GOD: GOD IN ISLAM

The Qurʾān, Islam's holy scripture, states, "Verily, the religion of God (Allāh) is Islam" (3:19). According to medieval Muslim lexicographers, there are twenty to thirty opinions on the origin, etymology, and meaning of the term Allāh. Some say that it should be read as a proper name, as in the English "God." Others claim that it is a contraction of al-ilāh, meaning "The God" or "The Divinity." Medieval Muslim manuscripts from North Africa and Islamic Spain often use al-Ilāh as a synonym for Allāh. Modern philologists relate the term to the Hebrew El or Elohim, used in the Bible. In Arabic, the verb alaha means, "he worshiped, served, or adored." In this sense, Allāh could be translated as "the One who is worshiped or adored." Similarly, the past participle maʾluh, taken from the same root as Allāh, is a synonym of maʿbūd, "worshiped" or "adored." In the Qurʾān, the terms ilāh ("god" or "divinity") and ilāha ("goddess") are often used in contrast with Allāh, the former representing false gods or false objects of worship when compared with the One True God.

Every sūrah of the Qurʾān but one begins with the phrase Bismillāh al-Raḥmān al-Raḥīm (By the name of Allāh, the Beneficent, the Merciful). This phrase, known as the basmalah, is also used for oaths and at the beginning of important or sacred acts. Islamic prayers and supplications often begin with the expression Allāhumma, which is understood as meaning "Oh God!" (yā Allāh ). The doubled letter mīm in this expression stands for the suppressed vocative particle Yā (Oh). Such uses of the term Allāh recall the practices of pre-Islamic Arabia, where Allāh was called upon as the creator god, the god of the heavens, the bringer of rain, and Lord of the Kaʿbah in Mecca. Although this rather remote divinity was personified by the pagan Arabs, he was unique among other Arabian gods because images were not made of him. According to Toshihiko Isutzu, a Japanese scholar of Islam, Allāh was seldom worshiped as part of a cult in pre-Islamic Arabia. Instead, he was the object of what Isutzu called "temporary monotheism," the last recourse of prayer when all the other gods had failed (Isutzu, 1980, p. 101).

The Qurʾān provides evidence for Isutzu's conclusions. In certain passages it rebukes the pagan Meccans for asking the Prophet Muḥammad, "Who is al-Raḥmān? " when he invoked this "name" of God (25:60). Implied in the Qurʾān's rebuke of the Meccans is the idea that Allāh and many of his attributes were already known to those who denied Muḥammad's message (29:65). In this view, the Qurʾān introduced the new term al-Raḥmān (the Beneficent) into Arabia, but it did not introduce a new god. Rather, the Qurʾān brought the Arabian sky and creator god closer to human experience by stressing that Allāh was both transcendent and immanently near: "And when my servants question you concerning me, I am truly near. I answer the prayer of the supplicant when he calls on me. So let them heed my call and believe in me, so that they might be guided rightly" (2:186).

The Qurʾanic Doctrine of Divine Unity

The Qurʾān uses a variety of arguments to demonstrate that knowledge of God as the creator of all things makes all other ideas of divinity superfluous. If Allāh created everything in the universe, then the lesser gods and powers worshiped by human beings must be created as well, and hence are not truly divine. Theologically, the religion of Islam replaced the pagan Allāh with a divinity of greater complexity. God in Islam is more than just a name; Allāh is both a theological concept and an active deity that creates and maintains the universe. Both immanent and transcendent, the full nature of God appears as a paradox to the human mind. Allāh is the One True God, as in the Greek phrase ho theos (The God). However, the oneness of God is not self-evident, nor is it self-evident that God is the ultimate cause of all things. The secondary causes and contingent realities of things in the world veil the nature of God from human understanding. The Qurʾān acknowledges this paradox by equating belief in God with "belief in the unseen" (2:3). Because the full reality of God is not self-evident, a book of revelation is needed to educate human beings about the existence and nature of divinity.

