Fakhruddin Razi was once passing through a marketplace and, being a well-known scholar of his time, had a group of people following him.
Upon seeing this spectacle, an aged Lady sitting on the side made inquiries of her immediate neighbor as to who this man was and why he had a crowd with him.
The neighbor, as is often the case with these types of situations, when the individual in question is some sort of a celebrity, expressed surprise at the Old Lady’s apparent ignorance of this most famous man.
“You do not know who this is?” he asked. “This man is Fakhruddin Razi” (some of whose titles included Shaykh al-Islam, Prince of The Controversialists, Teacher of The Skeptics).
“This man,” he added, evidently trying his best to emphasize the man’s status for the Lady to appreciate, “is so knowledgeable he can give you seventy proofs for the existence of God.”
“If he did not have seventy doubts for the existence of God,” quipped the Old Lady, loud enough for the Sheikh to hear, “he would not need seventy proofs,” *no doubt with the warmth and the assuredness of a Grandma who was firm in her convictions and did not give a goat’s hoof what anyone else thought otherwise.
The Sheikh, upon hearing this, stopped for a moment, and made the following recommendatory comment: everyone, he said, ought to have the type of faith and conviction of this Old Lady.
*Added, at author’s liberty, solely, for literary edification.
***Paraphrased from a Sheikh Hamza Yusuf lecture – Introduction to Logic, on Deenstream
