Fitrah – The Primordial Nature of Man

Is the mind of a baby a blank slate or are there certain concepts ingrained in the human mind? Can human nature be demonstrated in infants from birth? Do thoughts about God and moral values naturally occur to a human growing up or are they fabricated ideas invented by previous cultures? Why are certain ideas and values so widespread among people?

People have long wondered and debated about human nature. Are there some behaviours which arise naturally from the human being and others which arise solely due to the influence of the surrounding culture? Some would argue that many of the good traits of human beings arise naturally, including moral traits like compassion and concern for others.

The man known as the father of modern economics, Adam Smith (d. 1790CE), argued that sympathy must be inherent. He wrote, “No matter how selfish you think man is, it’s obvious that there are some principles in his nature that give him an interest in the welfare of others.” Others, like English philosopher John Locke (d.1704CE), argued that the human mind is essentially a blank slate at birth and that all knowledge is acquired through experience.

Muslim scholars centuries earlier preceded such comments with a vast, rigorous and systematic analysis of human nature when defining the Fitrah – the primordial nature of all human beings.

What is the Fitrah?

Fitrah is an arabic word used in Islamic theology to refer to the natural constitution of human beings, i.e. the pure and pristine original state upon which God creates all human beings. The human’s natural state encompasses an inclination towards that which is morally and spiritually pure, upright and wholesome. The concept of the Fitrah comes from the Qur’an which states:

“So turn your face toward the true natural way of life – God’s chosen fitrah (constitution) upon which He has formed humanity. There is no altering the primary state of God’s creation. That is the correct way of life though most men fail to realize it. It is the path of turning towards God, remaining dutiful to Him, establishing prayer, and being not of those who ascribe partners to Him.” (Qur’an 30:30-31).

This is the default ‘factory setting’ with which all humans are delivered, if you will. The Qur’an presents the most fundamental aspect of the fitrah to be the spiritual inclination toward God, expressing one’s love of God in prayer and gratitude, and striving to come closer to God. In addition, the moral inclination towards caring for others and doing good is also part of this primordial state (the spiritual and moral are also interconnected – refer to this article). This is what accounts for our “moral conscience” that we speak about in every day life. If it is not corrupted, our moral conscience will be upset when we know we are doing something wrong. The Prophet Muhammad said, “Righteousness is good character, while sin is that which agitates and disturbs your soul and you would hate others to uncover” (Sahih Muslim). The fitrah is like having an internal compass that always points in the direction of good works which bring us closer to God.

Despite the fact that human beings live with so many different ideologies, religions, belief systems, and world-views, Islam teaches that we are all born with the same inherent nature and that these manufactured labels are acquired through one’s upbringing, one’s culture, one’s society and one’s environment. These labels are human ways of recognizing their own “brand”. Prophet Muhammad famously said, “Every single child is born upon the fitrah, and then his parents may make him into a Jew or Christian or Magian. Similarly, animals are born unbranded. Have you ever found an animal born branded until you brand it yourselves?” (Sahih Bukhari). The fitrah means a tendency that naturally develops and shapes the way we see ourselves and the world – it does not mean being born with set a of facts in one’s head, since the Qur’an states, “And God brought you forth from the wombs of your mothers not knowing a thing, but He granted you hearing, seeing, and reasoning so perhaps you may show gratitude” (Qur’an 16:78).

How does Islam relate to the fitrah?

Without guidance, the fitrah is corruptible. The system of guidance revealed by God (known simply as ‘surrendering to Him’ or ‘Islam’) is the fulfillment of the natural disposition of human beings. The fitrah finds comfort in Islam as naturally as a hand fits in a glove. The early hadith scholar, Ibn Qutayba al-Daynuri (d.276H) points out that Islamic theology does not teach that children are born Muslim, but rather that they are born with a simple spiritual and intellectual inclination towards God and towards good, for God took a covenant with humanity prior to their earthly existence (referenced in Qur’an 7:172) and it is this primordial affirmation of God that yields the tendency to journey towards Him and towards good in this earthly existence. Thus, every child is born with a natural spiritual, moral and intellectual constitution by which they make sense of reality, and this inborn tendency is affirmed and nourished by the revealed system of guidance known as Islam.

Unlike assertions of man’s original sin or inherent evil in other theological and ideological systems, the Qur’anic discourse argues that the fundamental nature of human beings is inherently good. However, rather than cultivating that natural inclination towards good, human beings often descend into the gratification of lower desires including greed, hatred, envy, lust and power. These lower desires are termed the nafs in Islamic theology. The human soul constantly battles with a desire to feed the appetite of the nafs, which the human being knows to be destructive by virtue of the fitrah.

In his colossal work on reason and revelation entitled Dar’ ta’arud al-Aql wa’l-Naql, the famous Islamic theologian Ibn Taymiyyah writes, “The servants of God are inherently compelled by their fitrah to love God, though amongst them are those who corrupt this fitrah… and this love of God intensifies according to one’s knowledge of Him and the soundness of one’s fitrah. And it diminishes with diminished knowledge, and the pollution of one’s fitrah with corruptive vain desires.”

