No God But God

by Reza Aslan

  The third Pillar, the month-long Muslim fast (sawm in Arabic) which takes place during Ramadan, was not firmly instituted as a Muslim ritual until after the emigration to Medina. Considering that the concept of fasting was thoroughly foreign to the Bedouin experience—it would have been absurd to go voluntarily without food or water in a desert climate—there can be no doubt that Muhammad adopted this ritual from Arabia’s Jews. The Quran admits as much when it states, “Fasting is prescribed for you, just as it was prescribed for those before you” (2:183; emphasis added). And al-Tabari notes that the first Muslim fast coincided with Yom Kippur; Muhammad specifically ordered his followers to fast with the Jews in commemoration of their flight from Egypt. Only later was the fast changed to Ramadan, the month in which Muslims believe the Quran was first revealed to Muhammad.

  During the month of Ramadan, no one may eat, drink, or have sexual intercourse between sunup and sundown. Again, the chief purpose behind the ritual fast is to bind the community as one. It is a reminder of the suffering and poverty of those among them who go without food throughout the year. For this reason, Muslims who are not obliged to fast—the old and the sick, the pregnant and nursing, travelers, and those who perform heavy manual labor—are instead required by the Quran to feed the hungry (2:184). And while an entire month of fasting may sound like a grim experience, Ramadan is in actuality a time for both spiritual introspection and festive celebration. Friends, families, entire neighborhoods spend the long nights of the month breaking fast together, while the final night of Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr, is the most widely celebrated holiday in the whole of the Islamic world.

  The fourth, and perhaps the most famous, Pillar is the annual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. All Muslims must, if possible, journey to Mecca at least once in their lives to take part in the sacred rites of the Ka‘ba. Technically, the rites at the Ka‘ba can be performed anytime in what is known as the “lesser pilgrimage,” or umra. However, the Hajj itself takes place only during the last month of the lunar year, when the sacred city swells to accommodate the crowds of pilgrims like a “mother’s uterus that miraculously makes room for its child,” to quote the famed twelfth-century Spanish scholar and poet Ibn Jubayr.

  Like their pagan counterparts, Muslim pilgrims travel to Mecca to experience the transformative effects of the Ka‘ba. But unlike the pagan sanctuary, the Muslim Ka‘ba is not a repository of the gods. Rather, it is a symbol for the living presence of the one and only God. The Ka‘ba, it must be understood, has no architectural significance. It is a cube—the simplest form a building can take—veiled in black (which is no color) and rimmed with the word of God. It is not a temple in the traditional sense. It no longer has any intrinsic sanctity; it has been torn down and rebuilt a number of times. Though dubbed “the House of God,” the Ka‘ba houses nothing, save for a few Qurans and some ancient relics. Yet in its utter simplicity, the Ka‘ba and the rites associated with it function as a communal meditation on the Oneness and Unity of God (a concept that will be more fully explored below).

  The Hajj begins when the pilgrims cross the consecrated threshold of the Grand Mosque, which surrounds the Ka‘ba, separating the sacred from the profane. To come into the presence of the sanctuary, pilgrims must rid themselves of their ordinary clothes and don the sanctified garments—two seamless white pieces of cloth for men; any similar plain garment for women—that signify a state of purity (ihram). The men shave their heads and trim their beards and nails; the women clip a few locks of hair.

  Once this sanctified state has been reached, the intention to perform the rites is voiced, and the pilgrim embarks on the tawaf: the seven circumambulations of the sanctuary, which still function as the principal ritual of the pilgrimage. While in every corner of the world—from the farthest fringes of sub-Saharan Africa to the affluent suburbs of Chicago—Muslims face the Ka‘ba in prayer, when they are gathered in Mecca, the Ka‘ba becomes the axis of the world, and every direction is the direction of prayer. It is, one might say, the centrifugal force of praying in the presence of the sacred shrine that compels the worshipper to orbit the sanctuary.