The intellectual quest for the understanding of God is depicted mythologically in the Qurʾān by the story of Abraham, who progressed from worshiping the stars, the moon, and the sun to acknowledging that Allāh is the sole cause of heavenly phenomena (6:75–79). However, simply understanding that God is the Cause of Causes only solves part of the divine mystery. There is still the problem of knowing how God, as the transcendent Truth (al-Ḥaqq, 22:6), may be discerned in the vast multiplicity of created things and events. This key problem of Islamic theology is expressed in the following poem by the sixteenth-century Moroccan Ṣūfī ʿAbdallāh al-Ghazwānī (d. 1528) of Marrakech:

Oh, he who is one of all! Oh, he for whom all is one! Mortal beings count you by number, oh one. You appear in the all such that one cannot be hidden, And you disappear in the all such that one cannot be seen. (al-Ghazwani, folio 5)

This paradox of divine unity was not only a problem for Ṣūfīs. It also appears in Shīʿī Islam, as in the following statement of Imām ʿAlī (d. 661):

To know God is to know his oneness. To say that God is one has four meanings: two of them are false and two are correct. As for the two false meanings, one is that a person should say "God is one" and be thinking of number and counting. This is false because that which has no second cannot enter into the category of number. Do you not see that those who say that God is the third of a trinity fall into this infidelity? Another meaning is to say, "So-and-so is one of his people," namely, a species of this genus or a member of this species. This meaning is also false when applied to God, because it implies likening something to God, whereas God is above all likeness. As to the two meanings that are correct when applied to God, one is that it should be said that "God is one" in the sense that there is no likeness to him among things. Another is to say that "God is one" in the sense that there is no multiplicity or division conceivable in Him, neither outwardly, nor in the mind, nor in the imagination. God alone possesses such a unity. (Tabatabai, 1979, pp. 127–128)

Theologically, the Qurʾān is an extended argument for the existence of the One God. As a revelation both from Allāh and about Allāh, it guides humanity toward a single, absolute Truth that transcends the world: "Say: He is Allāh the Only; Allāh the Indivisible; He gives not birth, nor is He begotten, and He is, in Himself, not dependent on anything" (112:1–4). These verses summarize the Qurʾanic definition of tawḥīd, the Islamic doctrine of divine unity. Most simply, tawḥīd means that God is one, unique, and not divisible into hypostatic entities or incarnated manifestations. He gives birth to no "son" or demiurge, nor is he begotten from another, for he is independent of his creation: "Your Lord is utterly independent, All-Engendering. If he wills, he can expel you and replace you with others, just as he multiplied you from the seed of others" (5:133). Along with this strictly monotheistic image of God, the Qurʾān also provides a more monistic image of a deity that is immanent in the world of creation: "He is the First and the Last, the Outward and the Inward; He is the Knower of every thing" (57:3). This complementary focus on the immanence of God implies that a full understanding of divine unity must somehow include the transcendence of number. This is the paradox addressed by al-Ghazwānī and Imām ʿAlī above, and the attempt to resolve it delineates the conceptual limits of theological inquiry in Islam.

As an aid in understanding the complexity of tawḥīd, the Qurʾān uses ninety-nine terms that convey various aspects of the divine nature. These terms are referred to as the "Excellent Names of Allāh" (77:180) and are tokens of God's presence in the world. Many of the divine names are incorporated into Muslim personal names, such as ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (Slave of the Beneficent), ʿAbd al-Jabbār (Slave of the Overpowering), or ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (Slave of the Glorious). The fact that such names describe attributes of human beings is another reminder of God's immanence. With the exception of the supreme name Allāh and the Arabic neologism al-Raḥmān, which refers to the divine beneficence that creates and maintains the universe, all of the other divine names may be shared by both God and human beings. However, this sharing of attributes should not lead a person to believe that he or she is divine or that the sharing of attributes puts any limitation on God's transcendent nature. Such attitudes lead to the sin of shirk, associating things with God, or relying on contingent, created entities as if they were divine in themselves. Shirk is a major sin in Islam because it is the basis of kufr, literally "covering up" or denying the truth of God and of the Islamic religion.

Divine Power

A constant concern of Islamic theology has been to maintain God's absolute power and agency. Divine agency is expressed in the Qurʾān by the name al-Qadīr (The All-Powerful or All-Potent), and by verses such as, "When [Allāh] decrees a matter, he merely says to it 'Be!' and it is" (2:117), or "You do not will, unless Allāh wills" (76:30). The desire to maintain the limitlessness of divine power was particularly important in theological discussions of free will and human agency. One of the earliest theological schools in Islam was the Jabrīyah (literally, "Compulsionists"), who conceived of power as a limited quantity and felt that any amount of choice or agency delegated to human beings reduced the amount of power available to God. This zero-sum approach led to a theology of fatalism and predestination, which was exploited by the Umayyad caliphs (r. 662–750) to justify their rule.

