How Can a Person Be Sure of Correct ʿAqīdah?

A very important question is how a person can be sure that they have the correct ʿaqīdah. Is it enough to believe these things in the heart, and to try one's best to practise, without being able to fully prove it?

There are two things here. One is: how does a person know that they have correct ʿaqīdah? A tried and tested book, an accepted book across the board, is ʿAqīdah Ṭaḥāwiyyah. Anyone who can believe in everything that is in ʿAqīdah Ṭaḥāwiyyah, and has no problems with anything like that, and no confusions about anything, has correct ʿaqīdah. That is correct ʿaqīdah, inshāʾAllāh.

As for whether one needs to know the proofs of everything or not: that is not necessary. Scholars have discussed in great detail taqlīd in ʿaqīdah: taqlīd, which means following somebody else in ʿaqīdah without knowing the proofs. The taqlīd in ʿaqīdah which is not permitted, and which has been condemned, is the one in which someone is following another purely for the sake of following that person. They are not following the Sharīʿah through that person's explanation to them; they are literally following that person and their faith.

Take a person who converts because of another individual, for marriage, for example. Then it does not work out, so this person reverts back to whatever they believed in before. There it was pure taqlīd, or it was basically a false conversion. Or take someone who is following somebody else in such a way that if that person changes, they change as well. They are not really following the Qur'an and Sunnah; they are not following the true ʿaqīdah; they are following somebody else. That would be blind following, and that is not permitted.

What is permitted, though, is this. There are all of these books, and all of these sources of ʿaqīdah that we have: Imam Ṭaḥāwī's ʿaqīdah, Abū Ḥanīfah's ʿaqīdah, all of these other great books that we have, and the scholars that teach this. If someone is following them because they believe that these are providing them with the true guidance in terms of what we should believe, then what they are really doing is simply using that person's explanation and understanding as a transmission to them of the true ʿaqīdah, and that would be fine.

It is not within everybody's ability to go to the sources and try to find out and collect what the ʿaqīdah should be: to look through the whole corpus of hadith and the Qur'an, to actually say that these hadith relate to ʿaqīdah, and to bring them together. It is not everybody's cup of tea. It is basically a service that has been provided to us by the ʿulamāʾ. We are using only that, but we are actually following the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him), and the guidance of Allah. So that is a taqlīd: one does not have to know exactly where it comes from, as long as one has trust in the scholarship. So it is not necessary to know the evidences.

Otherwise, for anyone who wants to know the evidences, there are evidences provided for nearly every single line of ʿAqīdah Ṭaḥāwiyyah, for example in Ghaznawī's sharḥ. It would also be worthwhile, at the end, to go quickly through every point and mention the verse that it comes from. Also, scholars like Bājūrī have mentioned the logical proofs for every one of the attributes of Allah (swt), all the way from His oneness to His beginninglessness, to having the ṣifah, or the attributes, of speech and hearing, and so on and so forth. Even though these things are proven without any form of doubt or confusion from the sources of Sharīʿah, from the Qur'an and the Sunnah, he has still provided that, just for those who like rationalism.

Again, this was a later development of the Ashʿarī school, in which they employed certain Aristotelian logic, for example: to say that the world is constantly moving and changing and adapting; that for anything that moves and changes and adapts, there needs to be somebody, an administrator, or somebody who causes that to happen; and thus, because the world is of that nature, it needs a creator, it needs someone who causes that change; and thus, that is Allah. Putting these premises in order to reach this conclusion is basically part of Aristotelian logic, which obviously was not used at the time of the Prophet (peace be upon him). But in order to clarify this for minds later on, who wanted that kind of organised way of trying to reach a conclusion, they employed that.