So tell the tale — perhaps they will reflect. [Koran 7:176]
Introduction
Something is lost when Western thinkers approach Islam as they seem to see the religion in historical and cultural terms, obscuring Islam’s own internal logic and its true beauty and spirituality. This clearly written introduction to Islam changes that, vividly explaining the Islamic perspectives that have rung true for Muslims for nearly 1400 years.
“The Vision of Islam” by Dr. Sachiko Murata and Dr. William C. Chittick explores the four dimensions of Islam—practice, faith, Ihsan/spirituality, and the Islamic view of history—based on the Hadith of Gabriel. Dr. Israr Ahmed (may Allah bless him) was fond of this book and recommended it highly for every Muslim.
The authors draw from the Quran, the Prophet’s sayings, and traditional authorities to introduce each dimension and illustrate how it has manifested in Islamic institutions throughout history. The book aims to present Islam from the perspective of Muslim thinkers and offers a deeper understanding of the Islamic worldview. Dr. William C. Chittick, a distinguished professor in Asian and Asian-American Studies co-authored the book with his wife, Sachiko Murata, and emphasizes the importance of interpreting Islam through its rich intellectual tradition rather than contemporary Western perspectives. The preface outlines the authors’ approach, reflecting their dedication to providing Islamic self-understanding to diverse audiences, including Muslims and non-Muslims. The book challenges the tendency to overlook Muslim views and aims to reveal the depth of Islamic thinking by exploring the great texts that have shaped the tradition. It rejects the dismissal of the Islamic intellectual heritage in favor of modern methodologies and advocates for an indigenous perspective that appreciates the living tradition’s relevance.
The book covers the four dimensions of Islam as outlined in the Hadith of Gabriel: Practice, faith, spirituality, and the Islamic view of history. Drawing on the Koran, the sayings of the Prophet and the great authorities of the tradition, the text introduces the essentials of each dimension and then shows how it has been embodied in Islamic institutions throughout history. The authors’ original writing remains unaltered to preserve its impact. The reader is urged to recite the respectable words like “PBUH, peace be upon him”, wherever the name of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) appears in text. Four parts have already been covered, which can be consulted as follows, while the book can be downloaded from websites [1]:
The Vision of Islam-1\https://defencejournal.com/2022/11/10/the-vision-of-Islam-1/
The Vision of Islam-2\https://defencejournal.com/2022/12/08/the-vision-of-Islam-2/
The Vision of Islam-3\ https://defencejournal.com/2023/02/08/the-vision-of-Islam-3/
The Vision of Islam 4\ https://defencejournal.com/2023/03/08/the-vision-of-Islam-part-04/
The Vision of Islam-5 Tawhid
We have already discussed the primary importance of the Shahadah for Islamic practice: Without it, a person is not a Muslim. In the same way, the Shahadah has a fundamental importance for Islamic faith, since it expresses the first and second principles of faith in a nutshell.
The First Shahadah
The Shahadah consists of two statements, which we can call the first and the second Shahadahs. Through the first Shahadah, one bears witness that “There is no god but God,” and through the second, one testifies that “Muhammad is the Messenger of God.”
The first Shahadah expresses tawhid, while the second speaks of prophecy. Hence we will discuss the second Shahadah when we reach the second principle of faith.
For Muslims, the first Shahadah has no special connection with the religion brought by Muhammad. Rather, it expresses Islam in the widest sense—it explains why everything in the heavens and the earth is submitted to God. It also expresses Islam in the narrower sense of the religion of all the prophets. The most explicit Koranic verse here is, “And We never sent a messenger before thee save that We revealed to him, saying, ‘There is no god but I, so worship Me'” (21:25). All prophets have come with the message of tawhid.
The universality of the first Shahadah is at first difficult for non-Muslims to understand. One problem lies in the concepts of god and God. What do people understand when they hear the words, “There is no god but God”? Nowadays especially, when institutionalized religion has relatively little effect upon the way people think, everyone has his or her own idea about what the word god means. What is certain is that ordinary understandings of the word do not help much in grasping its meaning in the Islamic context.
When someone says, “I don’t believe in God,” Muslims familiar with their own religion’s teachings find it easy to reply, “I don’t believe in the God you don’t believe in either.” People are usually quite right not to believe in the god that they have come to understand, since that god is far from the reality to which the first Shahadah refers. That is why it is necessary for us to spend quite a bit of space explaining the Islamic concept of God.
