was completely enveloped in the protective veil of innocence that now begins
seven years of gradual dissolution that leads towards complete extinction at
the age of puberty. If the child's questions regarding imperfections or
conflicting behaviors of superiors and peers go unheeded, or if deeper queries
that reach out for spiritual truth and meaning are ignored and remain
unanswered as if they are insignificant, a conditioning process ‒ akin to
sectarian reform ‒ initiates a certain ‘careless’ attitude in the child leading to
the heedlessness of fitrah , and this is exactly what prepares the soul for the
life-long double-standard of either hypocrisy or the well known human denial
syndrome.^70
Children then learn to suppress their search for truth (reaffirmation of the
pre-primordial covenant of As-Sakkinah ), after which they adjust themselves
to whichever bias best serves need fulfillment. When factual truth and
understanding (wisdom) are set aside, self-gratification and survival become
the child’s paramount pleasure in place of wisdom, whereby these passing
pleasures become addictive such that they continuously require more and
more “things” or pre-occupations like sports, music, trivia or worldly
knowledge to satisfy non-virtuous attributes such as vanity, fame, greed, lust,
gluttony, power, money, etc., etc. ... When no oblation of tawhid truth is
offered to fill the void in the heart of the newly conditioned ‘non-wisdom’
seeking soul, these fixations on worldly pleasure become a veil that covers the
neglected search for truth, understanding and eternal purpose ( akhirah ),
without which As-Sakkinah cannot be maintained in peace (Islam). And thus
are hypocrites and self-deluded liars in denial made, which consequently
infers they are not born that way.
If this deviation and shunting aside of fitrah is not corrected by the time of
adolescence and guided by truth towards virtue, the non-virtuous pre-
occupations become ‘fixed’ (i.e. concretely conditioned) in the soul by
adolescent peer pressure, wherein the child learns that ‘everybody is doing it’
so to speak. They also learn that if he/she does not run with the herd, their
needs and perceived needs – now entirely emotionally centered on being
70
The practice of claiming to have higher standards or beliefs than is the case. ORIGIN: Middle
English: from Old French ypocrisie , via ecclesiastical Latin, from Greek hupokrisis ‘acting of a
theatrical part’, from hupokrinesthai ‘play a part, pretend’, from hupo ‘under’ + krinein
‘decide, judge’. (Oxford Dict). This latter definition is often referred to in Al-Kitab in
references to those who’ set themselves up’ as judges of God’s Word or Law.