The Covenant of Alast and Why We Don't Remember It

We do remember it — spiritually, not rationally. Our brains develop slowly, but our spiritual conscience is a different kind of conscience, and it awakens when it comes in contact with revelation.

That spiritual conscience already knows the difference between right and wrong, between ugly and beautiful, between fair and unfair. Mercy, patience, gratitude, fairness — affinity toward truth — these are concepts that do not come from evolutionary biology or science alone. They are innate. The Quran's argument is that this is not just moral intelligence but spiritual intelligence, given to us and awakened as the brain develops.

This is why so many people in America, Canada, Australia, France — people reading the Quran in a library — say: "I feel like this is too familiar." And then they become Muslim. Not one or two cases. Hundreds of thousands, millions, all the time. Something innate inside human beings is being activated by the word of Allah — which He describes as light upon already existing light.

As for believers having doubts: doubt is natural and does not mean the covenant did not happen. The covenant is in the fitrah — the deep conscience. Doubt arises when the intellectual conscience, which is developing and wrestling with information, hasn't yet caught up with or unified with that deeper spiritual awareness. The Quran engages both of them.