The Umayyads used the doctrine of predestination to claim that their opponents were unbelievers. Since God predetermined the affairs of the world, God's will was that the Umayyads should rule over Islam. To reject the Umayyads was thus to reject God's will, and the rejection of God's will is unbelief. This put their political opponents in a difficult theological situation. To say that the Umayyads were unfit to rule implied either that God's will was imperfect or that God created evil by creating corrupt rulers. The easiest way out of this dilemma was to cede the power of moral choice to human beings by saying that God creates good but humans create evil. This position is clearly supported by the Qurʾān: "Whatever good befalls you, it is from Allāh, and whatever evil befalls you it is from yourself" (4:79). Blaming human beings for their own faults and weaknesses prevents God from being accused of willing injustice.

The moral separation of God from the actions of created beings characterized the second theological school of Islam, the Qadarīyah (literally, "Determinists"), whose name refers to the power (qudrah ) of human beings to partially determine their own fate. Just as the theology of predeterminism was used to justify the status quo, Qadarīyah theology was often advocated by opponents of the status quo and was combined with a strong moral imperative to oppose injustice. Qadarīyah tenets form the basis of Shīʿī theology, which stresses the responsibility to fight against injustice and the freedom to choose the Shīʿī imām as the rightful ruler of the Muslims. Qadarīyah doctrines make for good moral theology. After all, how could a just God punish human beings for their actions if they were not free to choose them? The theological choice between Islam and polytheism or the moral choice between good and evil would have no significance if a person's actions were predetermined. If a Muslim judge cannot punish a person for a crime that he or she was forced to commit, how could God do such a thing?

Divine Exceptionalism and Divine Justice

The most influential proponents of Qadarīyah theology were the Muʿtazilah (literally, "Withdrawers"), who called themselves The People of Divine Justice and Unity (Ahl al-ʿAdl wa al-Tawḥīd ). Muʿtazilism was prominent in Islam for approximately four hundred years and has recently resurfaced as one of the theological positions of Islamic liberalism. From 833 to 850, it was the official theology of the Abbasid caliphate (750–1258) and had a significant influence on Shiism. As a movement of theological rationalism, it attracted the attention of Western scholars of Islam, who mistakenly believed that it foreshadowed the doctrines of the European Enlightenment. The Muʿtazilah believed in a doctrine of extreme exceptionalism with regard to God. One of their fundamental beliefs was that divine unity could be expressed only in terms of divine simplicity. According to this understanding, the statement "There is no god but Allāh" meant that nothing but God is equal to God or is even a part of God, including God's own actions and attributes. The attributes of God cannot be eternal because only God-in-himself is eternal. Thus, the "names" of God mentioned in the Qurʾān are not attributes. They are only metaphors, figures of speech, or created modes of divine action. The Muʿtazilah accused those who believed in divine attributes of falling into anthropomorphism (the belief that God has human attributes) or corporealism (the belief that God's attributes are corporeal entities that exist within Him).

For the Muʿtazilah, knowledge of God's unity is based on reason, which is a responsibility imposed by God on all human beings. This knowledge depends on four types of evidence: dialectical reason, the Qurʾān, the sunnah of the Prophet Muḥammad, and the consensus of the Muslim community. Of these, reason is the most important. This is because the validity of scripture, tradition, and consensus are based on the rational knowledge that God exists, that he is truthful, and that he is just. The existence of God can be proven by the argument from contingency. Experience tells us that we cannot live forever and that we are limited in our powers and abilities. Thus, we are contingent beings: we must depend on something outside of ourselves for our creation and support. This noncontingent, necessary being is God, who is unlike us in every way. Because God is exalted above all forms of resemblance, statements in the Qurʾān such as "What prevents you from prostrating yourself before what I have created with my two hands?" (38:75) can only be metaphorical. The "hands" of God must stand for something other than real hands, such as God's ability to create and maintain the world. Metaphors such as these should be understood as partial and approximate descriptions of a divine reality that is ultimately indescribable.

The Muʿtazilite principle of divine justice was derived directly from their view of divine agency and was based on two premises: (1) God desires good for human beings; thus, he does not will or create evil. (2) God provides guidance for human beings in the form of divine revelation; thus, he does not want people to go astray. According to these premises, it would be absurd to believe that God's voluntarism would lead him to predestine people to commit sinful acts. If God punished people for acts that they performed against their will, he would deny the justice that is his nature. Whatever God wills is objectively good, and his justice can be proved by reasoned arguments. Reason demonstrates that the sharīʿah, the Law of God, is good for humanity. God's justice, expressed in the sharīʿah, is like a rope thrown to a drowning man. God provides the opportunity for salvation, but it is up to the human being to accept it or reject it.