Allah
A second problem that makes it difficult for non-Muslims to understand the first Shahadah’s universality is the common use of the word Allah. When people hear this word, they naturally think that it means that Muslims believe in a god, Allah, just as the ancient Greeks believed in Zeus, many Hindus believe in Vishnu, and every tribe has its own god. To think of Allah in these terms is to imply that the Jews and/or Christians believe in the real God, but Muslims have their own local god, or a false idea about God.
In Arabic, Allah simply means “God.” The Koran, the Hadith, and the whole Islamic tradition maintain that the God of the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims is a single God. Arabic-speaking Muslims cannot imagine using a different word than Allah when referring to the God worshiped by Christians and Jews. Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews worship God using the word Allah.
Use of Allah in English is especially misleading in discussions of the first Shahadah. If it is translated has “There is no god but Allah,” this has very different connotations from the sentence “There is no god but God.” For example, it does not sound totally unreasonable to claim that Moses and Jesus taught that “There is no god but God,” but it sounds ridiculous to say that they were preaching that “There is no god but Allah.” English speakers unacquainted with Islam naturally tend to understand Allah to be some false, alien God of the same sort that pagans and other nonbelievers worship (whoever they might be).
Some Muslims insist on using the word Allah when they speak English for several reasons. First, it is the primary name of God in the Koran, so the word itself is considered to have a special blessing. Second, most Muslims who speak English are not native speakers of the language, and at the same time it is perfectly obvious to them that Islam is a true religion. Hence they cannot imagine the misunderstandings that arise in the minds of non-Muslim, native speakers of English simply by the mention of the word Allah. Third, many Muslims have little grasp of the theology of their own religion. Hence they think that Allah is the true God, and the word God as used in English refers to a false god worshiped by Jews and Christians. Such Muslims represent the mirror image of those English speakers who think that God is the true God and Allah is a false god worshiped by pagans.
God
The first article of Islamic faith is God. But who or what is God? Practically all Muslim authorities maintain that a true understanding of the word god is impossible without divine revelation. In other words, God himself must tell people who he is. After all, it is difficult enough to understand other people, and almost impossible to do so unless they express themselves through speaking. People we can see and touch, but God lies beyond the range of our vision. If we are to understand who God is, he himself must tell us. God tells people who he is by speaking through the prophets. His words are recorded in the books of the prophets, that is, the scriptures. What distinguishes Muslims from followers of other religions is that they accept Muhammad as God’s messenger and the Koran as God’s message; in contrast, people who follow other religions have other prophets (or so the traditional Islamic view maintains).
The fundamental message of all the prophets is the same—”There is no god but God.”] In brief, Muslims understand this word God to refer to the reality that reveals itself through the Koran, and they understand god to refer to anything that is falsely described by any of the qualities that the Koran ascribes to God.]
Clearly, the first step in understanding God is to understand the Koran. ]But the Koran is not an easy book to understand. One can say without exaggeration that Muslims have been explaining the Koran for the past fourteen hundred years and that they have not begun to exhaust its meaning. In other words, no matter how much you say about God, there is still more that can be said.
Ilaha
Before suggesting some of the things that the Koran says about God, we can usefully look at the Arabic words ilah (god) and Allah (God). A god, the Arabic dictionaries tell us, is anything that is taken as an object of worship, adoration, or service. The Koran uses the word in both positive and negative senses, which is to say that it may denote the true god or a false god. The Koran frequently uses the term in a positive sense, as in the verses “No god is there but one god” (5:73), “God is but one god” (4:171), and “Your god is one god, so submit to Him” (22:34). The Koran also uses the word ilah in a negative sense, meaning a false god or an idol. For example, in the Koranic account of the Children of Israel and the Golden Calf, the people say to Moses, “O Moses, make for us a god, as they have gods” (7:138). In his reply Moses says, “What, shall I seek a god for you other than God?” (7:140). With this sense of the term god in mind, it is easy to understand that “There is no god but God” means that all gods that people worship other than God are false.
The Koran uses the term ilah in other negative senses as well. After all, a god is anything that you worship or serve, whatever that thing might be. This does not imply that this god is the only thing that you serve, since people can have many gods—and the Koran frequently criticizes them for doing so. The god you worship does not have to be an external god. We tend to think of a god as something “out there,” something up in heaven, some being of a higher order than ourselves. But the Arabic word ilah does not demand that. You can perfectly well worship a god that is within yourself or less than yourself.
