is given precisely so that it can be chosen, that tests become tests at all, and that those who succeed in them become the ones who succeed.
Isn’t that exactly what our own tests and exams prove?
While there is only one correct answer, many wrong answers are also shown — and there is freedom to choose and write those wrong answers.
“We have shown them the various paths: whether they be ungrateful (rejecting) or grateful (accepting).” (Qur’an)
Even the tests we conduct for ourselves and for our own children prove this same thing.
Tests grant the freedom to write wrong answers too.
But that does not make wrong answers right.
The freedom to make mistakes and write them down does not make any mistake correct.
Rather, freedom — and the test or trial that necessarily grants freedom — exists only to ensure that those who choose the right answer do so with true knowledge and true conviction.
There is no test that does not grant the freedom to write a wrong answer.
A test that does not grant the freedom to write a wrong answer is not a test at all.
The mere fact that tests grant freedom does not make wrong answers right, does not make wrong equal or similar to right.
This is simply the same truth found in life itself — that freedom is essential for a test to be a test — which Islam too intends.
This means that in life, in an Islamic way, within Islamic society and the Islamic state itself, there must be freedom to do wrong.
But the existence of freedom to do wrong and to choose wrongly does not make wrong things right.
Freedom exists only because one must not be forced, during the test, to avoid wrongdoing merely because wrong is wrong.
But it is a freedom that in no way, in the test’s outcome, reflects as a merit.
This is the Islamic dimension and meaning of the statement that life itself is a test.
Perhaps this is, in both open and hidden ways, the very same dimension and meaning that human beings themselves have been implementing in this world — the same one Islam, in its larger sense, gave to life.
The fact that a teacher already knows his students in advance is no justification for not conducting the test the students themselves need to go through to arrive at their own conviction.
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