The material in this blog is now available at amazon.com under the title: Ideas Inspired by the Qur’an.
At the beginning of this book, I said that we know GOD better than we know ourselves. We do know GOD, but not in the way we think. Intellectually, we fail constantly, but we know Him well enough by how we feel. We ‘know’, i.e., feel and identify, the absolutes that form and guide our lives, and hence can readily, if not completely, imagine a Being Who constitutes the culmination of these absolutes. And so, in a hadith qudsi, we read: AL-LAH the Most High says: “I am present at the thought my servant has of me, and I am with him when he remembers Me.”
AL-LAH, however, is not the combination of these absolutes, but rather their origin. He is Absolutely One Being, who expresses these absolutes to us, according to our need or nature, as signs of Who He is. He is free of any form of plurality; whatever multiplicity is attributed to Him, such as His Names, are concessions to the variety and limitations in ourselves and how our minds work.
We know what mercy is, for example, and can feel the attraction of Infinite Mercy, but we can only understand or explain Infinite Mercy in ways that distinguish it from, say, Infinite Knowledge. Such distinctions violate the condition of GOD’s Infinite Unicity.
We are beings in whom mercy and knowledge are clearly compartmentalized. We experience the effects of each so differently that we must distinguish them. This experience is what enables us to mentally process them or competently discuss them, but it comes at the cost of perfect unity – the Unity that only AL-LAH possesses. We are composite, partible beings, and will remain so until we return to Him.
GOD’s Beautiful Names, mentioned in Q59:24 and elsewhere in the Qur’an, are a concession to this partibility in us, and reflect how our minds are built to compartmentalize reality. There is, however, no divisibility in Him. His Mercy is not a separate power or entity from His Knowledge, from His Wrath, from His Vastness, from His Independence, and so on. The same Power that appears as Mercy to one person manifests as Wrath to another. He does not change from one moment to the next, or from one person to the next. Rather it is we who change as we move through His Light, like planets orbiting the sun, discovering more aspects of Him with every new station on our path.
We cannot understand how these different qualities are harmonized in one simple Unity, nor do we need to. We have His Highest Name, AL-LAH, and we are ordered to worship Him Alone, as One and All in One, and nothing else. We worship Him as a Transcendental Suprapersonal Person, not a comprehensible thing, and we interact with Him as a whole and single Being, rather than a bundle of attributes.
The purpose of worship is to activate the heart – the spiritual faculty that sees in GOD a Unity impenetrable by the mind. By this Unity, we ‘know’ that He does not delegate His Justice to one concern while His Mercy works elsewhere, or switch His mode of Being from Hearing to Seeing. We can ‘see’, by this Unity, that He is directly and intimately involved in everything in a way beyond our comprehension, for there are more of His attributes manifested in every act of His than we can imagine. We are ‘aware’, somehow, that He is Eternal, even though His Eternity appears to us in time. And so it is that our notions of Him are forever incommensurable with Who He really is. Yet he continues to occupy our hearts when we remember Him, and as we think of Him.
Consider the figure of the King – the King of fables and parables. His entire kingdom strains to catch and register his slightest turn or gesture. When he smiles, every subject sees that smile from his or her own experience and inner standpoint. To one person, it simply means approval, but to another it is a veiled warning, a subtle reproof. Others detect aloofness, contentment, a suggestion, or an invitation, each depending on his or her station and circumstances. A courtier close to the King would tell us, if we asked, that all those messages were meant, each for its particular recipient . . . and yet the smile was perfectly singular. In essence one, it produced countless effects, encompassing not only those who witnessed it but all denizens of the kingdom. Inconceivably vast and undivided in its attention, the King’s smile was nonetheless unfathomably minute in its intention, right down to the tiniest dust mote, and still incomprehensibly one – And Our Command is single, like a glance of sight (Q54:50.)
This Command marks the limit of our reason. Our knowledge of the Absolute beyond that takes the form of faith – an affirmation or inner certainty that it is so without being able to tell how. The uncontaminated human heart leaps to this conclusion because of its fitrah, its natural constitution and origin in Unity. By this same Unity, and particularly in our hearts, AL-LAH acts and expresses Himself directly, without the aid of any of the multiplicities we need to mentally identify those acts.
The GOD You Already Know 