The agnostic also has difficulty in understanding that those who are capable of belief and assent to a faith may believe quite different and irreconcilable things at different levels of their personality…

In any case the believer is more often born than made; he calls himself a Christian or a Muslim because he was born into this or that religious environment. he thinks that he shares the beliefs common to the people around him; with a part of himself he believes, and with another part he disbelieves. But, by the same token, those born into a secular agnostic society, and mouthing the slogans imposed by their education and their conditioning, may none the less be closer to faith than they know; in this case the rust which covers their hearts has come from without rather than from within themselves. A few years before his death in 1934 the great Algerian Sheykh, Ahmed al-Alawi became friendly with a Frenchman, Dr Carret, who had been treating him for various minor ailments. One day Carret tried to explain his agnosticism to the Sheykh, adding, however, that what most surprised him was that people who did claim to be religious ‘should be able to go on attaching importance to this earthly life’. After a pause, the Sheykh said to him: “It is a pity that you will not let your Spirit rise above yourself. But whatever you may say and whatever you may imagine, you are nearer to God than you think.’ In this confused age in which we now find ourselves there may be many a believer who is a kafir under the skin, and many a kafir who is closer than he knows to God in whom he thinks he does not believe.

It is important to be aware of these paradoxes because the distrust of religion – or at least of ‘organized religion’ – which is so widespread in the Western world, derives less from intellectual doubts than from a critical judgment of the way in which religious people are seen to behave. The agnostic does not concern himself with the supernatural dimensions of religion, let alone ultimate truth. He sees only that part of the iceberg which is visible among surface, and he judges this to be misshapen. The whole sad story is summed up in the wise child’s prayer: ‘Lord, please make good people religious, and make religious people good.”

-Islam and the Destiny of Man – Eaton