Hawa
The Koran vehemently stigmatizes those who worship their own inclinations and moods as gods. The word it employs is hawa, which we will translate as “caprice.” It is almost identical in meaning and derivation with the word hawa’, which means “wind.” Caprice is an internal wind that blows this way and that, a whim of the moment. One day you want one thing, the next day you want something else. For the Koran, caprice is the worst of gods. When you worship it, you never know what is up and what is down. Practically every day your ideas, feelings, and emotions change. The wind keeps on blowing and, the Koran assures us, if you let it take you along with it, it will take you to destruction. A few Koranic verses can help offer a picture of the wind of caprice:
As for him who feared the station of his Lord and forbade the soul its caprice, surely paradise shall be the refuge. (79:40)
Have you seen him who has taken his own caprice to be his god? (25:43)
Who is more misguided than he who follows his own caprice without guidance from God? (28:50)
Have you seen him who has taken his caprice to be his god, and God has misguided him in spite of [his] knowledge? (45:23)
The Koran employs the plural of hawa (caprices) in the same sense. In sixteen of the seventeen instances in which the plural is used, it is paired with the verb to follow. Those who are ignorant follow their own caprices—the little gods inside themselves—and as a result they end up in hell. The message is clear. People must avoid false gods by following guidance from God, which comes in the form of prophecy.
This same word caprices came to be used in later times to mean “heresies” or “sects.” People who are members of sects follow the winds of their own desires and pay no attention to the message of the prophets. Or they follow their own whims—or the whims of their leader—in deciding how to understand the scriptures. The use of the word caprices to mean sects parallels the use of the word heresy itself, which derives from a Greek root meaning “to choose.” A heresy is a way that you choose for yourself, without guidance from God.
If a god can be a false god or a true god, God is by definition a true God. If a god is anything that can be worshiped, God is that which should be worshiped. To say that “There is no god but God” means that no service or worship should be rendered to anything other than God, since everything other than God can only be a false god.
Shirk
The first principle of faith is tawhid, the assertion that God is one. The meaning of tawhid is expressed most concisely in the first Shahadah, which is called “The sentence of tawhid” (kalimat al-tawhid). “There is no god but God” means that there is only a single true and worthy object of worship, God. All other objects of worship and service are false. To serve anything else is to fall into error and misguidance. It is to be guilty of the sin of shirk.
Shirk means “to share, to be a partner, to make someone share in, to give someone a partner, to associate someone with someone else.” In the theological context, shirk means to give God partners and, by implication, to worship them along with God or exclusive of God. The Koran employs the word in seventy-five verses. We will be translating it as “associating others (with God).”
Worship God, and do not associate any others with Him. (4:36)[2]
Do not associate others with God; to associate others is a mighty wrong. (31:13)[3]
Say [O Muhammad!]: Surely God is one god. Surely I am free of the others you associate. (6:19)[4]
Say: I have only been commanded to worship God, and not to associate anything with Him. (13:36)[5]
The avoidance of associating others with God is thus a central part of the Koranic message, because it is nothing but the reverse side of tawhid. Given the fact that the sentence of tawhid is the first pillar of Islam and tawhid itself is the first principle of Islam, one begins to understand why shirk is so strongly criticized and why, according to the Koran, it is the only unforgivable sin:
God forgives not that any others should be associated with Him, but less than that, He forgives to whomsoever He will. (4:48, 4:116)[6]
If someone associates any others with God, God will prohibit paradise to him. (5:72)[7]
Since understanding tawhid is so basic to Islam, a little more reflection on the nature of shirk will be useful. As the Arabic proverb puts it, “Things become known through their opposites.” We understand day through night, and night through day. So also, we can understand tawhid if we can understand what shirk is all about. The literal sense of the term shirk may suggest that one has to be conscious of associating others with God in order to be guilty of it. How can I give a partner to someone if I do not know the someone? Then, one might reason, if we do not know about God and we worship something else, we are not guilty of shirk. This is a complex issue, and various approaches can be taken to it. We will attempt a very basic reply, without entering into the theological fine points.
Most Muslim thinkers hold that knowledge of tawhid pertains to what it means to be human. It lies in the original human nature (fitra), since human beings were created knowing that “There is no god but God.” The prophets were sent to remind them of what they already know. Hence, to associate others with God is to go against the most fundamental instincts of the human species. It is, so to speak, to betray human nature and even to leave the domain of human existence. This explains why it is such a grave sin: It is the overturning of what makes us human. In this view of things, claiming ignorance of tawhid is tantamount to claiming not to be human. In the next world, paradise is the human realm, while hell is the realm of those creatures who began as human beings but did not live up to their humanity.