  When the circumambulations are complete, the pilgrim moves on to a series of rituals that, according to tradition, were established by Muhammad in the last year of his life. These include running back and forth between the twin hills, Safah and Marwah, to commemorate Hagar’s search for water; traveling to Mt. Arafat (the refuge of Adam and Eve after they were exiled from Eden, and the site of Muhammad’s final sermon); the stoning of three pillars at Mina, which represent the Devil; and finally, the sacrifice of sheep, cows, or lambs to mark the end of the pilgrimage (the meat is then distributed to the poor). When the rites are complete, the pilgrim removes the sanctified garments and reenters the world of the profane as a Hajji; the next time the garments are worn will be as a burial shroud.

  The Hajj is the supreme communal event in Islam. It is the only major Muslim ritual in which men and women participate with no division between them. In the sanctified state, when every pilgrim is identically dressed, there is no longer any rank, or class, or status; there is no gender and no ethnic or racial identity: there is no identity whatsoever, save as Muslims. It was precisely this communal spirit that Malcolm X referred to when he wrote during his own pilgrimage, “I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all colors together.”

  These four rituals—communal prayer, the paying of alms, the fast of Ramadan, and the Hajj pilgrimage—provide meaning to the Muslim faith and unity to the Muslim community. Yet one could argue that the primary function of these four is to express the fifth and most important Pillar (and the only one requiring belief rather than action): the shahadah, or profession of faith, which initiates every convert into the Muslim faith.

  “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is God’s Messenger.”

  This deceptively simple statement is not only the basis for all articles of faith in Islam, it is in some ways the sum and total of Islamic theology. This is because the shahadah signifies recognition of an exceedingly complex theological doctrine known as tawhid.

  The doctrine of tawhid is so central to the development of Islamic theology that “the Science of Kalam” (’ilm al-kalam) is synonymous with “the Science of Tawhid” (’ilm al-tawhid). But tawhid, which literally means “making one,” implies more than just monotheism. True, there is only one God, but that is just the beginning. Tawhid means that God is Oneness. God is Unity: wholly indivisible, entirely unique, and utterly indefinable. God resembles nothing in either essence or attributes.

  “Nothing is like Him,” the mystic and scholar Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111) wrote in his Revival of the Religious Sciences, “and He is not like anything.” God is, as the Quran repeatedly reminds believers, “elevated”; God is “eminent.” When Muslims cry Allahu Akbar! (literally, “God is greater!”), what they mean is not that God is greater than this or that, but that God is simply greater.

  Obviously, human beings have no choice but to speak of God in human language, through human symbols and metaphors. Therefore, one can refer to God’s attributes as embodying “Goodness” or “Being,” in the classical philosophical sense, but only with the recognition that these are meaningless terms when applied to God, who is neither substance nor accident. Indeed, tawhid suggests that God is beyond any description, beyond any human knowledge. “Imagination does not reach Him,” stressed the Egyptian theologian al-Tahawi (d. 933), “and understanding does not comprehend Him.” God is, in other words, wholly Other: the Mysterium Tremendum, to borrow Rudolph Otto’s famous phrase.

  Because tawhid insists that God is One, a group of Muslim mystics called the Sufis will claim that there can be nothing apart from God. God is, according to the Sufi master Ibn al-Arabi, the only being with real existence: the only reality. For al-Ghazali God is al-Awwal, “the First, before whom there is nothing,” and al-Akhir, “the Last, after whom there is nothing.” Al-Ghazali, it must be understood, is making neither an ontological
nor a teleological argument for the existence of God; God is neither Thomas Aquinas’s “First Cause,” nor Aristotle’s “Prime Mover.” God is the only cause; God is movement itself.

