Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Allah

2014; Duke University Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-2713367

2164-0041

HAROON MOGHUL,

Islamic Studies and History

There’s nothing,” as the Qur’an vows, “like the likes of Him” (42:11). This is precisely why Muslims worship Him, but also why we think our relationship to Him so indispensable. For this article, I’ll turn to three sources — the Qur’an’s 112th chapter, the “verse of the throne,” and God’s ninety-nine names (well, a few of them) — to help us better understand Islam’s photophobic and iconoclastic monotheism and what it enables us to do.But as any other proper religious primer would do, we had better start with the caveats. First, although many anglo-phone Muslims prefer the Arabic, I’ll be calling “Allah” God, exactly as the contraction translates into English: Al (“the”) plus ilah (“God”). Second, all translations of the Qur’an offered here are my own. And third, I refer to God as “He” because He chooses to use this pronoun in the Qur’an — not because Islam or I believes He has gender. Much like in Spanish, all Arabic nouns are assigned a grammatical gender — there’s no neutered, neutral “it.” (Plus I think the English “it” comes across as disrespectful.) That out of the way, let’s proceed.Because Muslims believe the Qur’an is the verbatim word of God, its 112th chapter, only four verses short, might reasonably be described as God’s autobiography. It comes in two parts. The first: Who God Is. The second: Who He’s Not.The chapter starts: “Say, He is God, the One/Unique” (the word ahad may be translated either way — if you’re one of a kind, after all, you’re necessarily unique). The next verse describes “God”: “the Everlasting/Self-Sufficient.” Self-sufficiency is the ultimate distinction; unlike everything and everyone else, He’s never needed anything or anyone. What better kind of deity to be dependent on? Therefore the third and fourth verses stress difference: “He begat not, nor was He begotten; and there can be none like Him.”Why is a quarter of God’s autobiography devoted to ruling out the idea of the Trinity and its idea of Christ as God’s “only begotten son”? In the Muslim view, Christianity (like Judaism) descends from Islam, and not any other way around. All prophets preached Islam, which means submitting (to God’s will); hence prophets like Moses and Jesus and their immediate followers are considered Muslims with whom Muslims therefore closely identify (3:84). Contrary to a common misperception, Muslims don’t believe Muhammad brought anything new. His mission was two-fold: to nudge previous monotheisms back on track, and to share their same message of Islam with those who hadn’t yet heard the word (21:107).Though Judaism preserved the monotheism preached by the prophets (again, as a Muslim would see it), Christianity strayed far from Jesus’s teachings, which preached fidelity to the law and unitarian monotheism. The final pages of Reza Aslan’s Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth and Richard Rubenstein’s When Jesus Became God confirm this point. That is why the Qur’an’s 112th chapter focuses on how God “begat not.” But of course that’s not the end. How do we square a deity we are supposed to worship with the implications of the fourth and final verse, “there can be none like Him”? In other words, if God says He’ll treat us with justice but also compassion, how do we know His concept of justice and compassion comport with our own?“There is nothing,” not to belabor the point, “like the likes of Him.”Of course, sometimes God answers our questions.Because, for example, God preceded the Universe — He refers to Himself as “First” and “Last” — Muslims believe He cannot be said to exist in any time or space. God is not just not everywhere, but He is also not in any physical location. Therefore it would make no sense to say God is near or far except that He also says, “He’s closer to you than your jugular,” or “He is with you wherever you are” (50:16; 57:4). God stresses His difference from us because He really is so different. But that reinforces our worshipping Him, the point of ayat-al-kursi, “the verse of the throne”:God! There is no God but Him, Living, Self-Sufficient. Slumber cannot seize Him, nor sleep. To Him belongs all in the heavens and on the earth . . . His Throne extends over the heavens and earth, which He preserves untiring (2:255).I have heard more than a few of my peers speak of God’s disinterest in their existential troubles. “Doesn’t He have more important things to do?” they fret. “He’s not going to bother,” they lament, defeated. Prioritization, however, is an anthropomorphism unbecoming of the Divine. We with our mortal frailties and limited lifespans must pick and choose; the God who is omniscient does not have to. Should you need Him, you need only call out, and He’ll answer. That’s how billions of us can each establish individual relationships with the Everlasting. And why billions of us can intuit Him.When a Muslim starts a task, she’ll say, Bism Allah al-Rahman al-Rahim (“With God’s Name, the most Merciful, the most Compassionate”). There are three names in this invocation, and some ninety-nine in total. But Rahman and Rahim don’t just reference the same deity as God. They are Him. God, in the Muslim tradition, is the Loving, the Clement, the