The Muʿtazilah believed that divine revelation, as the embodiment of God's law, was a created entity. For them, the Qurʾanic reference to a "Glorious Qurʾān on a Preserved Tablet" (85:21–22) meant that God created the Qurʾān as a model or template of divine scripture before the creation of the world. The Qurʾān that was revealed to the Prophet Muḥammad was a copy of this preexistent Qurʾān. The Muʿtazilite doctrine of the created Qurʾān was similar to the Jewish doctrine of the preexistent Torah. In Judaism, the Torah, as the source of divine law, is both preexistent and created: God created his law before he created the world. The Qurʾān also had to be created before the world because the world was created in conformity with the law, as is expressed in the Qurʾanic concept of "God's Way" (Sunnat Allāh, 48:23).

Sunnī Muslims rejected the doctrine of the created Qurʾān. In the first century of Islam, ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿAbbās (d. 687), a cousin of the Prophet Muḥammad, asserted that God's speech was uncreated and coeternal with God. According to this doctrine, the Qurʾān was also uncreated and eternal because it contained the word of God. Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (d. 855), a staunch opponent of the Muʿtazilah, claimed that the word of God is equivalent to God's knowledge. Since the Qurʾān is part of God's knowledge, the words and letters that are found in the Qurʾān must be regarded as the word of God. Because the word of God is uncreated, the Qurʾān must also be uncreated. Ibn Ḥanbal realized that the doctrine of the created Qurʾān contained a potential theological problem. If the Qurʾān were created, this might be construed to mean that the text of the Qurʾān was fixed in historical time; thus, its relevance would be limited primarily to the era in which it was revealed. This would imply that certain Qurʾanic injunctions might be superseded if the social or historical conditions that gave rise to them changed. However, an uncreated Qurʾān, not being fixed in historical time, would have no such limitations. Since it was coeternal with God's knowledge, it would be truly universal. Being free of the limitations of culture and history, its injunctions would be valid for all peoples and all times.

Divine Determinism

Until the modern revival of the teachings of Ibn Ḥanbal, the most important Sunnī theology of divine voluntarism was Ashʿarism. Named after Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī (d. 935), Ashʿarite theology sought to recuperate an unrestricted sense of divine agency by promoting a new theory of predestination and a view of the universe that denied the empirical understanding of cause and effect. For the Ashʿarites, all power belongs to God. If God granted people the power of free choice as the Muʿtazilah believed, this would mean that God relinquished some of his power to determine the fate of his creatures. It was absurd to imagine that an all-powerful God would give up his power for any reason. For the Muʿtazilah, God endowed people with choice because human beings, alone among God's creatures, possessed reason. Since God endowed people with reason, he could not prevent them from using this gift to make their own decisions. For the Ashʿarites, it was absurd to consider anything impossible for God, even if it appeared to be illogical. If God's power were truly infinite, then even theoretical limitations on divine power were unacceptable.

According to Ashʿarism, the Qurʾanic verse "[God is the] doer of what he wills" (11:109) means that God is the creator of everything, including the actions of human beings. Al-Ashʿarī distinguished between "necessary" and "acquired" actions. Necessary actions, such as shivering from a fever or trembling with emotion, are involuntary. Acquired actions, such as walking, thinking, and making moral choices, are voluntary. In both cases God is the creator and the agent of all human acts; the human being only "acquires" the capacity to carry them out. This is the meaning of the Qurʾanic statement "God created you and that which you do" (37:96). A person's acquired capacity (kasb ) is created by God at the time of the act itself. The human being acquires the capacity to either do or not do an action, like the "yes" or "no" binary switches on a computer chip. However, even these limited choices are not really one's to make. "Acquiring the power to do something" only means acquiring the capacity to do what God has already created one to do. The human being cannot produce anything he was not predestined to make. For Ashʿarism, to say that God is all-powerful is to say that human beings are essentially powerless.

The critics of Ashʿarism responded that this was merely a reconfiguration of the outmoded doctrines of the Jabrīyah, who believed that human beings had no freedom of choice whatsoever. The philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroës) of Córdoba (d. 1198) rejected Ashʿarite theology as illogical. If both the ability to act in a certain way and the act itself are created by God, then, to all intents and purposes, the human being is compelled to behave in only one way. If the acquisition of an act created by God enables a person neither to "own" the act nor to create it, the act cannot really be described as a "power" possessed by the human being. It would therefore be unjust for a person to be judged by God for committing a sin that did not, in reality, "belong" to him. Despite such inconsistencies, Ashʿarite theology became dominant in Sunnī Islam because it provided a relatively simple solution to the problems of divine power and divine knowledge. By basing their arguments on Qurʾanic concepts, the Ashʿarites could create a Qurʾān-based theology more successfully than their opponents could. Muʿtazilite theology also resorted to the Qurʾān, but its emphasis on the use of human reasoning in attaining knowledge of God led to the criticism that revelation was either unnecessary or was reserved for those who were unable to think for themselves. Ashʿarite theologians also stressed the importance of reason. However, they considered divine revelation and prophetic tradition to be more essential because they provided the guidance necessary for reason to function properly. The Ashʿarites saw themselves as taking a middle path between reason and revelation. According to the great Ashʿarite theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), revelation is understood through tradition, but its underlying truth is understood through reason.

