A naïve faith in God as an all-knowing, all-powerful, and omnipresent Person is not the most refined faith one could wish for, as I will soon explain, but it is far from being the worst. It has the potential merit (again, depending on the character of the believer) of submitting one’s ego to wholesome disciplines and lofty absolutes, of reminding oneself of all that humbles and tames one’s worst passions and desires, and demanding that a higher Justice and a deeper Compassion be served ahead of oneself. Its ethical potential far outweighs its intellectual flaws.
Critics who can see the chilling defects of a rational, impersonal God are entitled to point out the shortcomings of an anthropomorphic, personal God. If God is no more than a person, then we cannot help but attribute to Him all the failings that attach themselves to human personality, including gendered pronouns, as in English and Arabic. However much we may remind ourselves that His descriptions of Himself in the Qur’an are not to be taken literally, such tropes inevitably bend the mind of the reader towards gross misinterpretations of the Divine – occupying space, possessing extension, subjected to time, taking a point of view and changing it, reacting to circumstances, being passionate, having objectives or ends, distinguishing and thus separating Himself from creation, and therefore existing at a distance from human affairs. All these characteristics are natural corollaries to how we normally think of persons, since our experience of persons is almost entirely limited to ourselves and other human beings.*
* Just as we cannot say what GOD is, we are unqualified to say who GOD is. We will never be able to comprehend the identity of GOD in any form, be it personal or impersonal.
Although we cannot say who GOD is in Himself, the Qur’an clearly envisages our dealing with Him as He is for us. In other words, speak to Him as you would to a person, and cultivate a relationship with Him as you would with a person. Make Him the First Person in your life.
For all human intents and purposes, He is a person . . . but never forget that this concession to our limitations does not in any way limit GOD to being nothing more than a person, or only what we understand persons to be. This is why I use the term ‘Personal-Suprapersonal Absolute’. No expression of mine, however, will ever do justice to AL-LAH.
قَالَ يَا رَسُولَ اللَّهِ، مَا الإِحْسَانُ قَالَ الإِحْسَانُ أَنْ تَعْبُدَ اللَّهَ كَأَنَّكَ تَرَاهُ، فَإِنْ لَمْ تَكُنْ تَرَاهُ فَإِنَّهُ يَرَاكَ
“O Messenger of AL-LAH, what is excellence?” He replied, “Excellence is that you worship GOD as if you see Him, and if you cannot see Him, truly He sees you.” (Sahihul-Bukhari, Book 65, Hadith 4777)
To transcend these concepts is to tread the via negativa, crossing into the realm of apophatic mysticism in which nothing can be said about GOD except what He is not. If personality is the highest form of being that we can imagine, and yet realize that it, too, is not high enough, we are bound to see all positive attributes of Divinity as tainted by their worldly associations, and therefore seek to dissociate Him from all that would tie down His Absoluteness (‘absolute’ being a derivative of the Latin absolvo, to loosen or set free). We do not say, for example, that He is perfect (from the Latin perficere, to finish), but rather that He is devoid of imperfection, nor that He is powerful, but that He is beyond all conceptions of power. By cleansing our minds of all substantive impressions of Him, we do not reach for something conceptually higher, but rather school ourselves to mentally let go of GOD, that we might follow Him more devoutly with our hearts.
When we say subhanal-Lah, sometimes translated as “Glory be to GOD!” but more accurately as “Transcendentally free is GOD (of whatever has been said or thought of Him)”, we are expressing apophatic theology in Islamic terms. But this transcendence is commonly and mistakenly thought to mean that GOD is somehow removed or separated from our daily reality or mundane affairs. GOD is transcendently free of this misconception as well. We must acknowledge His freedom from all limits, even the supposed boundaries between the heavenly and the worldly. His transcendence does not exclude His immanence*, but rather embraces it. As Adh-Dhahir and Al-Batin, two of His Names confirmed in the Qur’an (Q57:3), He is both Manifest in all things and Hidden in all things – hiding in plain sight, as it were. We ‘see’ Him constantly – something like a fish in direct contact with water – and so never recognize Him.
* Some commentators (e.g., Muhammad Asad in his The Message of the Qur’an at Q21:18)1, consider mention of GOD’s immanence to be false and blasphemous. They think it to be an expression which equates God with His creation or alleges some kind of co-existence with His creatures.
That is clearly not my meaning or intent. GOD can no more be found ‘inside’ anything than He is found ‘outside’. The very notion of His dependence on anything, or any sort of location, boundary, or container for GOD, intellectual or otherwise, is absurd, and reeks of the materialism that dominates modern discourse. Both transcendence and immanence can only be suggestively imprecise indicators of how we feel GOD to be related to us – as One Who is utterly beyond what we know or imagine, and yet One Who, through our prayers and innermost moments, at the very core of our being, is closer to us than our jugular vein (Q50:16). If that is not an emphatic assertion of immanence, I do not know what is.
1 Muhammad Asad, The Message of the Qur’an, p. 673-4
The GOD You Already Know 