Of central importance to the Islamic creed
is a firm belief in Allah (God)
that accords with the precepts set in the
Qur’an and Sunnah. While the majority of
humanity believes in an absolute, the
Islamic definition of God is precise and
unique, and not subject to personal
revisions. In other words, Allah is as He is,
and our belief in His reality benefits no
one but ourselves.
With this in
mind, we have endeavored to define the
Islamic understanding of Allah in a candid,
albeit simple, language:
Allah is One,
without any partners. He has no sharers in
His essence, attributes, actions, or rulings.
He is the sole Creator of all that exists,
has existed, and will ever exist. Everything
other than Him is His creation – that is, a
contingent being that came into existence
after it did not previously exist.
He alone
controls all events, causes, and effects,
and no power exists independently of His
power. Nothing happens outside of His will,
neither before He willed it, nor after He
willed it, neither more than what He willed,
nor less than what He willed.
There is
nothing like Him, and it is impossible to
imagine or conceive Him. He is not qualified
by the laws of His creation. He is not
encompassed by direction or distance. Allah
existed as He has always been before the
creation of time and space.
He not only created time and space, but He
is transcendentally beyond them, such that
He cannot be “in” a place, He cannot be “everywhere,”
and He cannot be “nowhere.”
Allah is the
eternally-existing, necessary first cause.
Unlike His creation, which is a possible
existent subject to nonbeing, beginning, and
ending, Allah has no beginning and He will
never perish or come to an end. Scholars
have also explained, “Bringing creation into
existence did not add anything to His
attributes that was not already there.”
He is the
Sustainer of everything, directly sustaining
every instant of the existence of all things.
He alone gives life and He alone gives death,
and He will re-create and resurrect living
rational beings for judgment and retribution
just as He created them the first time.
Nothing is difficult for Him.
His
omnipotence encompasses all things
intrinsically possible. He cannot terminate
His own existence, for “the divine nature
necessarily entails the divine perfections,
of which being is one. It is impossible that
Allah could cease to have this perfection or
any other, for otherwise He would not be God.”
Similarly, it is impossible for created
things to contravene the knowledge or speech
of Allah, for by being connected with either
of these two divine attributes, it has
become contingently necessary for any
created thing to conform and submit.
His knowledge
encompasses all things. It is not subject to
change or increase; it is not based on time
or chronology. He knew the actions and
eternal abodes of all of humanity before its
creation, and its actual existence and
conformity to Allah’s pre-temporal knowledge
neither increased nor benefited Him.
He sees all
events and things in a manner wholly unlike
our means of seeing things. His sight does
not depend on distance, light, and
appendages. Likewise, He hears all events
and things with a hearing that transcends
sound waves, volume, tone, and pitch.
Allah is the
source of all benefit and harm. If all of
humanity gathered together with the sole
intention of benefiting or harming a single
person, it would be absolutely powerless to
do so save by the will and permission of
Allah.
In a similar
vein, Allah alone guides to His single,
eternal truth, and He likewise leads astray.
All good works done by a person are not a
consequence of his own knowledge, effort, or
piety, but rather they issue from a
divinely-bestowed ability that Allah grants
to whom He wills.
It should be
noted at this point that while the masculine
pronoun “He” is used in both Arabic and
English to denote Allah, He is nonetheless
transcendentally beyond any gender.
Elucidating this phenomenon, T.J. Winter, a
British academic, writes the following:
God is simply
Allah, the God; never Father. The divine is
referred to by the masculine pronoun: Allah
is He (huwa); but the grammarians and
exegetes concur that this is not even
allegoric: Arabic has no neuter, and the use
of the masculine is normal in Arabic for
genderless nouns.
The Signs
of Allah
The first
“book” that attests to the existence of
Allah is creation itself. As such, a wise
man has said, “Praise be to God Who has
proven His existence through His
creation, proven His eternality through
the origination of His creation, and proven
His incomparability through the
uniformity of His creation.”
The universe
is, in essence, a book, though few
people are truly able to read it. With a
printed book, a person may become
obsessed with the font style,
binding, paper quality, and other
superficial features, while he never
learns or takes the time to read the
actual message contained therein. Similarly,
most people confine their attention to
the externalities of the world, such as the
relationship between cause and effect, and
they never perceive the underlying message
of creation, namely, that behind it lays a
single, all-wise, all-powerful Creator.
Regarding the
manifest signs of Allah all around us, a
knowledgeable British convert to Islam
writes the following:
We cannot
live, for instance, without daily rest; both
the human body and the human mind are
constructed to need it. This fact is not in
itself surprising, but what is surprising is
that the solar system collaborates with us
in our human frailty and provides us with a
day and a night exactly suited to our needs.
Man cannot claim to have compelled or
persuaded the solar system to do so; nor can
the solar system claim to have modeled human
physical and mental energy to conform to its
own movements. Both man and the solar system
are evidently linked in a total organization
in which man is the beneficiary; the
organizer of these inexplicable concordances
can only be a Supreme Controller of the
universe and mankind. Sweet water is a
necessary condition of human existence; it
is equally necessary for those plants which
produce man’s staple foods, which themselves
depend on each other. If sea water were to
invade our rivers and wells or rain down
from the sky, is there any doubt that we
should all die of hunger and thirst in a few
days and the whole world become an empty
desert? Yet sea water is only held back by
an invisible barrier over which we have no
control and the sun and the clouds co-operate
in order to desalinate our water for us and
so give us life.