The Ashʿarite theology of divine determinism operated in an atomistic and occasionalistic universe in which nothing was truly real except God. According to the Ashʿarite theory of atomism, the universe is divided into unbounded particles of matter, quality, space, and time. The related theory of occasionalism asserts that every action or event may be broken down into a series of discrete moments, which are completely independent of each other. Such moments are joined together solely through the agency of God's will. No logical continuity or order connects a series of events. To Ashʿarite theologians, the act of hitting a ball with a polo mallet was not perceived as a single motion. Instead, swinging the mallet and striking the ball were seen as a series of separate events, in which the mallet is brought closer and closer to the ball, until it finally strikes it. This illusory view of reality can be compared to a strip of movie film, in which what appears to be a single action is in reality a series of images of different events, which only seem to be continuous because of the speed at which they pass through the projector. In Ashʿarite occasionalism, objects, actions, and events exist only for a single moment. They appear to have continuity only because they are re-created by God in a series of instantaneous creations. This view of reality rejects the notion of "nature" or even of a natural order. Everything is possible for God, who can change reality at any time. No limitations of divine power are allowed to exist.

Ashʿarite occasionalism accepted neither the reality of continuity nor the law of cause and effect. Instead, the regularity of natural occurrences was explained by "habit" or "custom" (ʿādah ), which God may change at any time. A miracle was simply a paranormal event (kharq al-ʿādah ), literally, a "ripping" of the fabric of custom. A miracle seems impossible because it goes against normal expectations. However, from the point of view of Ashʿarism, a miracle is essentially normal. Because God creates and re-creates everything at every moment in time, all creation is a miracle. What we think of as a "miracle" is simply an example of God changing his sunnah, his customary way of doing things. Ṣūfīs adopted this concept of paranormality to explain their own doctrine of the miracles of saints. Most Ṣūfīs were proponents of Ashʿarite theology, and most Ashʿarite theologians accepted Sufism as a legitimate expression of Islam. The Ashʿarite doctrines of divine voluntarism, divine omniscience, predestination, and occasionalism can all be seen in the following verses, taken from an ode by the Spanish Ṣūfī Abū Madyan (d. 1198). The reference to the Arabic letters kāf and nūn in the poem recalls the divine command Kun! ("Be!"), through which God continually brings things into existence (Qurʾān, 2:117):

All praise is yours! There is no granting what you forbid, And no forbidding what you abundantly bestow.

Your will is preordained and your judgment is piercing, Your knowledge encompasses the seven heavens and the Earth.

Your command subsists between the [letters] Kaf and Nun, [And is executed] more swiftly and easily than the blink of an eye.

When you say, "Be!" what you say has already been, And your enunciation of it is never repeated.

You were, and nothing was before you; you were, and nothing was Other than you, yet you remain when mortal beings die.

You determined the fate of creatures before creating them, And what you determined was a predestined command. (Cornell, 1996, p. 150)

Creativity and Intentionality

Abū al-Ḥasan al-Māturīdī (d. 944) of Samarkand, a contemporary of al-Ashʿarī, developed a theology that split the difference between the Ashʿarite doctrine of divine determinism and the Muʿtazilite doctrine of reasoned choice. Although his ideas are often taken as a critique of Ashʿarism, they were developed independently. Maturidism became influential under the Ottoman Empire (1342–1924), and today it is accepted as a variant of Ashʿarism. The most important difference between the two theologies lies in the balance between divine voluntarism and human agency. According to al-Māturīdī, actions are shared between God and the human being. When an action is attributed to God, it is called "creation" (khalq ), and when an action is attributed to a person, it is called "acquisition" (kasb ). God's actions are essentially creative. They include miracles and other phenomena that the human mind cannot fully comprehend. God also creates the potential for human actions, but human beings are responsible for what they actually do. By being responsible, they "acquire" the act for themselves. Reward or punishment is the moral consequence of a person's intention (nīyah ) to act in a certain way. Since Maturidism separated intentions from actual behaviors, it was better able than Ashʿarism to account for apparent paradoxes of the divine will, such as when an otherwise good person inexplicably commits a crime.