In discussing shirk, one needs to keep in mind the nature of the things that can be associated with God. It is not only a question of worshiping a being or beings other than God, or serving idols in the crude and literal sense of the term. Remember that caprice is a god and that those who follow caprice are mushriks (associators of others with God). To follow one’s own opinions and feelings, then, is a form of shirk. According to many authorities, it is a worse form of shirk than idol-worship, because idol-worship is clear and plain and therefore relatively easy to deal with and to cure. But the worship of caprice is hidden and often found in people who appear outwardly to be very pious.
The way to cure obvious shirk is to observe the Shariah. In other words, when people follow the first dimension of Islam, they obey the instructions of God. Hence their activities are put in right order. However, hidden shirk does not pertain to the domain of Islam, but rather to iman and ihsan, the second and third dimensions. It is much more difficult to recognize and to remedy than obvious shirk. No longer must one simply perform certain activities to establish the outward form of tawhid; now it is a question of bringing one’s thoughts, understanding, attitudes, and moral qualities into conformity with tawhid.
The Prophet said that he was commanded to war against people until they say the Shahadah. Then, with this verbal acknowledgment of Islam, they became members of the community. The good standing of their membership was confirmed when they observed the rest of the Five Pillars. As the Prophet said (and here again we see the primary importance of the ritual prayer), “Abandoning the salat throws a man into shirk and truth-concealing.” But observing the salat is outward and external, and it does not necessarily tell us anything about what is going on inside. People may observe the Shariah, but that does not mean that faith has entered their hearts. A number of hadiths express the Prophet’s worry about people’s attitudes and thoughts. One of his companions reported as follows:
The Prophet came out to us from his house while we were discussing the Antichrist. He said, “Shall I tell you about something that is more frightening to me than the Antichrist?” The people replied that he should. He said, “Hidden shirk. In other words, that a man should perform the salat and do it beautifully for the sake of someone who is watching.”
Another hadith makes it completely obvious that idolatry or paganism in the ordinary senses of these terms does not begin to exhaust what is at issue in discussions of shirk: The most frightening thing that I fear for my Community is associating others with God. I do not mean to say that they will worship the sun, or the moon, or idols. I mean that they will perform works for other than God with a hidden desire.
To summarize, Muslims understand God as the only object truly worthy of worship and service. To serve anything other than God is to betray the fundamental impulse of the original human nature. Shirk, or associating others with God, implies not only worshiping more than one god, but also following one’s own desires or anything less than the guidance of God.
In this first view of things, tawhid has an eminently practical application, because it refers to the everyday course of life. It explains what sort of motives should govern activity, and hence it is intimately related to ihsan, Islam’s third dimension. Shirk is the underlying cause of all wrong motives. It is to see two or more when there is only one. It results in every sort of misguidance, error, and loss.
If tawhid means to worship only God, while shirk is to worship other gods, we can rightly ask how we should go about worshiping God and avoiding worship of others?
The first answer, of course, is Islam in the narrowest sense—the Shariah. But the Shariah applies only to activity. What about motives, understandings, attitudes? How can they be altered and brought into harmony with tawhid? To answer questions of this sort, we must have a clearer understanding of what we are talking about when we use the word God. This is the task for the rest of this section.
Book references[8]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Vision-Visions-Reality-Sachiko-Murata/dp/1557785163
اردو ترجمہ مکمل کتاب : http://www.williamcchittick.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Chittick-and-Murata-Vision-of-Islam-Urdu-Translation-by-Muhammad-Suheyl-Umar.pdf
[2] https://www.Islamawakened.com/quran/4/36/default.htm
[3] https://www.Islamawakened.com/quran/31/13/default.htm
[4] https://www.Islamawakened.com/quran/6/19/default.htm
[5] https://www.Islamawakened.com/quran/13/36/default.htm
[6] https://www.Islamawakened.com/quran/4/48/default.htm /https://www.Islamawakened.com/quran/4/116/default.htm
[7] https://www.Islamawakened.com/quran/5/72/default.htm
[8] Vision of Islam: https://www.amazon.com/Vision-Visions-Reality-Sachiko-Murata/dp/1557785163
اردو ترجمہ مکمل کتاب : http://www.williamcchittick.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Chittick-and-Murata-Vision-of-Islam-Urdu-Translation-by-Muhammad-Suheyl-Umar.pdf
Vision of Islam-5 https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTh1UvIClxt36RWHCIGhL-RkmHW_Nvg2vAHNNHUBEv6C409dQRyg1Iemf1g2QoS-PN5fHxI1I0NPAJo/pub
