So tell the tale — perhaps they will reflect. [Koran 7:176]
Islam and Iman
In the hadith of Gabriel, the Prophet said that faith was “that you have faith in God, His angels, His books, His prophets, and the Last Day, and that you have faith in the measuring out, both its good and its evil.” At first sight, this looks like a definition of faith. But notice that the Prophet repeats the word faith. A proper definition cannot repeat the word being defined in the definition. Hence, the Prophet is assuming that his listeners already know what faith is and they need to be told what they should have faith in. It is not enough to have faith and leave it at that, nor is it enough to “have faith in God.” Faith must also have other objects, and unless one has faith in all the mentioned objects, one’s faith will not be counted as Islamic faith, but rather as some other kind of faith.
Before we turn to the objects of Islamic faith, we need a definition of the word faith itself, or rather of the Arabic term iman, because some common ideas about faith, as the term is employed in English, do not apply to iman. In English, we usually make no distinction between faith and belief, however, Wilfred Cantwell Smith has pointed out that the word faith—even without considering the Arabic context—needs to be differentiated from the word belief.[1]
When we say that people believe in something we mean that they have confidence that something is true, but frequently we are implying that they are mistaken and are OPINION 13 flying in the face of all the evidence. In Islamic languages, the word iman has no such negative connotation. Iman involves confidence in a truth that is really true, not a supposed truth. There is no suggestion that people have faith in a falsehood. The object of their faith expresses the objective reality of things. Moreover, faith means that when people have this confidence, they commit themselves to acting on the basis of the truth that they know. The Prophet defined the word iman by saying, “Faith is knowledge in the heart, a voicing with the tongue, and an activity with the limbs.” Thus faith involves knowing, speaking, and doing.
Someone who has iman first knows or recognizes in the heart that something is true. The heart—a term which is often used in such contexts in the Koran—is not primarily the place of emotions, rather, it is the specific faculty or spiritual organ that separates human beings from non-human beings. Usually we refer to it by words such as intelligence. In philosophical language, it can be associated with what the word rational refers to when the human being is defined as a rational animal.
In the Koranic view of things, a rational animal is an animal with a heart. A human being without a functioning heart is an animal, or worse. It is in reference to such people that the Koran says,
“They are but as the cattle, or rather, they are further astray from the truth” (25:44)
healthy heart[2] is able to understand the nature of things, but many hearts are, in Koranic terms, “sick” or “rusted” or “locked.” Only a healthy heart has faith and is able to see things the way they are:
They have hearts, but do not understand with them. (7:179) It is not the eyes that are blind, but blind are the hearts within the breasts. (22:46)
What, do they not ponder the Koran? Or is it that there are locks on their hearts? (47:24)
They would trick God and the faithful, and only themselves they deceive, but they are not aware. In their hearts is a sickness. (2:10)
No indeed; but what they were earning has rusted upon their hearts. (83:14)
Those–He has written faith upon their hearts. (58:22)
It is He who sent down tranquility into the hearts of the faithful, so that they might add faith to their faith. (48:4)
Faith is also a “voicing with the tongue.” The human quality of intelligence becomes manifest in rational speech, a faculty possessed only by human beings, at least in our world. The heart’s recognition of the truth must be expressed, and its first expression must be in the most human of ways—through speech. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of speech in the Islamic perspective. God himself creates the universe through speaking.
“Our only word to a thing, when We desire it, is to say to it ‘Be!’ and it is” (16:40)
God provides guidance by speaking through the prophets. Hence, all the scriptures are the speech of God. The Koran is God’s speech to Muslims and the foundation of everything Islamic. Moreover, human beings return to God by speaking to Him; that is, through prayer. As we saw earlier, the Shahadah, the first pillar of Islam and the fundamental act of Muslims, is a speech act. It is not sufficient simply to think that there is no god but God and Muhammad is His messenger. One must also say so. The ultimate importance of this speech act is indicated by the fact that it alone suffices for a person to be a Muslim. The center pole of Islam, the salat, is a series of bodily actions accompanied by speech, and if, for some reason, a person cannot perform the bodily movements, it is sufficient to recite the words (mentally if necessary). In sum, “voicing with the tongue” is the most important act a person performs: It marks the person’s humanity and makes possible the establishment of a relationship with God.