Another contribution of Maturidism was a theory of knowledge that balanced the dictates of reason and revelation. Al-Māturīdī was highly critical of blind traditionalism. This was particularly important with respect to notions about God, because the Qurʾān admonishes believers not to blindly follow their forefathers (43:23). Knowledge is of three types: knowledge from the senses, knowledge from testimony, and knowledge from reason. Knowledge from the senses includes knowledge from experience. One who denies the truth of empirical knowledge is unreasonable because he denies what he observes with his own eyes. Knowledge from testimony is what we would today call "history." This includes the testimony of the Qurʾān and the sunnah. Such testimony is believable because God stands behind the teachings of the prophets. However, the most important type of knowledge is from reason. Reason is the critical faculty by which we assess empirical and historical forms of knowledge. Reason enables us to understand the divine wisdom in creation. Without submitting the testimony of the prophets to reason and experience, the human being falls into traditionalism. Without submitting empirical knowledge to reason and revelation, the human being falls into materialism (illḥād), which medieval Muslims likened to atheism.

The One in the All

Today's limits of Islamic theology are marked by Wahhabism and Sufism. The elimination of the falsafa tradition of Islamic philosophy by the end of the thirteenth century and the decline of formal Sunnī theology during the Ottoman Empire led to the legalistic fideism that dominates Sunnī theology today. Most of what is left of these traditions has been subsumed into Shiism, as represented by the writings of Mullā Ṣadrā of Shiraz (d. 1641). Wahabbism, which was founded in the eighteenth century by Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (d. 1787), goes beyond normal Sunnī fideism by advocating an extreme form of traditionalism. Its approach to divine unity relies on a literal reading of Qurʾān and ḥadīth that avoids rational speculation on the nature of God and his attributes. It also avoids the interpretation of ambiguities in the Qurʾān and even denies the metaphorical nature of certain Qurʾanic verses. Instead, Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal's theological formula of bilā kayf (literally, "without how") is employed to assert that God has "hands unlike other hands," or "a face unlike other faces." Questions left unanswered by traditional sources are not to be investigated at all. The Wahhābī abandonment of rational interpretation has led their critics to accuse them of theological simple-mindedness and of anthropomorphizing God and his attributes.

Ṣūfī theology stands at the opposite pole from Wahhabism in that it does not reject hermeneutical inquiry. It confronts the paradox of divine transcendence and divine immanence by recognizing that the concept of divine unity must allow for the transcendence of number. Ṣūfī theology has been neglected in modern scholarship, especially in the Islamic world. In part, this has been the result of a Western emphasis on the concept of mysticism, which tends to overlook the use of reasoned arguments in Ṣūfī treatises and focuses instead on "ineffable" spiritual experiences. The identification of Sufism with mysticism has, in turn, affected the image of Sufism in Muslim countries, where it is often dismissed as nonrational or inauthentic. It particular, it is accused of incorporating ideas from Hinduism or Buddhism into Islam. In premodern Islam, however, Ṣūfī theology was the subject of lively debates, and the onus was on the opponents of Sufism to prove why this tradition was not authentic, rather than the other way around.

Abū al-Qāsim al-Junayd (d. 910) of Baghdad was one of the founders of Ṣūfī theology. Like other Sunnī theologians, he sought to combine Qurʾān and ḥadīth with a reasoned approach to interpretation. Unlike non-Ṣūfī theologians, however, he accepted mystical experience as epistemologically equivalent to reason. When combined with reason and revelation, mystical experience, which was known as "unveiling" (kashf), led to a direct knowledge of God (maʿrifah ) that was superior to the intellectual knowledge (ʿilm ) of the theologians. The Ṣūfī reliance on mystical perception, however, did not mean that they ignored other approaches to theology. On the contrary, Ṣūfī treatises are full of discussions of theological issues. Al-Junayd was the founder of the "Baghdad school" of Sufism, which set the standards for Ṣūfī thought and practice. Maʿrūf al-Karkhī (d. 816), a close associate of Shīʿī Imām ʿAlī al-Riḍā (d. 818), was an important forerunner of this tradition. Thus, it may be no coincidence that both Sufism and Shiism shared an interest in the paradoxical nature of divine unity.

For al-Junayd, the creedal pillar of tawḥīd meant "singling out the eternal from that which is created in time" (Abdel-Kader, 1976, p. 70). A later Ṣūfī, ʿAlī al-Ḥujwīrī (d. after 1072), glossed this definition in the following way: "You must not regard the eternal as a locus of phenomena, or phenomena as a locus of the eternal. You must know that God is eternal and that you are phenomenal, and that nothing of your genus is connected with him, and that nothing of his attributes is mingled in you, and that there is no homogeneity between the eternal and the phenomenal" (al-Ḥujwīrī, 1976, p. 281). Understood this way, there is nothing distinctively "Ṣūfī" about al-Junayd's definition. It even earned the approval of the Ḥanbalī theologian Ibn Taymīyah (d. 1328), who was one of the most influential opponents of the Ṣūfīs.