While the concept of the inherent human disposition has been discussed in Islamic theology for centuries, many of its implications are remarkably being elaborated by contemporary research from childhood psychologists, cognitive scientists, ethicists, anthropologists and linguists. Some of the details of the fitrah shall be explored in parallel below.

Compassion, Justice, and Morality

A large volume of experimental research in childhood psychology has established that infants and toddlers demonstrate compassion, empathy, as well as a sense of fairness and justice. The psychologist Paul Bloom outlines copious evidence in his book, Just Babies – The Origins of Good and Evil. Bloom notes that, “Developmental psychologists have long observed that one-year olds will pat and soothe others in distress.”

There is also a clear capacity to discriminate moral good from evil at a strikingly early age. When five month old children were shown puppets demonstrating good behaviour (like helping to open a box or rolling a ball back) and other puppets demonstrating bad behaviour (like slamming the box shut or stealing the ball), the children invariably preferred the good puppets. Eight-month old infants even demonstrate a sense of disciplinary justice – they prefer a puppet that is mean to the bad puppet over one that is nice to the bad puppet; and at 21 months of age, toddlers will prefer to reward the good puppet with a treat and prefer to remove a treat from the bad puppet.

This fairness and justice arises from the fitrah. Ibn Taymiyyah (d.728H) writes, “Souls are naturally disposed (majbula) to love justice and its supporters, and to hate injustice and its supporters; this love, which is in the fitra, is what is meant for [justice] to be good.” The moral values upon which we construct our lives stem from the intuitions which naturally arise in childhood and which are not stamped out by overriding sociocultural pressures.

God, Purpose and Spirituality

Everyone wonders about purpose. Asking “why?” is perhaps one of the most quintessentially human acts fathomable. As an individual, one comes to realize many undeniable facts about the human condition. I am a sentient being, aware of myself and the universe I inhabit; I feel love, joy, pain, anguish; I can choose how to live my life; I may spend my life chasing livelihood until I inevitably die, buried beneath the earth and forgotten by all. What is it all for? Is life altogether pointless? Some people chase after pleasure and happiness, making more money, relying on frequent forms of entertainment, looking from one vacation to the next until retirement – but at the end of the day, life may feel hollow, shallow, empty, and meaningless. A human being can distract oneself from the deeper questions of life by pursuing the fleeting bodily pleasures as many do, or challenge oneself to engage in a serious search for meaning.

As it turns out, the search for meaning is a very early human intuition. Infants at 3 and 6 months of age will follow the eye gaze of an adult to visualize the intended object of interest. In fact, even testing on infants two days after birth, shows that newborn babies will prefer to look at actions that are purposeful – they prefer to look at a hand reaching toward something when an object is present and the hand is traveling in the appropriate direction.

But the research on young children goes much further than this. The psychologist Justin Barrett discusses a large volume of experimental studies in this regard in his book Born Believers – The Science of Children’s Religious Belief. Children have a very strong propensity to see natural objects and events as the result of unseen intentional agency – something referred to as the Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device (HADD). Children offer teleological explanations for phenomena, preferring to think about the purpose behind things. So, how do children end up believing in God? The idea that belief came from one’s parents – the indoctrination hypothesis – has been supplanted by psychological research in favour of the preparedness hypothesis – children naturally develop this belief because their mental mechanisms have properties that favour learning about God.

Moreover, children intuitively demonstrate certain theological notions about God. When asked who would know what was inside a concealed gift without opening it, three-year old children answered that a friend would not know what was inside, but God would know. Ibn Taymiyyah writes that the God is known to be All-Seeing and All-Hearing by one’s fitrah.

Barrett and colleagues also found that children as young as three-years had a strong sense that God is immortal and would never die. In fact, according to Barrett, the psychological research allows one to reliably reconstruct a child’s “natural religion” as including the following beliefs: existence of superhuman beings with thoughts, wants, perspectives, and emotions; and elements of the natural world have been purposefully designed by superhuman beings, who possess knowledge beyond humans, and may be invisible and immortal.

Language and Numbers

Language is humanity’s most remarkable gift, the foundation of all civilizational achievements, and a defining property of our species. Human language allows for the incredible ability to use a very small finite system of symbols to formulate an infinite range of profoundly complex meanings, such that the present sentence you are reading has never been expressed before in the history of the universe. Languages are spectacularly complex systems of syntax, semantics, and sounds, but perhaps the most puzzling aspect of all is how on earth babies acquire it so easily, especially in the absence of any focused training (this is known as the ‘poverty of stimulus’). Consider the sentences “Fred appeared to Jim to like him” and the sentence “Fred appealed to Jim to like him“. Why does ‘him’ refer to Jim in the first sentence but to Fred in the second, even though the surface structure of both sentences is the same? Expressing a grammatical rule for such cases is no easy matter, but native speakers understand such sentences intuitively without any training.

