Understanding another faith requires sincere suspension of doubt about its core claims.

Evidence

If people believe it to be true, that will not make it true, but their actions will be the same as they would have been, if it had been true. Sympathy and understanding require that this should be understood. If there is this sympathetic approach it immediately becomes possible to pass into and share the state of mind of Muslims in many ages: the first Companions, the people of the golden age of the ‘Abbasids, the men of the Ottoman Empire, the Muslims of to-day. But if some such spiritual and mental borrowing does not take place, no further progress is possible. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1737

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s readings on orientalism and sympathetic vs. objectifying study of non-Western religions, and to how Muslim self-understanding gets either honored or flattened.
• DEFINE: Defines a hermeneutic method: assessing a belief-world as-if-true without affirming it, as the precondition for comprehension.