However, another possible interpretation of al-Junayd's definition is more problematical. "Singling out" the eternal from that which is created might be understood to mean that God could be found, or at least identified, within his creation. Al-Ḥujwīrī alludes to this when he warns: "When the eternal is believed to descend into phenomena, or phenomena to be attached to the eternal, no proof remains of the eternity of God and the origination of the universe; this leads to materialism. In all the actions of phenomena, there are proofs of unification and evidences of the divine omnipotence and signs, which establish the eternity of God, but men are too heedless to desire only him or to be content only with keeping him in remembrance. Ḥusayn ibn Mansur [al-Ḥallāj, d. 922] said: 'The first step in tawḥīd is the annihilation of separation'" (al-Ḥujwīrī, 1976, p. 281).

Muḥammad "Muhyiddin" ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 1240), arguably the most influential Ṣūfī theologian, agreed more with al-Ḥallāj's statement than with al-Ḥujwīrī's warning. Many of Ibn al-ʿArabī's writings discuss the issues of separating the eternal from the temporal and finding the one in the many. In the chapter on Noah in Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam (Ring-Settings of Wisdom ), he summarizes the theological paradox of divine unity in the following poem:

If you speak of transcendence, you are restricted. If you speak of immanence, you are limited.

If you speak of both matters, you are complete. You are an Imam and a master of spiritual knowledge.

He who speaks of joining is a polytheist. He who speaks of separating affirms unity.

Beware of immanence if you are a dualist! Beware of transcendence if you are a Unitarian!

You are not he; yet, you are he and you see him in The essences of things both boundless and limited! (Ibn al-ʿArabī, 1980, p. 70)

For Ibn al-ʿArabī, divine immanence means that God can be "found" in worldly phenomena. In Arabic, the verb "to find" is wajada. The experience of finding is wijdān. Most works on Sufism translate wijdān as "ecstasy." This obscures the theological importance of the term for Ibn al-ʿArabī. One "finds" ecstasy in wijdān because he or she perceives, or "finds" God in the essences of things. Ibn al-ʿArabī extends the metaphor of "finding" to all of existence, which in Arabic is denoted by the term wujūd. Existence is where the perceptive believer "finds" God. In other words, the world is a theater for the manifestation of the Absolute. Before creation, while possible things are in a state of nonexistence, God is the only existent. At their creation, things "acquire" existence, much as human beings "acquire" moral responsibility in Ashʿarite theology. The Qurʾān states: "We did not create the heavens and the Earth and all that is between them but in Truth" (15:85). For Ibn al-ʿArabī, this verse holds the key to the paradox of divine unity. Things and their effects "find" their way into physical existence through the divine names: "Since the effects belong to the divine names, and the name is the named, there is nothing in existence but God" (Ibn al-ʿArabī, 2002, p. 138).

In al-Fūtuḥāt al-Makkīyah (Meccan Revelations ), Ibn al-ʿArabī states that no theological subject is more resistant to human reason than the transcendence of number. Because numbers are usually conceived as serial integers and are believed to bestow qualities on the things they designate, it is difficult to understand how the many are dependent on the one. Commenting on the anti-Trinitarian verse of the Qurʾān: "They disbelieve who say 'Verily, Allāh is the third of three'" (5:73), Ibn al-ʿArabī notes that the person who says "Allāh is the fourth of three" is not an unbeliever. If God were the third of three, he would be of the same genus (jins ) as the other two. This is the theological sin of shirk, associating partners with God. However, as the "fourth of three," God would not be of the same genus as the three, so he is not one of them. Therefore, God is one for any group or plurality, but without becoming one of its kind: "He is the fourth of three, so he is one; the fifth of four, so he is one; and so on indefinitely" (Ibn al-ʿArabī, 2002, p. 137).

Ibn al-ʿArabī explains this theological principle in terms of algebra or set theory. Medieval Muslims called algebra al-jabr wa al-muqābalah (literally, "determination and juxtaposition"). God is the fourth of three as in the algebraic expression (x + y + z ) a. The letter a is part of the expression because it is juxtaposed with the terms in parentheses, but it is not part of the set (x + y + z ). In the same way, Allāh can be "found" in the expression of his creation, but he is not part of the same set, or genus. This principle is also a key to the paradox of divine unity because it demonstrates how God can be transcendently separate and immanently involved with his creation at the same time. "This is what is called Allāh," observes Ibn al-ʿArabī. God is the existence manifest in the forms associated with the sites of his manifestation, but he is not of their kind. In his essence, he is Necessary Being, whereas created possibilities are "necessary nonexistence" in their essences eternally (Ibn al-ʿArabī, 2002, p. 136).

