When a young man says he is too smart to be religious, I do not first hear arrogance. I hear a wound speaking through the vocabulary of pride. Our brother Ibrahim has been insulted, called arne, treated with contempt by those who claim to defend God while trampling on the most basic manners that God demands. He has watched siblings suffer and has seen religion worn like a costume by people who neither fear God nor respect fellow human beings. From that furnace of experience, he throws out a challenge to religion and calls it stupidity. We must answer him, but with a calm mind and a soft heart.
Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir Sadr once wrote that a society can wear the name of Islam yet be structured on ignorance, greed and oppression. In that case, what collapses is not Islam, but a counterfeit built in its name. If an intelligent young man sees mostly this counterfeit every time he hears the word religion, it is not surprising that he flees from it and then says that his intelligence demands this escape. The tragedy is that he has walked away from a fake coin while believing he has rejected gold itself.
The first confusion sits in the sentence itself. To say I am too smart to be religious assumes that religion is the natural refuge of the dull, the unthinking, the intellectually lazy. Genuine religion does not ask a human being to switch off his mind. Genuine religion asks him to turn his mind to its highest capacity, to ask sharper questions, to follow the chain of cause and effect until he reaches the point where blind matter can no longer carry the weight of explanation. Baqir Sadr called this a movement of reason toward what he called an all encompassing explanation of existence and society.
Intelligence is not just the talent to pass exams or to quote Western philosophers on social media. Intelligence is the capacity to see connections, to question assumptions, to detect contradictions, to be honest when our own logic turns against us. A person who says there is no God and in the next breath blames that same God for the suffering of his siblings is not stupid. He is in pain. His mind is struggling to reconcile the moral outrage in his chest with the intellectual slogans on his tongue.
If there is no God, then the universe is a cold accident, indifferent to victims and oppressors, blind to justice and injustice. In that picture, the suffering of any sibling is simply one more statistical event in an uncaring cosmos. To be angry at that, to call it unfair, is to smuggle into an atheistic world a standard of fairness that the world itself cannot provide. Where did that standard come from. Why does the heart refuse to treat injustice as a neutral fact, the way it treats the boiling of water or the falling of a stone.
Jawad Amuli would say that this moral outcry is a sign that within the human being lives a knowledge that did not come from chemistry or chance. The same young man who denies God still speaks with the grammar of right and wrong, still feels that oppressors deserve blame and the oppressed deserve defence. That moral compass is not a superstition of Hausa culture. It is part of the original nature that God breathed into the human being. One may deny the name of the Giver, but one cannot erase the gift itself.
At the same time, those who insult him with the word arne betray the very book they claim to defend. The Prophet who brought that book never treated a doubter with this cheap contempt. He argued, he clarified, he prayed for guidance, but he did not spit on human dignity. To call another human being arne as an insult is not a sign of strong faith. It is a confession of weak intellect and weaker character. Dastghaib would say that the first disease such people must treat is not the atheism of others, but the arrogance in their own hearts.
Our brother says he despises Hausa traditional stupidity. We should listen here with care. There is in many of our cultures a mixture of deep wisdom and deep superstition. Some harmful practices are defended in the name of tradition. Some unjust hierarchies are cemented with religious slogans. When a thinking young person sees this, he may not possess the fine tools to separate genuine religion from cultural distortion. He sees the whole package as one block and rejects it. For that rejection of stupidity we should not blame him. Baqir Sadr spent his life saying that genuine Islam came to overthrow ignorance and oppression, not to serve as their decoration.
Where we must challenge him is where he mistakes the disease of a community for the nature of faith itself. When a doctor misdiagnoses and kills the patient, we do not declare medicine itself a fraud. When a corrupt judge sells verdicts to the highest bidder, we do not declare justice an illusion. In the same way, those who weaponise religion to insult, loot, kill or silence are evidence against their own souls, not against the truth of revelation.
There is also an emotional knot that must be recognised. A young man who sees his brother or sister suffer under violence, injustice or poverty will naturally ask where God is in all this. This question is not a sign of lack of intelligence. It is a sign that the heart is still alive. Religion that deserves loyalty does not run away from this question. It looks at the world and says human beings have been given freedom and power, and they are misusing it. When the state steals, when elites weaponise differences, when leaders neglect education and justice, they are not executing the will of God. They are betraying it.
Baqir Sadr in Our Society explains that the structure of a community will reflect whatever it takes as its ultimate reference point. A society that worships profit will produce a certain kind of human being, laws, habits and even family relations. A society that is truly grounded in God consciousness must produce a different kind of human being and a different structure. When a government that carries Islamic slogans produces mass poverty, corruption and insecurity, this does not refute Islam. It incriminates the rulers who have replaced God with their own appetites while still reciting His name.