But speaking, of course, is not the only requirement for faith. We all know people who say one thing and do something else, and we do not usually have much respect for them. The Koran makes it clear that God Himself dislikes this quality in people:
“Very hateful is it to God that you say what you do not do” (61:3).
Hence, we come to the third element in the Prophet’s definition of faith, “activity with the limbs.” Having recognized that something is true and acknowledged its truth verbally, people must commit themselves to this truth and show their commitment in their activities. They must live in conformity with the truth that they know. The necessity of “activity with the limbs” for complete faith explains why most Muslim theologians include Islam as part of iman. Islam is precisely activity with the limbs— not just any activity, but activity as commanded by God, or in conformity with the truth of the Koran. The fact that iman demands Islam is important. Faith includes submission to God’s instructions, but submission to God’s instructions does not necessarily include faith.
A person can act outwardly as a Muslim without having the faith that the Prophet describes in the hadith of Gabriel. This does not necessarily nullify the activity, but it does call its value into question. A simple OPINION 14 example can help clarify the relationship between iman and Islam. Today in America there are several million Muslims. Most of them are immigrants or the children of immigrants. American Muslims go to the same schools as other Americans, and it frequently happens that a Muslim will fall in love with a non-Muslim and want to get married.
If the family observes the Shariah, then the marriage has to take place according to Islamic law. If a Muslim man wants to marry a Christian or Jewish woman, the general opinion of the jurists is that the marriage can take place without any difficulty, so long as the children are raised as Muslims. But if a Muslim woman wants to marry a non-Muslim man, the Shariah says that this is not permissible. What does one do? The most common solution to this problem is formal conversion to Islam. The man simply recites the Shahadah before two Muslim witnesses. Then the marriage can go ahead with no objections. Normally, no one asks if the man has faith in what he says, because the Shariah is concerned with activity, not with faith. As the Prophet said in a famous hadith, criticizing a companion for judging that someone’s profession of faith was false, “Did you open the heart and look?” Faith is a matter between God and human beings. It is not for people to judge. Only activity can be judged by others, not the contents of the heart. The distinction between Islam and iman is mentioned in a passage from the Koran that we have already quoted:
The bedouins say, “We have faith.” Say, “You do not have faith. Rather say, ‘We have submitted,’ for faith has not yet entered your hearts. If you obey God and His messenger, He will not diminish you anything of your works.” (49:14)
There are a number of points that need to be noticed in this Koranic passage: First, iman and islam are two different things. The fact that people have submitted to the commands of God does not mean that they have faith in God. They may have submitted out of fear, or to make friends and allies, or to marry a girl. Second, faith is located in the heart. In another verse the Koran says,
“They will give you satisfaction with their mouths, but refuse in their hearts” (9:8).
Muhammad is told to inform the bedouins that they have no faith, because it is not found in their hearts, which is to say that they do not have the required recognition of the truth and commitment to it. Moreover, notice that Muhammad tells them this not on the basis of his own judgment, but on the basis of God’s instruction. God alone can look into people’s hearts and judge their intentions and thoughts.
“God knows what is in your hearts” (33:51)
but we do not know what is in other people’s hearts. Third, submission is the domain of obedience and works (a`mal). People obey God by doing what He asks them to do. If the works follow God’s command, they will be rewarded, even if these works are not accompanied by recognition of the truth and genuine commitment to it. This is not to say that anything people do, if it happens to coincide with God’s command, will be rewarded. The works in view here are the basic acts of obedience set down by the Koran; that is, the pillars of Islam. The bedouins have come and submitted—they have become Muslims. Hence their intention is to follow the religion and obey the Prophet, and they will be rewarded in keeping with their intention. Some of the significance of iman can be understood by considering its opposite, kufr, a word that is usually translated as “infidelity” or “unbelief”. It is true that in ordinary language a kafir—a person who has the quality of kufr—is someone who does not accept Islam. Hence, if the Muslims are believers, the kafirs must be unbelievers or infidels. But we have already suggested that “belief” is not the best translation for Iman, and so also “unbelief” is only a rough try at kufr. When we study the use of the word kufr and its derivatives in the Koran, we see that it has certain nuances that are difficult to catch in English.
To begin with, the Koran employs kufr not only as the opposite of iman, but also as the opposite of shukr, which means “gratitude”. In the Islamic view of things, the fact that human beings are God’s creatures and have received their existence and everything that they possess from his creative activity means that they should be grateful to him. Without God’s generous giving, they would not exist.