See Also

Attributes of God, article on Christian Concepts; Creeds, article on Islamic Creeds; Free Will and Predestination, article on Islamic Concepts; Kalám.

Bibliography

Abdel-Kader, Ali Hassan. The Life, Personality, and Writings of Al-Junayd. London, 1976. The most thorough study of this important Ṣūfī thinker, by a scholar from Egypt's Al-Azhar University.

Austin, R. W. J., trans. Ibn al-ʿArabī: The Bezels of Wisdom. New York, 1980. This is the most popular English translation of Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam.

Cornell, Vincent J. The Way of Abū Madyan: Doctrinal and Poetic Works of Abū Madyan Shuʾayb ibn al-Ḥusayn al-Anṣārī (c. 509/115–16—594/1198). Cambridge, 1996. The translation of Abū Madyan's ode above has been revised slightly from the original version.

Crone, Patricia, and Martin Hinds. God's Caliph: Religious Authority in the First Centuries of Islam (Cambridge, 1986). "The Letter of al-Walīd II," pp. 116–126, provides a good illustration of the Umayyad use of Jabrīyah theology.

Al-Ghāzwanī, Abū Muḥammad ʿAbdallāh. Al-Nuqṭaḥ al-azaliyah fi sirr al-dhāt al-Muhammadīyah (The Eternal Point in the Secret of the Muhammadan Essence). Rabat, Bibliothèque Générale manuscript 4400D.

Al-Ḥujwīrī, ʿAlī B. ʿUthmān al-Jullābī. The Kashf al-Mahjub: The Oldest Persian Treatise on Sufiism. Edited by Reynold A. Nicholson. London, 1976; reprint of 1936 edition.

Ibn al-ʿArabī, Muhyiddin. The Meccan Revelations, vol. 1. Edited by Michel Chodkiewicz, translated by William C. Chittick and James W. Morris. New York, 2002.

Ibn al-ʿArabī, Muhyiddin. Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam. Edited by Abū al-ʿAlā ʿAfīfī. Beirut, 1980.

Isutzu, Toshihiko. God and Man in the Koran: Semantics of the Koranic Weltanschaaung. New York, 1980; reprint of 1964 original. See especially pp. 95–119.

Al-Juwaynī, Imam al- Ḥaramayn ʿAbd al-Malik. Kitāb al-irshād ilā qawātīʿ al-adilla fī uṣūl al-Iʿtiqād (A Guide to Conclusive Proofs for the Principles of Belief). Translated by Paul E. Walker. Reading, U.K., 2000. An English translation of one of the definitive Ashʿarite theological treatises, written by al-Ghazālī's teacher.

Lane, Edward William. Arabic-English Lexicon. Cambridge, 1984; reprint in one volume of 1863 original. See especially, pp. 82–83 for the section on Allāh. Although this work was not completed at the time of Lane's death, it remains the most thorough Arabic-English lexicon, and is especially useful for premodern uses of terminology.

Martin, Richard C., and Mark R. Woodward, with Atmaja, Dwi S. Defenders of Reason in Islam: Muʿtazilism from Medieval School to Modern Symbol. Oxford, 1997. Kitāb al- uṣūl al-khamsah (Book of the Five Principles), a famous summary of Muʿtazilite doctrine by Qādī ʿAbd al-Jabbār (d. 1024), is translated on pp. 90–115.

Al-Māturīdī al-Samarqandi, Abū Manṣūr Muḥammad. Kitāb al-Tawḥīd (Book of divine unity). Edited by Fathalla Kholeif. Beirut, 1982. Introduction in English.

Pines, Shlomo. Studies in Islamic Atomism. Jerusalem, 1997. This work, a reprint of Pines's doctoral dissertation, is the definitive work in English on this subject.

Tabatabai, Sayyid Muhammad Husayn. Shiʿite Islam. Translated by Sayyid Husayn Nasr. Houston, Tex., 1979.

Watt, W. Montogomery. The Formative Period of Islamic Thought. Oxford, 1998; reprint of 1973 original. The classic work is still the best introduction to early Islamic theology.

Wolfson, Harry Austryn. The Philosophy of the Kalam. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1976. This work remains the most definitive study of Islamic theology in English.

Vincent J. Cornell (2005)