Allah (God the Unique: the Qur'anic God, his Oneness and his Names)

Allah is God the Unique, the Creator and the Lord of judgment, and the Encyclopaedia of Islam describes him as the centre of Islamic thought and its one reason for existence. The pre-Islamic Arabs knew Allah as one of the Meccan deities, possibly the supreme deity and certainly a creator-god; the name is most likely a contraction of al-ilah, "the god". ²

A Muslim tradition holds that the sura 96 was the first revealed, so the mission of the Prophet ﷺ began with the preaching of the Word of Allah. In it Allah is the Lord who created man and who teaches man what he did not know. The basmala formula opens each sura, and the root of the word for mercy came to mean, in later centuries, benefaction and clemency. The Qur'an is not a systematic theology of God; it is God's word, in which he says what he wishes about himself. ¹

Three themes predominate in the Qur'an. First, God as creator, judge and recompenser: he creates by his command, is the supreme judge, and is the master of life and death; the early suras proclaim his sovereignty over his creation and announce the judgment and the imminent Hour. Second, God is one and unique, the core of the message: "your God is one" is repeated throughout, and the short sura of Unity states his oneness both in relation to man and in his nature. This is the content of the testimony of faith. Third, God is omnipotent and merciful, Lord of the worlds, whose power is matched by forgiveness; the believer is called to commit himself to him. ³

The signs of the universe are signs of God, and human reason is religiously obliged to reflect on them and to see in what is perishable the evidence of a necessary and transcendent Creator. God alone abides, and he will annihilate all things at the Hour and raise them again for the Gathering. His perfections, which are the Names, are those the Muslim tradition set at ninety-nine "most beautiful Names" for memorizing and meditation. The main themes that emerge are that he is one, the living, the real, the sublime, the high, the light, the wise and the omnipotent. ³

The Names include the Omnipotent, the Creator (badi', khaliq, khallaq), the Hearing and the Knowing, the Witness, the Bountiful, the Benefactor, the Surety, the Protector, the Generous, the Merciful, the Forgiver, the Compassionate, the Benevolent and the Best of Judges. Some recur throughout the Qur'an, others are stressed in one period more than another. The divine omniscience extends to the smallest act of the smallest creature, so that God is fully present in every human deed and in every movement of the heart. ⁴

The first concerns retribution and the divine decree. Divine omnipotence is affirmed both as the power of the decree and as the justice of a judge who weighs every act, and the Qur'an presents these as complementary, not contradictory, affirmations aimed at a required attitude of heart. The Qur'an does not pose the theological problem of predestination or the philosophical problem of human freedom; it evokes the mystery of the relation between creature and Creator. The verses about the decree speak of the elect whom God favours and of those whom he leads astray, and the responsibility of man and the decree of God meet in the final affirmation of judgement. ⁴

The second group are the ambiguous verses (mutashabih), whose picturesque wording, taken literally, seems to ascribe human features to God: God sits on his throne, has a hand, a face and eyes. These verses were later the object of exegetical and theological dispute. ⁴

The Qur'anic teaching about God rests on his oneness, his transcendence and his absolute perfections, and it maintains the inaccessibility of the divine nature. God, who is near and knowing, can be known only through his Word, his Names and the acts of his sovereignty, which he himself reveals. The name Allah is the proper name of God, expressing the sole and incommunicable godhead; in himself God remains the unexpressed mystery, the unseen. Western scholars have called Allah a personal God, but Islamic theology did not use the term shakhs for him; the article explains the vocabulary, since shakhs in Arabic always connotes the individual figure. ⁴

The term "personal God" is accepted by the article in its Indo-European sense, as implying an absolute perfection: a God who subsists in himself, is incommunicable in his godhead, and is the source of all perfection, infinitely distinct from every creature. The Qur'an teaches this while keeping God's inmost life in its own mystery and insisting on the Word communicated through the prophets and the inner attitude demanded of the believer. Facing the incommunicable mystery, the believer is required to show reverent fear (taqwa), piety (birr), gratitude (shukr) and trust (tawakkul). For the damned, fear becomes dread of punishment, while those who believe in the unseen and seek the face of God find in him their protector and guide and their final refuge. ⁵