  If tawhid is the foundation of Islam, then its opposite, shirk, is Islam’s greatest sin, for which some Muslims claim there can be no forgiveness (see the Quran 2:116). In its simplest definition, shirk means associating anything with God. But like tawhid, shirk is not so simple a concept. Polytheism is obviously shirk, but so is obscuring God’s Oneness in any way. For Muslims, the Trinity is shirk, for God is nothing if not Unity. Any attempt to anthropomorphize God by endowing the Divine with human attributes, thereby limiting or restricting God’s dominion, could be shirk. But shirk can also be defined as placing obstacles in the way of God, whether greed, or drink, or pride, or false piety, or any other grave sin that keeps the believer apart from God.

  Ultimately, tawhid implies recognizing creation as a “universal unity,” to quote Ali Shariati, without divisions into “this world and the hereafter, the natural and the supernatural, substance and meaning, spirit and body.” In other words, the relationship between God and creation is like that between “light and the lamp that emits it.” One God; one Creation. One God.

  One God.

  * * *

  As the starting point for all doctrinal discussions in Islam, the Oneness and Unity of God clearly raise some theological problems. For example, if God is absolutely omnipotent, then is God also responsible for evil? Does humanity have the free will to choose between right and wrong, or are we all predetermined for either salvation or damnation? And how is one to interpret God’s attributes—God’s Knowledge, God’s Power, and especially God’s Speech as recorded in the Quran? Is the word of God coexistent with God, or is it a created thing, like nature and the cosmos? Does not an answer either way necessarily compromise Divine Unity?

  Given the relationship between religion and politics in early Islam, it is not surprising that these distinctly theological questions also had important political implications. The Umayyad Caliphs, for instance, were eager to exploit the argument for God’s determinate power to sanction their absolute authority over the Ummah. After all, if the Umayyads were the chosen deputies of God, then all of their actions were, in effect, decreed by God. This idea was adopted by the distinguished theologian Hasan al-Basra (642–728), who claimed that even a wicked Caliph must be obeyed, because he had been placed on the throne by God.

  And yet, al-Basra was no predeterminist: his position on the Caliphate reflected his political quietism and his anti-Kharijite stance, not his theological views. Like the Qadarite school of theology with which he is often associated, al-Basra believed that God’s foreknowledge of events did not necessarily correspond to predeterminism: God may know what one is going to do, but that does not mean God forces one to do it. Some theologians within the Qadarite school went one step further, to claim that God cannot know our actions until they occur, a notion that understandably offended the more traditionalist theologians, who believed the doctrine of tawhid necessitated the belief in God’s determinate power. If the Creator and Creation are one, they argued, then how could humanity contradict the will of God?

  But the “predeterminists” were themselves divided between those, like the radical sect of the Jahmites, who considered all human activities (including salvation) to be predetermined by God, and those, like the followers of the aforementioned legal scholar Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780–855), who accepted God’s absolute control over human affairs but still maintained humanity’s responsibility for reacting positively or negatively to the circumstances predetermined by God.

  By the ninth and tenth centuries, this debate over determinism and free will was loosely divided between two major strands of thought: the so-called “Rationalist position,” most clearly represented by the Mu’tazilite school, and the “Traditionalist” position, dominated by the Ash‘arite school. The Rationalist Ulama of the Mu’tazilah argued that God, while fundamentally indefinable, nevertheless exists within the framework of human reason. Challenging the notion that religious truth could be accessed only through divine revelation, the Mu’tazilah promulgated the doctrine that all theological arguments must adhere to the principles of rational thought. Even the interpretation of the Quran and the traditions, or Sunna, of the Prophet were, for the Rationalists, subordinate to human reason. As Abd al-Jabbar (d. 1024), the most influential Mu’tazilite theologian of his time, argued, the “truthfulness” of God’s word cannot be based solely on God’s Revelation, for that would be circular reasoning.