When we search and study the 7000 or so languages in the world, we find that there is a common syntax or universal grammar by which all such systems operate. The renowned linguist Noam Chomsky writes, “There are very deep and restrictive principles that determine the nature of human language and are rooted in the specific character of the human mind“. The evidence points to the existence of an internal structure within the human mind which infants use to determine what a language should consist of, and this system is called the ‘language acquisition device’ (LAD). That such a structure should exist would come as no surprise to the student of Islamic theology. In his fascinating work Miftah Dar al-Sa’adah, the theologian Ibn al-Qayyim (d.751H) notes that God is the one “who prepared the mind of the human by making it amenable to learning language in contrast to all other animals” and the Qur’an describes language as an inherent capacity of mankind (Qur’an 55:4, 2:31).

Understanding the natural numbers also happens to be a capacity that develops naturally in human beings. Rudimentary conceptions of numerical magnitude have been demonstrated in infants at six months of age, in experiments where they distinguish between displays with different quantities of items, as well as experiments with different numbers of repeated sounds. Ibn Taymiyyah provides the proposition “one is half of two” as an example of fitrah knowledge, which seems particularly appropriate, given that at this early stage infants rely on “the ratio and not the absolute difference between two numbers, since infants succeeded in discriminating four versus eight sounds but failed at four versus six sounds”.

If one were to take a step back and examine even broader metaphysical notions, like causality, it would become evident that these too are grounded in the human being’s natural worldview. In fact, experimental research in preschool children (ages 3 to 5) suggests the precise kind of causal structure we prefer to see in the universe – children will act with the assumption of deterministic causal relations when intervening in a scenario, accepting stochastic inferences as a last resort or when there is no obvious direct causal link. We are likewise predisposed to view the universe as intelligible to human beings and governed by a natural order of uniformly applicable laws. When a leading cosmologist, Paul Davies, pointed out that these metaphysical views must be accepted on faith for no empirical data nor deductive argument can substantiate them, it created a flurry of startled responses. In fact, it is just part of the inherent meaning-making process by which the human mind operates. There is no a priori reason to presume that principles of logic devised in the minds of earthly organisms with limited capacities should apply unfailingly to the universe. Nevertheless, we wholeheartedly embrace the applicability of logical reasoning, simply because our fitrah dictates it.

What are the implications?

From the moment of birth, human beings are flooded with a tsunami of visual and auditory data. The world is bright, noisy, messy, and by any reasonable estimate – it should be unintelligible to the newborn. But the human mind is not a passive vessel which is simply filled with the accumulation of sensory data. Rather, right from the beginning, the human mind is actively applying its conceptual architecture to the surrounding world, and using this interpretative framework to filter the noise and sights so they can be parsed into meaningful packets of words, objects, people, events, occurrences, goals, ideas, values, and meanings. Humans are predisposed by their fitrah to find purpose and prosperity in the world, so they cry for guidance and care, observe their surroundings, interpret their environment with causation and deduction, seek morally upright patterns of behaviour, and yearn for an existence worthy of God’s friendship.

Some of the epistemological implications reflecting on the fitrah are quite profound. There is a natural way of looking at the world that is coherent and meaningful (discussed further in this article on meaningfulness). We try to fit everything together – our logical principles, our experiences, our moral judgements, our spiritual inclinations. When something doesn’t make sense, we constantly adjust and refine our understanding as we process our surroundings. A child initially incorrectly generates the plural “sheeps” by over-application of a correct rule, before using experience and sensory data to prune such errors from the system. When the human being encounters a new occurrence or phenomenon in the external reality, it is processed according to the internal architecture of the fitrah, interpreted and then incorporated. The result is a dynamic process of continuously refining intuitions to bring them in line with our complete picture of reality. It stands to reason that we should retain our default components of the framework unless and until there is overwhelming contradictory evidence suggesting that something needs to be adjusted to recalibrate our system with reality. It doesn’t make sense to talk about proof for the fitrah, for that falsely presupposes logic and proof as entirely extrinsic to the fitrah, whereas the very concept of proof itself only arises from the fitrah; the fitrah is inescapable.

Questioning any individual component of this native conceptual architecture is epistemically equivalent to questioning any other part of it. If one says, “why bother with believing in God, it’s just a childhood notion we should abandon!”, the response would be that it would make no sense to dispense with the central component of one’s fitrah and retain the periphery. If the universe is a pointless particle soup, then there’s no good or bad either, and morality can go out the window too. Causality, minds, time, and all the rest of the metaphysical baggage should be dropped as well. And where’s the sense in keeping our childhood axioms of numbers, reasoning and logic, or the childish expectation of an ordered and intelligible universe (on which all of science is constructed)? Dispense everything of the fitrah, and one can construct no sane or intelligible understanding of anything. The only sensible thing to do is to retain our sensible way of making sense of the world. And we only dispense with something that doesn’t make sense.

So we have come a long way from the ‘blank slate’ to a rather sophisticated notion of human nature. Language, moral values, spiritual inclinations, metaphysical notions – all of these represent structures within the mind, organized into a very robust functioning architecture. The fitrah is thus comprised of a conceptual apparatus with ethical, spiritual, and intellectual processing functions by which the external reality is rendered meaningful, and life’s journey towards God is appropriately conceived.