Of central importance to the Islamic creed is a firm belief in 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.
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.
God 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.
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
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.
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He is the Sustainer of everything, directly sustaining every instant of the existence of all things.
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