Gratitude is the first character trait that people owe to God. After the formula of consecration, the first words of the Koran are “Praise belongs to God” (al-hamdu lillah), and this Arabic expression of gratitude is as commonplace in Islamic languages (not only in Arabic) as “thank you” is in English. It is, so to speak, common courtesy to acknowledge one’s debt to God. This sentence sets the tone for the whole Koran and provides its message in a nutshell. Notice that this phrase, “Praise belongs to God”, is not an exclamation, although people may employ it as such. It is not equivalent to the English sentence “Praise be to God!” which would be uttered on some special occasion. Rather, it is a simple statement of fact. No one else deserves praise, because no one else is the source of good and benefit. Everything positive and praiseworthy comes from God, even if talent or the weather or luck seem to be the immediate causes. The Prophet expressed the view that everything good comes from God in his short prayer of praise,
“The good, all of it, is in Thy hands, and evil does not go back to Thee”.
Given this sort of world view, ingratitude appears as the ugliest of human failings. It is to shut one’s eyes to the obvious. God is the source of all good, so people must thank him for it. When someone is ungrateful to God, he appears in Muslim eyes like a person who is invited to a grand feast through no merit of his own and who then sits down at the table, eats his fill, burps, and walks out, with no thought of thanking his host. In the Koranic view of things, as in the Muslim understanding in general, the two meanings of kufr — as the opposite of both faith and gratitude—are practically inseparable. Faith is nothing but a form of gratitude, and gratitude is a form of faith. Iman is the natural and normal reaction of human beings to the marvelous fact of their own unwarranted existence.
When they see that there is a reality above and beyond them that has made them what they are, they should acknowledge that reality. They should thank their host for inviting them to lunch. They should realize that if they walk out without expressing thanks, their good fortune will come to an end. Considering that this is the only free lunch in town—or rather, the only lunch there is—they had better express their gratitude and make themselves available in case their benefactor wants them to run some errands.
Remember that faith begins with “recognition of the truth in the heart.” Hence kufr begins with denial of the truth in the heart. Just as iman, for Muslims, is the acceptance of self-evident truths and commitment to them, kufr is the rejection of the same truths and refusal to abide by them. Wilfred Cantwell Smith summed up the Muslim view of faith nicely with his words,
“The object of faith being thought of as pellucid and incontrovertible, the issue is, what does one do about what one knows?”[3]
Since kufr represents a rejection of objects that are “pellucid and incontrovertible”, that are completely self-evident and utterly undeniable, it is looked upon with contempt. The original sense of the term kufr is to conceal something. People who are ungrateful conceal the good that has been done to them by not mentioning it. A person who has no faith conceals the self-evident truths of existence. Kufr, in short, is understood as a covering over and a concealing of the truths that one knows. Hence, we will not employ such words as unbelief or infidelity in translating it, but rather the term (ungrateful) truth concealing. People may object that “unbelief” is a better translation because it is not so judgmental. Moreover, some will say, the issue has to do with what Muslims believe, not with objective truths. But if Muslims accept that the issue is simply a matter of belief, the ball will be back in the non-Muslims’ court, because they will have thereby agreed that the discussion has to do with beliefs that may or may not be true. But once again, this falsifies the meaning of the word iman, which has nothing to do with belief in that sense. Someone might object to the use of the word truth-concealing by saying, “I don’t know these ‘truths,’ nor do I accept that they are truths, so how can I be called a ‘truth-concealer?” Traditional Muslims would typically reply that such people have simply not understood what the Koran is saying. If they would pay more attention to the message, they would realize that they know perfectly well that “There is no god but God”, since it is human nature to know this[4]. People who claim not to know it are denying their humanity.
Although this answer may appear unsatisfactory from the viewpoint of non-Muslims, an attempt should be made to understand the logic behind it. Once one gains a basic grasp of the implications of the Islamic understanding of God and human beings, one will see that the answer makes sense. By the end of Part 2, we hope that readers will at least be able to see that this perspective is rooted in a coherent world view. To summarize this discussion of the word iman, we can say that faith is a state of mind and heart that has to do with recognition of truth, commitment to the truth one recognizes, and activity on the basis of one’s commitment. Discussion of faith necessarily brings forth the discussion of truth. What is it and how do we recognize it? This is one of the most difficult of all questions to answer, and we cannot enter into the details of the Islamic answer here. Our goal is simply to suggest how Muslims have understood the truth that they recognize through faith, the truth that the Prophet summarized in the hadith of Gabriel.