  The Spanish philosopher and physician Ibn Rushd (1126–98), better known as Averroës in the West, pushed al-Jabbar’s conception of truth to its limit by proposing a “two truths” theory of knowledge in which religion and philosophy are placed in opposition to each other. According to Ibn Rushd, religion simplifies the truth for the masses by resorting to easily recognizable signs and symbols, regardless of the doctrinal contradictions and rational incongruities that inevitably result from the formation and rigid interpretation of dogma. Philosophy, however, is itself truth; its purpose is merely to express reality through the faculty of human reason.

  It is this commitment to what Binyamin Abrahamov calls “the overwhelming power of reason over revelation” that has led modern scholars to label the Mu’tazilah the first speculative theologians in Islam. And it was precisely this emphasis on the primacy of human reason that the Traditionalist Ulama of the Ash‘arite school so strenuously opposed.

  The Ash‘ari argued that human reason, while certainly important, must nevertheless be subordinate to the Quran and the Sunna of the Prophet. If religious knowledge could be gained only through rational speculation, as the Mu’tazilah claimed, there would be no need for prophets and revelations; the result would be a confusion of theological diversity that would allow people to follow their own wills rather than the will of God. The Ash‘ari considered reason to be unstable and changing, while the prophetic and scriptural traditions—especially as they were defined by the Traditionalist Ulama—were stable and fixed.

  With regard to the question of free will, Rationalist theologians adopted and expanded the view that humanity was perfectly free to act in either goodness or evil, meaning that the responsibility for salvation rested directly in the hands of the believer. After all, it would be irrational for God to behave so unjustly as to will belief and unbelief upon humanity, then reward one and punish the other. Many Traditionalists rejected this argument on the grounds that it seemed to compel God to act in a rational, and therefore human, manner. This, according to the Ash‘ari, was shirk. As the omnipotent creator of all things, God must be the progenitor “of the good and evil, of the little and the much, of what is outward and what is inward, of what is sweet and what is bitter, of what is liked and what is disliked, of what is fine and what is bad, of what is first and what is last,” to quote the Hanbali creed, unquestionably the most influential of all Islamic schools of thought.

  The Rationalist and Traditionalist theologians further differed in their interpretation of God’s attributes. Both believed that God was eternal and unique, and both grudgingly acknowledged the anthropomorphic descriptions of God provided by the Quran. However, while most Rationalists interpreted these descriptions as merely figurative devices intended for poetical purposes, most Traditionalists rejected all symbolic interpretations of the Revelation, claiming that the Quran’s references to God’s hands and face, while not meant to be likened to human hands or faces, must nevertheless be read literally.

  God has a face, argued Abu’l Hasan al-Ash‘ari (873–935), founder of the Ash‘arite school, because the Quran says so (“the face of your Lord will endure forever”; 55:27), and it is not our place to ask how or why. Indeed, the Ash‘ari often responded to the rational incongruities and internal contradictions that resulted from their rigid interpretation of religious doctrine by cultivating a formula of bila kayfa, loosely translated as “Don’t ask why.”


  This formula horrified the Rationalists, and especially scholars such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna in the West; 980–1037), who considered God’s attributes—God’s knowledge, speech, etc.—to be nothing more than “guideposts” that merely reflected the human mind’s understanding of the Divine, not the Divine itself. The Rationalists argued that God’s attributes could not possibly exist coeternally with God, but must be a part of creation. Assigning eternal attributes to God would, according to Wasil ibn Ata (d. 748), founder of the Mu’tazilite school, be tantamount to arguing for the existence of more than one eternal being.

  The Traditionalist Ulama rejected Wasil’s argument, countering that while God’s attributes may be separate entities, they nevertheless inhere in God’s essence and are, consequently, eternal. “His attributes are from eternity,” claimed Abu Hanifah, the Traditionalist founder of the Hanafi school of law (the largest school of law in the modern Muslim world). “Whoever says they are created or originated … is an unbeliever.”

  Of course, when talking about the relationship between God’s attributes and God’s essence, both the Rationalists and the Traditionalists had one particularly significant attribute in mind: God’s Speech; that is, the Quran.