Truth Concealing

Now, the books themselves are brought by messengers, which is the next object. We have to believe in messengers. And the idea of a messenger, al-rasūl, is somebody who is sent from God to human beings to give them a message from God — to explain God's intentions, or will, towards the human being. Both the books and the messengers are understood to be sent by God.

Now, there is a response to the messenger, and it is either īmān or kufr. Kufr will most often be seen translated in books as disbelief: a kāfir is a non-believer, or a disbeliever. That is not a good translation for kufr. The Islamic worldview sees kufr, if one looks at the root meaning of it — it is from a root word, ka-fa-ra, whose active participle in Arabic means a farmer. Because what a farmer does is cover a seed with dirt. They put a seed into darkness. Now, the idea there is that kufr is covering over something. That is the root of it. So, in a sense, kufr is seen as truth-concealing. The truth is concealed. The idea there is that it is really known that a person in truth cannot be a disbeliever, from the Islamic perspective. No one can be a disbeliever in truth. And the greatest truth-concealer is Iblīs, in the Islamic worldview — and Iblīs was one of the closest to God. So the idea is that really this is not about disbelief. This is about concealment. This is about hiding, or covering up. And that is how the Qurʾānic worldview sees truth in relation to how people respond to it. They will either accept it — and that is why they are called acceptors rather than believers — they will accept it, or they will conceal it.

Now, there are many ways to conceal the truth, and certainly many, many Muslims are truth-concealers in reality. A person can be a Muslim, doing all the right things and everything, and yet in reality be concealing the truth. The essence of truth-concealing is ingratitude. The human being who is a kāfir is also called an ingrate. The idea is that if God in His bounty — because the actual idea of sending messengers is good intention; in other words, God has a good intention towards His creation — if God had simply created the human being, thrown away the manual, and just said, work it all out for yourselves, then everybody would spend their life in turmoil and darkness, and moving out…