The Three Principles
The truth that Muslims recognize and to which they commit themselves is expressed through the objects of faith mentioned in the hadith of Gabriel: God, the angels, the scriptures, the prophets, the Last Day, and the measuring out. When theologians and philosophers undertook the classification and organization of religious knowledge, these six objects were divided up and placed in three broad categories known as tawhid, prophecy (nubuwwa), and eschatology or the Return (ma`ad). These came to be known as the three principles or roots (asl) of the religion.
Shi’ite theologians typically added two more principles—justice (`adl) and imamate (imama). We will discuss the three principles that are common to all Muslims and leave the two specifically Shi’ite principles for another occasion. It is sufficient to know that these two pertain to Shi’ite understandings of the implications of tawhid and prophecy. In other words, justice is looked upon as specifying the nature of tawhid, while imamate explains how certain dimensions of prophecy are extended through the Imams. We have defined tawhid as accepting that there is no God but God and worshiping him. As a principle of faith, tawhid explains the nature of God and how the various creatures, including angels, are connected to God. Prophecy explains who the prophets are and the function of their scriptures. The Return explains the Last Day, or what happens after death. Hence the term is often translated as “eschatology”, that is, knowledge of the last things.
The word tawhid is derived from the same root as the word wahid, which means “one”. God is one, and tawhid means “to recognize and acknowledge that God is one”. Sometimes the term is translated as “unity” or “divine unity.” More correctly, it can be rendered as “the assertion of divine unity,” or “the declaration of God’s oneness.” But tawhid implies far more than the simple fact that God is one, and no single English expression could possibly render the full range of its nuances. Tawhid is concerned primarily with three of the six objects of faith: God, the angels, and the measuring out, although this does not begin to exhaust what it entails. God is the foundation and beginning of everything Islamic. The angels are the creatures nearest to God in the cosmic hierarchy, and they play a central role in God’s interrelationship with human beings. The “measuring out, both its good and its evil” refers to how God interacts with creation. To each thing, God measures out a certain limited amount of good and, as the negative consequence of exactly the same act, a certain amount of evil. Unlimited good belongs to God alone, and limited good is inseparable from a touch of evil.
When we ask how God determines who gets what and whether or not his creatures have anything to do with this determination, we enter into the thorny domain of free will and predestination. Moreover, any mention of good and evil brings up the question of how a good creator can create a universe that seems to have too much evil. These are issues
that people have stumbled over for centuries, and we will not be able to resolve them here, but it will be useful to have some idea of how Muslims approach them.
Prophecy is concerned with the prophets and the books. Why did God send prophets? What is their function in human society? More specifically, what roles do Muhammad and the Koran play?
The Return looks at human destiny in terms of tawhid. Since people come from the One, they also go back to the One; and this going back has everything to do with the human response to prophecy. Once people know about God through the prophetic messages, how do they react? What fruits does human activity yield in the worlds after death? What happens when blindness disappears at death and people come face to face with the reality of God? The second and third principles are implied in the first principle. Tawhid is an all-embracing concept, in keeping with the all-embracing nature of the divine reality which it expresses.
It is impossible to discuss prophecy and the Return without referring back to tawhid. In the Koran and the Hadith, of course, no attempt is made to set up these three principles, and this should be enough to alert us to the fact that discussion of the three principles is simply a way of conceptualizing the objects of faith. There is nothing final about this approach but, like the idea of Islam’s three dimensions discussed in the Introduction, it provides us with a way of seeing how things fit together.
Islam’s three principles make up the primary subject matter of a vast number of books and an enormous amount of learning. We will suggest later how three major schools of thought developed in response to the various ways of understanding the objects of faith. For the time being, we will try to provide a basic understanding of the three principles so that readers can become familiar with Islamic ways of looking at reality.
To be continued ……
next – Chapter 3. Tawhid ……
Reference/Links[5]
https://SalaamOne.com/vision/
https://bit.ly/VisionOfIslam-PartII-Iman
[1] (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
[2] https://salaamone.com/intellect/
[3] Ibid.2, p. 109./ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
[4] https://tanzil.net/#trans/en.arberry/7:172
[5] http://bit.ly/3IWFAFi
