Artful Dodger: II. ALLAH AND HIS ATTRIBUTES

There are two fundamental points between Islam and Christianity which, for the sake of the truth and the peace of the world, deserved a very serious and deep investigation. As these two religions claim their origin from one and the same source, it would follow that no important point of controversy between them should be allowed to exist. Both these great religions believe in the existence of the Deity and in the covenant made between God and the Prophet Abraham. On these two principal points a thoroughly con- scientious and final agreement must be arrived at between the intelligent adherents of the two faiths. Are we poor and ignorant mortals to believe in and worship one God, or are we to believe in and fear a plurality of Gods? Which of the two, Christ or Prophet Muhammad, is the object of the Divine Covenant? These two questions must be answered once for all.

It would be a mere waste of time here to refute those who ignorantly or maliciously suppose the God as mentioned in Islam to be different from the true God and only a fictitious deity of Prophet Muhammad's own creation. If the Christian priests and theologians knew their Scriptures in the original Hebrew instead of in translations as the Muslims read their Quran in its Arabic text, they would clearly see that Allah is the same ancient Semitic name of the Supreme Being who revealed and spoke to Adam and all the prophets.

Allah is the only Self-Existing, Knowing, Powerful Being. He encompasses, fills every space, being and thing; and is the source of all life, knowledge and force. Allah is the Unique Creator, Regulator and Ruler of the universe. He is absolutely One. The essence, the person and nature of Allah are absolutely beyond human comprehension, and therefore any attempt to define His essence is not only futile but even dangerous to our spiritual welfare and faith; for it will certainly lead us into error.

The trinitarian branch of the Christian Church, for about seventeen centuries, has exhausted all the brains of her saints and philosophers to define the Essence and the Person of the Deity; and what have they invented? All that which Athanasiuses, Augustines and Aquinases have imposed upon the Christians "under the pain of eternal damnation" to believe in a God who is "the third of three"! Allah, in His Holy Quran, condemns this belief in these solemn words:-

"Because the unbelivers are those who say: 'Allah is one of three.' There is but One God. If they do not desist in what they say, a painful punishment will afflict those of them that disbelieve." (Quran Ch.5 v73).

The reason why the orthodox Muslim scholars have always refrained from defining God's Essence is because His Essence transcends all attributes in which it could only be defined. Allah has many Names which in reality are only adjectives derived from His essence through its various mani- festations in the universe which He alone has formed. We call Allah by the appellations Almighty, Eternal, Omnipresent, Omniscient, Merciful, and so forth, because we conceived the eternity, omnipresence, universal knowledge, mercifulness, as emanating from His essence and belonging to Him alone and absolutely. He is alone the infinitely Knowing, Powerful, Living, Holy, Beautiful, Good, Loving, Glorious, Terrible Avenger, because it is from Him alone that emanate and flow the qualities of knowledge, power, life, holiness, beauty and the rest. God has no attributes in the sense we understand them. With us an attribute or a property is common to many individuals of a species, but what is God's is His alone, and there is none other to share it with Him. When we say, "Solomon is wise, powerful, just and beautiful," we do not ascribe exclusively to him all wisdom, power, justice and beauty. We only mean to say that he is relatively wise as compared with others of his species, and that wisdom too is relatively his attribute in common with the individuals belong- ing to his class.

To make it more clear, a divine attribute is an emanation of God, and therefore an activity. Now every divine action is nothing more or less than a creation.

It is also to be admitted that the divine attributes, inas- much as they are emanations, posit time and a beginning; consequently when Allah said: "Be, and it was" - or He uttered, His word in time and in the beginning of the creation. This is what the Sufis term "aql-kull", or universal intelligence, as the emana- tion of the "aql awwal", namely, the "first intelligence." Then the "nafs-kull", or the "universal soul" that was the first to hear and obey this divine order, emanated from the "first soul" and transformed the universe.