Both Transcendent and Immanent
The universe is, in essence, a book that attests to
the existence of Allah.
Of central importance to the Islamic creed is a firm
belief in Allah (God)1 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.2 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.”3
For more on the idea of judgment and retribution, see
the Afterlife section.
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.”4 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.
For more on the idea of destiny, see the Fate &
Destiny section.
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.5
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.”6
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.7
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.8
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,9 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
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 10:
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.”11 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.
True conviction in Allah’s existence and in His actual
relationship with every one of us comes only with His mercy and guidance.
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.12
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.
1 Allah is the Arabic word for God; the same
word is used by Arab Christians.
2 For a full elaboration on this point, see
Harun Yahya’s Timelessness and the Reality of Fate.
3 This is a translation of Imam al-Tahawi’s
tenet number 13 of his famous catechism. For a complete translation of this
import piece of scholarship, see al-Aqidah al-Tahawiyya on Masud.co.uk.
4 Keller, Nuh Ha Mim. “A
Letter to `Abd al-Matin.” 1996.
5 Winter, T.J. “Islam, Irigaray, and the
Retrieval of Gender,” 1999. From Islamamerica.org.
6 Nahj al-Balaaghah, the first sermon. The
quote is attributed to the Companion `Ali, but there is much speculation as to
the authenticity of this claim.
7 For an excellent discussion on the role of
science in Islam and the rationality of belief, see the six “Coherence of
Islam” audio files of Sheikh Nuh Ha Mim Keller on Masud.co.uk: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,
6.
8 Faridi, Shahidullah. “Belief in God”, from
Themodernreligion.com.
9 For a more-detailed presentation of these
concepts, see Introducing Islam’s “Messengers” and “Revelation” sections
respectively.
10 A famous Islamic jurist, theologian, and
sage who died in the beginning of the 6th century after Hijrah (1111 CE).
11 Qur’an Surah 2, verse 255.
12 This passage was an original translation of
excerpts of al-Ghazali’s “Foundations of Belief,” found in Book II of his
Revival of the Religious Sciences. A fuller version of the section can be found
on the Dartmouth College MSA website.