Fitrah
Definition
Fitrah is the innate, God-given disposition toward recognizing and worshipping Allah that was embedded in Adam at creation and passed through him to every human being. Ibn Kathir grounds this in the famous hadith: 'Every child is born upon the fitrah; then their parents make them a Jew, a Christian, or a Zoroastrian.' The fitrah is not merely a potential — it is an active orientation, a default setting of the human soul that inclines it toward divine truth before any external influence arrives. Understanding the fitrah helps explain both the universal human religious impulse and the particular Islamic claim that monotheism is not an achievement of civilization but a return to something primordially known.
As understood in the classical tradition of Ibn Kathir and the scholars of his school.
Appears in
1 book in the library
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