Tradition and kalam built on the Qur'an through two sciences: the science of hadith, which preserved sayings on God's mercy and forgiveness, his absolute kingship, human responsibility and the preordaining decree; and tafsir, the exegesis that treated the verses about God, especially the anthropomorphic passages. The problems of kalam, which in essence come from the Mu'tazilites, rest on two principles: the unity of God (tawhid) and the justice of God in requiting human acts ('adl). The Mu'tazilites called themselves "the people of unity and justice"; later schools kept the problems and changed their titles, dealing with the existence and attributes of God and with the actions of the Most High. ⁵

The schools agree that the Qur'an bids the reason reflect on the signs of the universe and rise to the Creator, but they differ on the status of that duty. For the Mu'tazilites it is inherent in reason before the Law; for the Maturidites reason could in principle have reached God unaided but was in fact brought to him by the revealed law; for the Ash'arites it is a purely legal obligation. The argument itself is common to them: the world is contingent and perishable, has a temporal beginning, and so requires a necessary Creator who alone exists from eternity. The Ash'arites therefore treat the existence of God as a rational proof prescribed by revealed authority. ⁵

On the attributes, the traditionists held to the letter of the texts, and their opponents called them corporealists (mujassima) or anthropomorphists (hashwiyya). The Mu'tazilites insisted on the via negativa (tanzih), denying God every created thing, and identified his attributes with his essence; the Jahmiyya almost denied the attributes altogether. The orthodox schools also practised tanzih, saying that God is neither body nor substance nor accident. ⁵

Against the literalists and the Mu'tazilites alike, the Ash'arites took a middle course, summed up in the principle "without how and without likeness" (bila kayf wa la tashbih). The Mu'tazilite negation of the attributes, they said, amounted to suspending them altogether and making God an empty concept. The Ash'arites accepted the full reality of the attributes, since the Qur'an speaks of them, but held that this reality cannot compromise the perfect unity of God. Later Ash'arites, following al-Ghazali, said that the attributes are neither God nor other than him. The Hanafi-Maturidite line kept an old statement in the Fiqh akbar II that God is a "thing" (shay'), in the sense of positive existence, and some Karramites and Hanbalites used the word "body" (jism) in the same sense. ⁶

The guiding rule was to affirm no attribute not expressly stated in the Qur'an, but the doctors of kalam allowed a move from a participle to a noun, and a list of attributes gradually took shape. Essential attributes include existence, eternity, permanence, dissimilarity to created things and self-subsistence. Attributes that add a concept to the essence include power, will, knowledge, life, speech, hearing and sight. Attributes of action include the creation of the world, command, decree and predestination, and God's consent. The Ash'arites and Maturidites agree that the attributes of essence are eternal, although their objects may be contingent, and most attributes can be proved by reason, while visibility, speech, hearing and sight depend on revelation alone. ⁶

The vision of God was accepted by the pious traditionists in the literal sense, and denied by the Mu'tazilites, who explained the relevant verses figuratively. The Ash'arites and Hanafi-Maturidites affirmed it "without how": the believers will see God in the hereafter, but not as one sees a limited object in space. The attribute of speech was the most contested: the Mu'tazilites made the Qur'an created speech, because God speaks in time; the Ash'arites, after the affirmation for which Ibn Hanbal was imprisoned, held that God's speech is an uncreated essential speech, distinct from its created expression in the Book and in human recitation. Ibn Taymiyya later revived the faith of the early pious and declared that this speech, in its mystery, is the Torah, the Gospel and the Qur'an. ⁶

The ambiguous (mutashabih) anthropomorphic verses, which seem to liken God to created things, posed the question whether they should be taken at face value or interpreted (ta'wil). The early traditionists took them literally and committed their meaning to God (tafwid): God sits on his throne and has a hand, but no one knows the sense God gives these terms; this attitude was attributed to Malik b. Anas. The Mu'tazilites, who wished to defend the Muslim God against the God of the philosophers, used ta'wil widely: al-Zamakhshari used philology, and the vision of God was explained as the hope of the faithful for their Lord's bounty. The first Ash'arites rejected this use of reason in tafsir. ⁶

