Emblemises the beauty of simplicity. You don need to be as twisty as those Scandinavian detectives. Wordle is just a gentle love story in ordinary everyday lives. Wearing hijab, it is argued, is fundamental to the Islamic faith. Hijab is then resisted with saffron, symbolic of another faith. But no one wonders what all this has to do with faith. It has everything to do with the confusion between faith and belief. Invariably, when faith is invoked for the purpose of defending a religious custom or practice, it is used as a synonym for belief. But belief and faith are opposites. Belief denotes the absence of faith. A person relates to religion either in terms of belief or of faith; but not in terms of both. To believe is to insist that what one practices is valid for the reason that one has been doing it. Belief is invoked to justify clinging to the past and to reassure oneself. Its purpose is to ensure that the ground on which one stands is not shaken by nascent or extraneous forces. Belief is defensive. What one believes need not be true for others. That is why it is impossible to argue matters of belief in the public space. What a person believes is exclusive to her. It cannot be justified in terms of what is universally valid or true. If so, it is best if what one believes exclusively is not brought into the public, secular democratic space. Faith, in contrast to belief, implies a state of unreserved openness to the possibilities and profundities of life. Unlike belief, it is forward looking. If belief is deployed in defending the status quo, faith, as Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard put it, is a leap in the dark. Belief operates as the sentinel of the status quo. We believe in what already is. Faith is the signpost to the future. We need no faith to relate to what already is; belief will do for the purpose. Faith is needed to relate to the not yet. Religion has no room for faith. Faith is the essence of spirituality, which is universal. Nothing that disables us from revering the mysteries of life, or dreaming of the inexhaustible possibilities of life, is faith. We can believe in orthodoxy; but we can live only in faith. The belief of a person becomes pathological when he clings to a terrain of habit or custom to the exclusion of the rest of the world. In its extreme forms, belief breeds psychosis: the inability to relate wholesomely