On the Unity of God

A follower of the Islamic religion must first accept the testimony of faith: "There is no god but God" (la ilaha illa-llah). This profession of God's Unity is Islam's first pillar (rukn). All else depends upon it and derives from it. But what does it mean to say that there is no god but God ? For Islam, the manner in which the believer answers this question displays the depth to which he understands his religion. And, paraphrasing a hadith of the Prophet often quoted in Sufi texts, one might say that there are as many ways of understanding the meaning of this profession as there are believers. Islamic intellectual history can be understood as a gradual unfolding of the manner in which successive generations of men have understood the meaning and implications of professing God's Unity. Theology, jurisprudence, philosophy, Sufism, even to some degree the natural sciences, all seek to explain at some level the principle of tawhid, "To profess that God is One." Some of the most productive of the intellectual schools which have attempted to explain the meaning of tawhid have flourished among Shi'ites. Many historians have looked outside of Islam to find the inspiration for Islam's philosophical and metaphysical expositions of the nature of God's Unity. Such scholars tend to relegate anything more than what could derive-that is, in their view from a "simple bedouin faith" to outside influence. Invariably they ignore the rich treasuries of wisdom contained in the vast corpus of Shi'ite hadithliterature pertaining to Islam's first

centuries, i.e., the sayings of the Imams who were the acknowledged authorities in the religious sciences not only by the Shi'ites but also by the Sunnis. Even certain sayings of the Prophet which provide inspiration for the Imams have been ignored. In particular, the great watershed of Islamic metaphysical teachings, Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law and the Shi'ites' first Imam, has been largely overlooked. In the following selections from Bihar al-anwar, fifteen out of hundreds that can be found in Shi'ite sources, the reader will see the seeds for much of later Islamic metaphysical speculation. It will be noticed that the style of the hadiths varies little from the Prophet himself to the eighth Imam, the last from whom large numbers of such sayings have been handed down. The most important sources for such hadiths, i.e., the Prophet, the first, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth Imams, are all represented. The basic themes of the selections remain largely constant.The Prophet and the Imams all emphasize God's transcendence, or His "incomparability" (tanzih) with the creatures. We may speak of God-although only on the authority of His own words, i.e., the Quran-but the expressions we employ are not to be understood as they are when we use the same words to describe the creatures. At the same time, the very fact that words can properly be employed to refer to God show that in some respect He is indeed "comparable" or "similar" (tasbih) to His creation, if only in the sense that His creation is somehow "similar" to Him because created by Him. Otherwise, the words employed to speak about Him would all be meaningless, or each one would be equivalent to every other. But this second dimension of God's Reality-one more emphasised in Sufism-is relatively ignored in favor of His incomparability. Another theme of the selections is man's inability to grasp God through such things as the powers of his reason and his senses. The constant emphasis upon this point underlines God's incomparability and illustrates the particular errors to which the polytheistic and anthropomorphic thinking and imagination of the "Age of Ignorance" (al-jahiliyyah) before Islam was prone. In order to clarify the meaning of the selections, I have tried to supply a sufficient number of annotations. To comment upon the sayings in detail has been the task of much of Shi'ite speculation throughout the centuries. Every word and every sentence have

provided numerous scholars with ample opportunity to display their erudition. But for a Western audience, one can only hope to point out the most important references to the Quran and the prophetichadith literature-references which are largely obvious for the Arabic speaking Muslim. Then I have tried to illustrate the manner in which later commentators have elaborated upon the hadiths by quoting a number of explanatory passages, in Part I mostly from Majlisi, the compiler of the Bihar al-anwar. Some of these commentaries are necessary to understand the bearing of the text, but others may seem to obscure an apparently obvious sentence. In the latter case, this is largely because the commentators usually try to explain the text by referring to theological and philosophical concepts familiar to their readers, but not so to the average Westerner. However that may be, such notes illustrate the manner in which later speculation has expanded and developed an aphoristic mode of expression into a complex metaphysical system.