By reflecting
upon the innumerable miracles within the
cosmos around us through the use of the
intellect that has been gifted to us, every
human being of sound mind and senses is able
to attain a basic realization of the
existence of a single, omnipotent God.
Through His Mercy and Guidance in the form
of prophets and revealed texts,
a person’s realization may ultimately grow
into gnosis of the true nature of Allah and
His Oneness, a concept know in Islam as
Tawheed.
Tawheed
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An artistic rendering of the
word Allah. |
In order to
provide a better understanding of Islamic
Tawheed, we have provided a
description of Allah and some of
His attributes as it appears in a famous,
classical text of Islamic
knowledge.
The following is an original
translation of excerpts from Revival of
the Religious Sciences by
Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali
:
Allah is
singular in His essence with no partner,
Unique with no equivalent,
Absolute, no opposite has He,
Alone without peer. He is beginningless
without predecessor, perpetual
of being without end, singularly
sustaining everything without stop. He is
not victim to termination or cessation, or
to the elapsing of spans or the
passing of interims. Rather He
is the First and the Last; the Outward and
the Inward – and He has knowledge of
everything.
He is not a
body with form, nor is He a confined or
quantifiable substance. He does not resemble
bodies in quantifiably or divisibility.
Rather He resembles nothing existent, nor
does anything existent resemble Him. There
is absolutely nothing like Him, nor is He
like anything.
No measure
confines Him, no space contains Him, no
direction encompasses Him, nor do the
heavens surround Him.
He is above
everything until the farthest reaches of the
stars – an above-ness that does not increase
His nearness to the heavens; rather He is
exalted in degree above the heavens to the
same extent that He is exalted in degree
above the depths of the earth.
Notwithstanding, He is near to all
existence, and He is nearer to the bondsman
than his jugular vein. His nearness, however,
no more resembles the nearness of bodies one
to another than His essence resembles the
essences of bodies.
He is too
sublime that space should encompass Him, as
He is too hallowed that time should restrict
Him. Rather He was, before He created time
and space, and He is now as He was always.
He is separate from His creation by His
attributes. He is transcendentally holier
than to be subject to change and movement.
Rather He remains in His qualities of
absolute majesty, not subject to abating,
and in His qualities of perfection with no
need of increase.
He is Living,
Almighty, Irresistible, Overpowering;
deficiency does not affect Him nor does
incapacity. “No slumber can seize Him nor
sleep.”
Extinction and death do not counteract Him.
He is possessed of absolute dominion,
sovereignty, and grandeur; to Him is
creation and command.
He is
matchless in creating and beginning,
solitary in causing existence and
originating. He creates all beings and their
acts, decrees their sustenance and spans.
Nothing possible is outside His grasp, and
He is never detached from the absolute
governing of all affairs. His abilities
cannot be enumerated, and His knowledge is
boundless.
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True
conviction in Allah’s existence and
in His actual relationship with
every one of us comes only with His
mercy and guidance.
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He knows all
things knowable, encompassing all that
transpires between the depths of the earths
to the ends of the universe. Nothing of an
atom’s weight in the earth and the heavens
escapes His Knowledge; rather He knows the
creeping of a black ant across a soundless
stone on a lightless night. He knows the
movement of the particles on a windy day. He
knows the hidden and what is beyond. He
presides over the thoughts of the
conscience, the movements of the
cerebrations, and the recondite subtleties
of the psyche, with a beginningless, eternal
Knowledge that has been with Him forever.
He is the
willer of all that exists, and He is the
director of all that occurs. Nothing occurs
in the seen or unseen world, be it minimal
or abundant, small or large, good or evil,
beneficial or harmful, of belief or
disbelief, knowledge or ignorance, triumph
or ruin, increase or decrease, obedience or
defiance, except by His decree,
foreordainment, command, and volition. What
He wills is, and what He does not will is
not.
A servant has
no escape from disobeying Him except through
His conferred success and mercy; he has no
power to obey Him except through His
assistance and will. If all of mankind
united together to move or retard a single
atom in the universe without His will and
volition, they would be unable to do so.
He hears and
He sees. No audible thing, however faint,
escapes His hearing, and no visible thing,
however minute, is hidden from His sight.
Distance does not impede His hearing and
darkness does not obstruct His seeing. His
attributes do not resemble the attributes of
the creation to the same extent that His
essence does not resemble the essences of
creation.
Everything
other than Him is an originated thing that
He created by His power from nothingness,
since He existed in eternity alone and there
was nothing whatsoever with Him. He
originated creation thereafter as a
manifestation of His power and as a
realization of His preceding Will, not
because He had any need of it.
He is
Magnanimous in creating and in imposing
obligations upon His creation; He is not
compelled to do it by necessity. He is
Gracious in beneficence and reform, though
not through any need. Munificence and
Kindness, Beneficence and Grace are His. He
rewards His believing worshipers for their
acts of obedience according to generosity
and encouragement rather than according to
their merit and obligation, for there is no
obligation upon Him in any deed towards
anyone. Tyranny is inconceivable in Him, for
there is no right upon Him towards anyone.
While these
are the Islamic beliefs on Allah in written
form, it must be noted that a person is not
accountable for his intellectual
understanding of them, but rather he is
responsible for truly incorporating them in
his heart. True conviction in Allah’s
existence and in His actual relationship
with every one of us comes only with His
mercy and guidance. As such, Muslims ask
Allah in every prayer for guidance unto His
Straight Path.