Evolver, the First, the Last, the Bringer of Life, the Patient, the Generous, the Giver of Gifts — but also the Destroyer, the Avenger, the Master of the Day of Doom. These names incorporate qualities that have at times been assigned as masculine or feminine, illustrating how God transcends our conceptions of sexuality and sexuality itself. In this way, they become means by which a person can connect to God.In Sea Without Shore, the American scholar Nuh Keller suggests that, because God has created us to worship Him, we must be able to know Him in some fullness. So, Keller goes on to say, God created a world in which we can understand love, but also vengeance; a world in which we can understand life, but also death. To know God completely, to understand that He possesses all and that we possess only through Him, we suffer loss. But we also simultaneously learn that there is One who’ll never leave us, a cause of our adoration of Him.In the Muslim tradition, love has been the language through which scholars, mystics, and poets have tried to describe the relationship between humans and their Creator. The day, for instance, on which a Sufi dies may be called her “wedding” — she’s off to be with her beloved (or his, to be fair).Through love, many Muslims have understood their religion. The language of love has also been critical to my religious life. I was almost always convinced of God’s existence. But just because you know God is out there doesn’t mean you’re particularly pious, appreciative, or even interested. We’ve all struggled through pain — physical, mental, maybe both. And possibly too many of us can sympathize with those times when the hurt was too much, when we’d have loved nothing more than to forfeit the loneliness of existence or exchange it for something that perdured.There were times in my life when I wondered whether He was angry with me for my religious inadequacies. I yearned for the intimacy of the Christian divinity, the possibility that He became flesh, living and suffering among us. I wished I had something of the Jewish tradition of “wrestling with God,” for I did not know how else to channel my anger and unease. I wondered if Islam could suffice me. And as is the case in many such spiritual journeys, the way forward came through failure.I used to dread facing the loneliness of the night and the bitter reality of my separation from God. One particularly gloomy winter night, I closed my door, sat facing Mecca’s direction, and unloaded my burdens. Years of avoidance had not profited me, and months of loneliness had left too little of me to suffice me. So why not? Did I think the Lord could not handle my furious soul? Soon, though, my imploring became begging, and every night I began to speak the words Muhammad taught me, the means by which we are taught to beseech the Divine. But something unexpected happened. In the daylight hours, I most looked forward to being alone at night. Instead of dreading the nighttime, I wanted the sun to stay down. In this I was only attempting to emulate a man I loved and still love: Muhammad too would rise in the late night hours to pray. I’d done what he did. And I found it changed me. Love for him led me to love for Him.Hadn’t Muhammad said, “God loves the consistent deed, no matter how small”?True love is made out of the modest gestures we accumulate over time. Anyone who’s been with someone for more than a few months knows the truth of this. The first whirlwind of romance must graduate to a deeper, calmer love, or it is no real affection. Nobody could stand living too long head over heels. Faith is not found in extremes, but in constants. A poor man in a modest home, Muhammad would have to nudge his beloved wife’s legs out of the way as he made room on the floor to prostrate; so bowed, he — and we after him — could be in closest congress with the Beloved every night.The Prophet Muhammad went up to the mountain, sure, but he came back down. He loved Him, but he loved us, too.He told his companions, “God has more love for you than a mother for her child” (not a mother who wants her child to remain a child). “Return to God,” God tells the deeply contented self in the Qur’an’s eighty-ninth chapter, where the self is unforgettably rendered as “pleased with God” and “pleasing to Him.” But not only does God deserve and demand to be worshipped, we wish to worship Him; we find our purpose in casting aside false idols and subsidiary powers — the very implications of Islam’s testimony of faith, that “there is no god but He.”“There is a void in the heart,” wrote the medieval Muslim scholar, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, adding that this voidcannot be removed except with God’s company. And in there is a sadness that cannot be lifted except with the happiness of knowing God and being true to Him. And in there is an emptiness that cannot be filled except with love for Him, except by turning to Him and always remembering Him. And if a person were given all of the world and what is in it, it could not fill this emptiness.If there is a purpose to Islam, it is here, in the right and the need for each person to establish a relationship with God: a God who is so far beyond our imagination, so alien to all our conception, that only He and He alone can suffice us, if even all the world — and even we ourselves — have turned against us.