Kalam inherited from the early controversies of Damascus the problem of how divine omnipotence and human responsibility can be reconciled, since the Qur'an teaches both that God is all-powerful and that good works are rewarded and disobedience punished. The Mu'tazilites affirmed human freedom: man acts by a power which God created in him, and God knows those acts without creating them, and rewards and punishes them with perfect justice. God is bound to do the best; there is an objective order in the world, good and evil belong to the nature of things, and the Law confirms them. The Ash'arites rejected this attempt to justify God: God is the just Judge because he does what he wills, and nothing obliges him; good and evil have no existence before the positive divine law. ⁷

Al-Ghazali and al-Razi recognized a rational meaning for good and evil, but at different levels. For the Ash'arites God predetermines all things by his eternal will, and his decree is realized by his command in discontinuous instants; second causes have no real efficacy, and the laws of nature are a custom of God (sunnat Allah), which he can change in miracles. Most Ash'arites therefore adopted an atomistic cosmology, which is in fact of Mu'tazilite origin, and which the occasionalist line kept as the best explanation of divine power over the world. Others, such as al-Ghazali and al-Razi, passed over it or modified it. ⁷

For the Maturidites, kadar is an eternal foreknowledge of the good and evil qualities of creatures, while qada' is God's bringing them into existence in time with wisdom and perfection. Man's power qualifies his acts as good or evil, although God creates their basis. The Maturidites deny that God is bound to justice, and say that he is above all justice by reason of his knowledge and wisdom. Later kalam worked out subtler theories to explain how a human act is both God's creation and man's: acquisition (kasb), the capacity (istita'a) created by God, the generation of acts by occasionalism (tawallud), and divine assistance (tawfiq). ⁷

The kalam refined its theories further in the notion of tawfiq, the divine "facilitation" of good acts, which God creates in man by his favour, and of its opposite, khidhlan, the divine abandonment. These analyses seemed to the pious ancients, and to the Hanbalite and Zahirite traditionists, to be a sterile game in the face of the mystery of God. ⁸

Ibn Hazm, the Zahirite, denied reason any criterial capacity in matters of faith, and held that the texts allow neither creation of acts by man (Mu'tazilite) nor acquisition given by God (Ash'arite); his refutations of the opposing theories are nonetheless detailed. Al-Ghazali, in the Ihya', analysed choice and the relation of intellect and will in the free act. Only God, who acts without motive, is wholly free; man acts by necessity, in the sense that everything comes from another, and by free choice, in the sense that he is the place of the free act. Kasb is an intermediate stage, not a share in divine freedom. In the later manuals the analysis dwindled to repeating formulas, and at the end of the 19th century Muhammad 'Abduh counselled leaving the secrets of the divine decree alone. ⁸

Ismaili theology, which had many cultural contacts with the Sunnis, combined a Mu'tazilite line with a Neoplatonic emanationist system, from Abu 'Abd Allah al-Nasafi in the 4th/10th century onwards. It stressed the inscrutable mystery of God and developed a negative theology: no name or attribute can be attached to God in his essence, and the Qur'anic names signify only that those who bear them come from him. The command (amr), the word (kalima) and the act of creation are hypostatized; the eternal is the command and the speech, while the creation emanates from them through a universal intellect. The Ismaili system used the allegorical ta'wil of the hidden meaning (batin) of the verses, and influenced several philosophers and Sunni theologians. ⁸

In the falsafa the term ilahiyyat (theology) came to denote the whole body of questions about God. These came from Greece, especially from Aristotle, though in the East al-Farabi and Ibn Sina were strongly marked by Neoplatonism. Ibn Sina proved the existence of God by the argument from contingency of the world, and the flexible philosophical method allowed the attributes to be distinguished from the divine essence in a reasoned way. God became the Thought that thinks itself, the supreme Good, and the Intelligence that loves itself. ⁸

