In this part of the article titled “The Unity of Allah”, we shall look at the attributes of Allah from the Prophet’s viewpoint. Thereafter, we look at the speech of Imam Ali on the transcendent Lord.
Allah’s Attributes
Ibn Abbas related that a Jew, called Na’thal, stood up before the Prophet of God-upon whom be blessings and peace-and said, “O Muhammad, verily I will ask thee about certain things which have been repeating themselves in my breast for some time. If thou answerest them for me I will embrace Islam at thy hand.” The Prophet said, “Ask, O Abu Ummarah” Then he said, “O Muhammad, describe for me thy Lord.”
He answered, “Surely the Creator cannot be described except by that with which He has described Himself-and how should one describe that Creator whom the senses cannot perceive, imaginations cannot attain, thoughts cannot delimit and sight cannot encompass? Greater is He than what the depicters describe. He is distant in His nearness and near in His distance.
He fashions ‘howness’, so it is not said of Him, ‘How?’; He determines the ‘where’ (ayn), so it is not said of Him, ‘Where?’ (ayn). He sunders ‘howness’ and ‘whereness’, so He is “One . . . the Everlasting Refuge” (112: 1-2), as He has described Himself. But depicters do not attain His description. ‘He has not begotten, and has not been begotten, and equal to Him is not anyone (112: 3-4).
Na’thal said, “Thou hast spoken the truth. O Muhammad, tell me about thy saying, ‘Surely He is One, there is none like (shabih) Him.’ Is not God one and man one? And thus His oneness (wahdaniyyah) resembles the oneness of man.” He answered, “God is one, but single in meaning (ahadi al-mana), while man is one but dual in meaning (thanawi al-ma’na), corporeal substance (jism) and accidents (‘arad), body (badan) and spirit (ruh). Similarity (tashbih) [11] pertains only to the meanings.” Nathal said, “Thou hast spoken the truth, O Muhammad.”
Imam Ali (as), the First Imam
1. The Transcendent Lord
It was related by ‘Ali ibn Musa al-Rida (the eighth Imam) from the earlier Imams in succession that al-Husayn ibn ‘Ali (the third Imam) spoke as follows: The Commander of the Faithful-upon whom be peace-addressed the people in the mosque at Kufa and said: “Praise belongs to God, who did not originate from anything, nor did He bring what exists into being from anything. [12]
His beginninglessness is attested to by the temporality (huduth) ofthings, His power by the impotence with which He has branded them, and His everlastingness (dawam) by the annihilation (fana’) which He has forced upon them. No place is empty of Him that He might be perceived through localization (ayniyyah), no object (shabah) is like Him that He might be described by quality (kayfiyyah), nor is He absent from anything that He might be known through the situation (haythiyyah).” [13].
“He is distinct (muba’in) in attributes from all that He has originated, inaccessible to perception because of the changing essences He has created (in things), [14] and outside of all domination (tasarruf) by changing states (halat) because of grandeur and tremendousness. Forbidden is His delimitation (tahdid) to the penetrating acumen of sagacities, His description (takyif) to the piercing profundities of thought and His representation (taswir) to the searching probes of insight.” “Because of His tremendousness places encompass Him not, because of His majesty measures gauge Him not, and because of His grandeur standards judge Him not. Impossible is it for imaginations (awham) to fathom Him, understandings (afham) to comprehend Him or minds (adhhan) to imagine Him.
Powers of reason (uqul) with lofty aspiration despair of contriving to comprehend Him, oceans of knowledge run dry without alluding to Him in-depth, [15] and the subtleties of disputants fall from loftiness to pettiness in describing His power.” “He is One (wahid), not in terms of number (adad); Everlasting (da’im), without duration (amad); Standing (Qa’im), without supports (umud). He is not of a kind (jins) that ( other ) kind should be on a par with Him, nor an object that objects should be similar to Him, nor like things that attribute should apply to Him.
Powers of reason go astray in the waves of the current of perceiving Him, imaginations are bewildered at encompassing the mention of His beginninglessness, understandings are held back from becoming conscious of the description of His power, and minds are drowned in the depths of the heavens of His kingdom (malakut).” [16]
“He is Master over (giving) bounties, Inaccessible through Grandeur and Sovereign over all things. Time (al-dahr) makes Him not old, nor does description encompass Him. Humbled before Him are the firmest of obduracies in the limits of their constancy, and submitted to Him are the most unshakeable of the cords in the extremity of their towering regions.” [17]
“Witness to His Lordship (rububiyyah) is the totality of kinds (al-ajnas, i.e. kinds of creatures), to His Power their incapacity, to His eternity (Qidmah) their createdness (futur), and to His permanence (baqa’) their passing into extinction (zawal). So they possess no place of refuge from His grasp (idrak) of them, no exit from His encompassing (ihatah) them, no way of veiling themselves from His enumeration (ihsa’) of them and no way of avoiding His power over them.
Sufficient is the perfection of His making them as a sign (ayah), His compounding of their (natural) constitutions as a proof, the temporal origin (huduth) of their natures as (a reason for His) eternity, and the creation’s laws governing them as a lesson. [19]
No limit is attributed to Him, no similitude struck for Him and nothing veiled from Him. High indeed is He exalted above the striking of similitudes and above created attributes!”
“And I testify that there is no god but He, having faith in His lordship and opposing whoso denies Him; and I testify that Muhammad is His servant and messenger, residing in the best lodging-place, having passed from the noblest of loins and immaculate wombs, extracted in lineage from the noblest of mines and in origin from the most excellent of plantations, and (derived) from the most inaccessible of summits and the most glorious roots, from the tree from which God fashioned His prophets and chose His trusted ones: [20] (a tree) of excellent wood, harmonious stature, lofty branches, flourishing limbs, ripened fruit, (and) noble interior, implanted in generosity and cultivated in a sacred precinct.
