Concept of Fitrah

"According to an ancient and still recognized legal principle an accused man cannot plead, in his defence, ignorance of the law; and since in the older civilizations the temporal and the spiritual were organically connected, this principle may well have originated as a prolongation of the dogma that on the Day of Judgement it will not be possible to plead ignorance of the basic truths of religion.

The dogma in question is to be found expressed, implicitly or explicitly, in various ways. Islam, for example, is particularly explicit: in the Quran, God is said to have taken to Himself, out of the loins of Adam, the seeds of all future generations of men and to have put to them the question: "Am I not your Lord?", to which they answered in the affirmative. The Qur'an adds that they were made to testify, "lest ye should say on the Day of Resurrection: 'Verily, of this we were unaware'. (al-'A'raf 7:172)

In other words, every human soul is imbued with what might be called the sense of the Absolute or of the Transcendent, the sense of a Supreme Power that is both Origin and End of the created universe which It infinitely transcends."

... Preface, The Eleventh Hour, Martin Lings