On the question of evolution, our brother thinks he has found a scientific foundation for atheism. Here again we need clarity. Evolution as a scientific theory studies how life changes and diversifies over time. It explains patterns in the fossil record, genetic similarities, adaptation. Even if every detail of this theory were one day perfectly established, it would still remain a description of process, not a proof that there is no purpose or designer behind the process. To move from evolution is true to God does not exist is a leap of philosophy, not a conclusion of biology.
Writers like Harun Yahya have spent many pages attacking the scientific details of Darwinian evolution, pointing to gaps in the fossil record, to the complexity of the cell, to the fine tuning of physical constants. Some of their scientific arguments are disputed by many researchers. What remains valuable though is a central insight. The more we uncover about the depth of order in nature, the more strained it becomes to say that blind chance, operating without mind or purpose, is enough to account for everything. The real issue is not the length of time or the gradualness of change. The real issue is whether mindless matter can generate information, consciousness, moral awareness and the human longing for meaning.
Let us even accept for argument that a chain of natural processes can be traced from the first cell to Ibrahim typing on his phone. The question remains. Who wrote the laws that allowed such a chain to be coherent. Who set the constants of physics in ranges that permit stable atoms, stars, planets and chemistry suitable for life. Who planted within this evolved brain the hunger for justice that makes him grieve when his siblings suffer. Evolution, if true in its scientific dimension, is like learning the pattern by which the letters in a book were printed. It does not explain how the language itself came to exist, how meaning appeared, how the story acquired its moral weight.
Genuine religion embraces investigation of natural processes. The same God who commands prayer is the one who invited us to reflect on how He brings life from dead land, how He alternates night and day, how He created the human being from a tiny drop and endowed him with hearing, sight and heart. The believer has no need to be afraid of microscopes or telescopes. What he refuses is the ideological claim that once a process is described in material terms, God becomes unnecessary. That claim dissolves if we press the question of why there is anything rather than nothing and why this anything is structured in such a precise, law governed way that intelligence can read it.
Religion that deserves respect does not merely answer cosmic questions. It also transforms how we treat one another. A person who feels wronged by society and then meets only insult from religious people will naturally build hatred toward the entire faith. This is why the greatest argument for religion in Our Society is not abstract proof but the building of a community where justice, compassion and honesty are visible in the behaviour of its members. When a young man like Ibrahim meets such a community instead of those who mock him as arne, he may still struggle, he may still doubt, but his doubts will not be poisoned by the hypocrisy of those who speak in the name of God.
Dastghaib would remind us that the first battlefield is the soul of the believer. If the defender of faith is rude, abusive, shallow, then he has already surrendered the moral high ground. He is trying to defend the purest of messages with the dirtiest of tools. He pushes people away from the truth he claims to love. The believer must answer insult with patience, not silence in the face of injustice, but patience in personal interaction. One can strongly contest the ideas of atheism while still showing human warmth to the atheist.
To our brother Ibrahim we can say this: Your anger at the misuse of religion is justified. Your pain over the suffering of your siblings is noble. Your contempt for stupidity disguised as tradition has a righteous core. You are right to reject superstition, right to despise cruelty excused in the name of God, right to protest a culture where religious slogans coexist comfortably with corruption and neglect. Where we invite you to rethink is in your conclusion that intelligence itself stands on the opposite side of faith.
True intelligence does not flee from difficult questions. It does not hide behind sarcasm. It examines its own contradictions. If you deny God because you say the universe is cruel and random, then your own burning sense of injustice becomes a problem your atheism cannot fully explain. If you affirm evolution as a scientific process, you still have to explain why there is a rational order that allows any science to exist and why the human heart insists that some things are worthy and others disgraceful.
Baqir Sadr teaches that a society without God eventually reduces the human being to an economic unit or a political instrument. Religion, when understood in its original depth, defends the human being from this reduction. It grounds dignity not in tribe, class or state, but in being a conscious servant of the Creator. It commands the believer to protect the oppressed, to respect the neighbour, to honour the mind, to fight injustice even if the oppressor recites the same holy book. This is the religion we invite you to revisit. Not the noisy theatre of hypocrites in religious costume, but the faith of the prophets, the martyrs, the teachers whose lives were spent lifting others.
You say you are too smart to be religious. Allow your intelligence to aim higher than the failures you see around you. Let it question not only imams and parents, but also the fashionable atheism that surrounds you. Let it sit with the Quran not as a book of slogans shouted in your face, but as a text you read in silence, verse by verse, asking whether it speaks to the very pains that drove you away. Let your heart remember that behind the noise of religious politics there is still a Lord who knows every tear of your siblings, every insult you received, every confusion in your chest.
If the God you rejected is the god of hypocrites and oppressors, you have done well to reject him. The real question is whether that false idol is the only picture of God available. Genuine religion says no. It calls you to a different vision. A God who demands reason, a God who honours doubt when it is honest, a God who condemns those who insult and belittle you, a God who invites you not to switch off your mind, but to use it until it leads you from the depth of your own outrage at injustice to the Source of justice itself.
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