on rational grounds, since no one can know that Allah has obliged him to undertake rational inquiry when he does not know Allah until after such inquiry. One of the principles of Ahl al-Sunnah is that actions are not inherently prohibited or permissible.”

In my view, his statement is incorrect. For a person’s ignorance that something is obligatory upon him does not remove that obligation if the thing is obligatory in itself. Do you not see that, according to those who regard faith as the first obligation, faith is obligatory under revealed law even upon someone who does not know that law? [Just as faith is obligatory under revealed law upon someone who does not know that law, according to those who regard it as the first obligation], so too rational inquiry is obligatory under revealed law upon someone who does not know that law, according to those who regard inquiry as the first obligation.

Al-Bājī argued against those who hold that rational inquiry and inference constitute the first obligation by citing the consensus of Muslims throughout the ages that ordinary people and those who accept beliefs on another’s authority are called believers. He said: “If their position were correct, no one could rightly be called a believer unless he possessed knowledge attained through rational inquiry and inference.” He further said: “If faith were valid only after rational inquiry and inference, then, when Muslims overcame the disbelievers, the latter could say to them: ‘You may not lawfully kill us, because your religion holds that faith is valid only after rational inquiry and inference. Grant us a delay, then, until we have undertaken inquiry and inference.’ This would mean leaving them in their disbelief and not fighting them until they had undertaken inquiry and inference.” He said: “There is no disagreement that this is invalid.”

This consequence does not follow, however. Those who regard rational inquiry and inference as the first obligation do not confine them to the framework laid down by the speculative theologians: inferring from the accidents that successively occur in bodies that the world originated in time, and establishing its Originator and the true attributes of His essence and His acts. Rather, they maintain that this can be known through the mind’s first intuitive apprehension. For when a rational person considers the heavens and the earth, the alternation of night and day, his own self, his changing conditions, and his emergence from nonexistence into existence, he knows that all this has a Creator and Disposer, whom nothing resembles.

My position is that rational inquiry and inference in this sense constitute the first obligation according to those who regard inquiry as the first obligation. Faith is valid on this basis because it produces certainty, even if it does not yield knowledge. Knowledge arises only after sustained inquiry, whereas one may be certain of what one believes without possessing knowledge. Thus, whoever believes in Allah by accepting another’s authority, or through inquiry that produces certainty or yields knowledge, is a believer