Islam and God – Aliya Azam

The worldwide community of Islam is diverse with many variations in understanding between the different groups but there is one statement of faith that binds them all together.  This is the shahada, the basic creed which states: “There is no god but God and Muhammad is the Messenger of God.”  This statement gives the primary understanding of God in Islam, “there is nothing worthy of worship except the one and only God.”  God is one in two senses in this statement: God is unique and God is one and indivisible.  Muslims do not believe that God is “their God” in the sense of “the Muslim God” but rather the only God that there is; the same one God that was revealed through all the Prophets from Adam onwards, the same God proclaimed by Moses and the Jews, and by Jesus and the Christians.  Thus God is not a tribal God belonging to one ethnic group or religious group; God is the only god that exists.  This rules out all ideas of polytheism (a belief in many gods) or henotheism (a belief in a hierarchy of gods).  The indivisibility of God is central to Islamic understanding; God cannot be divided into parts and thus God does not share divinity with any other being, either created or uncreated.  The most fundamental sin in Muslim theology is to give God partners or to associate divinity with any other being; this is the sin of shirk.

God is totally transcendent; God is not part of the creation but rather the creator of everything that exists.  God is totally “other,” beyond our world, our imaginings, our ability to grasp.  God is thus ineffable, unknowable; of the essence of God we humans can say precisely nothing.  God is beyond all our earthly categories of knowledge (transcategorial); everything that we say about God is a statement within our earthly categories that points us in the right direction towards God but is not a statement of what God is like in God’s very essence, that remains unknowable.  This means that Islamic theology proceeds by negatives, it is apophatic; when speaking of God, we must use human language and concepts in the knowledge that they do not penetrate through to the reality of God.  Thus we can say that God is merciful, which is a human concept that we can understand but we cannot conceive of the quality of the mercy of God as that lies beyond our comprehension.  A saying common amongst Muslims helps to make this clear: “God has one hundred mercies.  God sends one mercy to the earth and keeps ninety-nine in reserve for the Day of Judgement.”  Thus, if we could conceive of the totality of mercy within all human experience in all ages, we would then know only one per cent of the totality of the mercy of God.

God is pure spirit and not a material being, therefore God is beyond the category of space; there is nowhere that God “is” and nowhere that God “is not.”  Similarly, God is the only eternally existing being, therefore God is not limited by time but rather God is beyond time and time itself is part of God’s creation.  God thus knows in the eternal present, which encompasses what we humans call past, present and future.  In this sense, God possesses all knowledge (omniscience), nothing is unknown to God.  As the creator and sustainer of all things and as the only eternally existing being, God is all-powerful (omnipotent).  Thus the power that humans use to perform evil acts is God’s power, which is abused by human beings.  God is wholly good, there is no evil in God, and God wills only what is good.  Even the most evil creature of which we can conceive is a creation of God, who was created good and who has used the God-given gift of freedom to rebel against the will of God and do evil.  God commands creatures to do good, that is, to obey the ethical will of God; thus sin is fundamentally rebellion and disobedience.

As a transcendent being, God is above all concepts of gender; God is neither male nor female.  God is one and has no consort or partner, therefore God does not have offspring (son/daughter).  It is inconceivable to think of God coupling with any creature to produce an offspring.  Again, as a transcendent being, God does not incarnate or appear in human or any other form.  When God reveals guidance to humankind, as in the Islamic scripture, the Qur’an, God has to use human language to communicate with human beings and, as is the case with Arabic, when such language is gendered, the Qur’an uses masculine pronouns of God but without any connotation that God is masculine. “Allah” is simply the Arabic word for God.

God is not uninterested in human beings but rather calls human beings into an eternal quest to grow closer to God by progressing in purity and wisdom.  As God is infinite, this is a quest without end; even in the life hereafter, the resurrected person in Paradise continues in this progression drawing ever closer to but never reaching the infinite being of God.  As God is not limited by space, God is close to every human being (the Qur’an speaks of God being closer to each one than their jugular vein).  There is, in this sense, a personal and intimate affinity and relationship between each person and God.

Given our human dependency on language, the scholars of Islam searched the Qur’an and teachings of Muhammad (PBH) (Hadith) to seek the names by which God is known.  Each of these names gives some insight into a quality of God.  As an infinite being, God has more names/qualities than human beings can ever comprehend but the names thus revealed (typically contained in the widespread list: the Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God) allow human beings to have the capacity for speaking about God to the limits of their categories; it gives us some “God-speak” which is genuine but limited.