The philosophers held that the world is produced by necessary and deliberate emanation and is eternal in time, possible in itself and necessary by another; providence is the law of emanation itself, willed by the eternal thought of God, and second causes necessarily act on their effects, so that the problem of human freedom against divine omnipotence does not arise. Ibn Sina's hierarchy of intellects rests on the active intellect as intermediary between God and man; Ibn Rushd alone seems to have returned to knowledge of the individual in its individuality. The God they proclaim, the necessary Being (al-wajib al-wujud), is the God attained by reason and at most by intellectual intuition, and they tried to prove that the God of reason and the God of the Qur'an coincide. ⁹

Ibn Rushd despised the dialectic of the mutakallimun, who, he said, broke the religious law into pieces. Yet both the Mu'tazilites and the Ash'arites were, in their own view, men of religion first and philosophers second, and their inner attitudes differed. The Mu'tazilites began from the Qur'an and the sovereign justice of God, but their use of reason as the criterion of the Law led them to a God "justified" before human reason, and their tanzih attenuated the divine attributes. The Ash'arites, by accepting the challenge of dialectic, refined and complicated the doctrine without end, and the kalam froze into stereotyped manuals after the 15th century, a risk that Muhammad 'Abduh's semi-agnosticism was in part a reaction to. ⁹

Sufism was not a rational enterprise but a spiritual experience, a life with God understood as an experience of oneness, the inner realization of tawhid. Some Sufis rethought the dogmatic bases of their age (al-Halladi, al-Tirmidhi); some were semi-Mu'tazilite (Hasan al-Basri); some gave their name to a school (Ibn Karram); many were Shi'i, and many Sunni Sufis did not challenge the Ash'arite conclusions (al-Makki, al-Ghazali of the Ihya, many Shadhilis). From the 7th/13th and 8th/14th centuries many were influenced by a Neoplatonic existential monism. The article distinguishes two main lines: the unity of witness (wahdat al-shuhud), of which al-Halladi was the exponent, in which union with God is achieved in God bearing witness to himself in the mystic's heart, and love ('ishq), which establishes the dialogue between the faithful heart and God. ⁹

Al-Ghazali's Ihya gave Sufism citizenship among the recognized religious sciences, joining the developed Ash'arite doctrine to the love of God, trust, and the ascetic virtues. The ishraq movement and its emanationism, of al-Suhrawardi of Aleppo, sought a unity in knowledge while leaving the Witness its transcendence. The oneness of existence (wahdat al-wujud), associated with Ibn 'Arabi, dominated later Sufism: the created world is impermanent, and the mystic must be annihilated (fana') in the only existence that subsists, that of God. The spirit (ruh) is then a direct emanation from the divine command, and the supreme experience is an experience of unity (ittihad). Ibn Taymiyya condemned this as the influence of Ibn Sina. ¹⁰

The faith of the early Sufis often agreed with that of the "pious ancients" (salaf), a choice rather than a chronological category, which reappears in Ibn Taymiyya and in the Wahhabi and modern Salafi movements. The Sufi line of al-Ansari rejected the quibbles of the kalam and the attempt to explain the divine attributes, while holding to the faith in God Most High, who reveals no more of himself than the most beautiful Names. The inner attitude of the believer is a total and confident surrender of the self to God, the just judge and supreme help. This, the article concludes, is what the Muslim has in his heart when he pronounces the name Allah. Each age produces new discussion of the divine, and a new kalam may yet rethink the questions in the light of modern philosophies, by a vital recourse to God, "the One, the Living, Master of the worlds and of the day of judgement". ¹⁰

The bibliography lists the Muslim works cited in the article (Bukhari, Muslim, al-Ash'ari, Ibn Sina, Ibn Hazm, al-Juwayni, al-Ghazali, Ibn Rushd, al-Razi, Ibn Taymiyya, al-Taftazani, al-Jurjani, al-Sanusi, al-Bajuri, Muhammad 'Abduh) and the Western studies of Wensinck, Horten, Pines, Macdonald, Gardet and Anawati and others. The article is signed by its author, unnamed in the scan. ¹⁰