There it put forth branches and fruit, became strong and unassailable, and then made him (the prophet Muhammad) tall and eminent, until God, the Mighty and Majestic, honoured him with the Faithful Spirit, [21] the Illuminating Light, [22] and the Manifest Book. [23] He subjected to him Buraq [24] and the angels greeted him. [25]
By means of him, He terrified the devils and overthrew the idols and the gods (who were) worshipped apart from Him. His prophet’s practice (sunnah) is integrity (rushd), his conduct (sirah) is justice and his decision is truth. He proclaimed that which was commanded by his Lord, [26] and he delivered that with which he was charged [27] until he made plain his mission through the profession of Unity and made manifest among the creatures that there is no god but God alone and that He has no associate; until His Oneness became pure and His lordship unmixed.
God made manifest his argument through the profession of His Unity and He raised his degree with submission (al-Islam). And God, the Mighty and Majestic, chose for His prophet what was with Him of repose, degree and means-upon him and upon his pure household be God’s peace.”
To be continued!
NOTES:
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[11] “Similarity” or “comparison” (tasbih) becomes an important technical term in Islamic theology and Sufism. It indicates the belief that God’s attributes can be likened to those of man and the creatures. Hence scholars have often translated the term as “anthropomorphism”. It is contrasted with “incomparability” (tanwih), the belief that God’s attributes are in no way similar to those of the creatures. As pointed out in the introduction, the Imams emphasize the latter position throughout these texts, without failing to make use of the former to explain their points. In later theology and Sufism, attempts are often made to strike a balance between the two positions by maintaining that God is neither completely similar to His creatures nor totally incomparable, or that He is both similar and incomparable at the same time. For example, Ibn al-‘Arabi attempts to strike this balance in the third chapter of his celebrated Fusus al Hikam. See W. Chittick, “Ibn ‘Arabi’s own Summary of the Fusus: ‘The Imprint of the Bezels of Wisdom’,” Sophia Perennis, vol. I, no. 2, Autumn I975, pp. I08-II0
[12] As pointed out by Majlisi (pp. 223-4), this is “a rejection of the views of those who say that every temporal being (hadith) must come from a (pre-existing) matter.”
[13] The words ayniyyah, kayfiyyah and haythiyyah could be translated more literally as “whereness”, “howness” and “whereasness” (cf. above, p.26, and below, p. 49). Majlisi explains the meaning as follows: “In other words, He is not localized in any one place that He should be in that place without being in another, as is the case with things qualified by localization (mutamakkinat). So He cannot be perceived like something possessing location and place. The relation of a disengaged reality (mudarrad) to all places is equal. No place is empty of Him in respect of the fact He encompasses them in knowledge, in terms of causality, and because He preserves and sustains them” There is no object like Him existing either externally (fi’-l-kharij) or mentally (fi’-l-adhhan), that He might be described as possessing any of the various qualities relating to corporeality and possibility. It is also possible that by ‘quality is meant ‘cognitive form’ (al-surat al-ilmiyyah).”And He is not absent from anything, that is, . . . in respect of knowledge, that one might thus conclude that He possesses aspect (hayth) and place (makan). As for things qualified by place, it is in their nature to be absent from (other) things and not to encompass them in knowledge. This sentence is as if to emphasize the former statement. It is also possible that ‘aspect’ here refers to time . . .” (p. 224).
[14] “The changing essences of things make Him inaccessible to minds . . . either because, if the mind could perceive Him, He would be like possible beings-a locus for changing attributes, and thus He would be in need of a maker; or because reason tells us that the Maker must be different in attribute from the made, so He cannot be perceived as are created things . . .” (Majlisi, p. 225).
[15] Cf. The Quran XVIII, II0: “Say, ‘If the sea were ink for the Words of my Lord, the sea would be spent before the Words of my Lord are spent, though We brought replenishment the like of it.”
[16] It will not have passed unnoticed that the transcendence of the divine Essence is emphasized here by the fact that man is dumbfounded even by the lower reaches of God’s theophany. The powers of man’s reason are stopped by the waves; they do not reach the current itself. The mere mention of God’s eternity bewilders the imagination, etc.
[17] According to Majlisi the reference is to the “cords” (asbab) or degrees of “Pharaoh said, ‘Haman, build for me a tower, that haply so I may reach the cords, the cords of the heavens, and look upon Moses’ ‘God’ ” (40: 361).
[18] The same words, itqan al-sun’, are used together once in the Quran: “God’s handiwork, who has made everything perfectly” (27: 88).
[19] The fact that the creation displays the signs and portents of God is of course emphasized throughout the Quran and all of Islam and is the basis of all Islamic cosmology. For the Muslim, moreover, it is the very order and regularity of the universe and nature’s laws which prove God. See S. H. Nasr, Science and Civilization in Islam, Cambridge (Mass.), 1968.
[20] According to Majlisi “tree” is meant first the Abrahamic line of prophecy, then by the tribe and family of the Prophet-the Quraysh and Banu Hashim (p. 227). The descriptions following all refer to the tree of prophecy and the prophets who grew from it.
[21] I.e., Gabriel, the angel of revelation. Cf. The Quran 26: I92-3: “Truly it is the revelation of the Lord of all beings, brought down by the Faithful Spirit . . .”
[22] I.e., revelation.
[23] The Quran.
[24] The “steed” which carried the Prophet to Heaven on his night journey (Miraj).
[25] I.e., during the Prophets Mir’aj.
[26] Cf. Quran 15, 94: “So proclaim that which thou art commanded, and withdraw from the idolators.”
[27] Cf. The Quran 5, 67: “0 Messenger, deliver what which has been sent down to thee from thy Lord . . “.
