Preface

Someone asked me to write the story of how I en­tered Islam, what it was that I liked about the reli­gion, and what motivated me to become a Muslim. Now, stories have a beginning, middle, and end, while life is not often so sim­ple. One’s course is seldom de­termined, particularly in events of the mind and heart, by causes and effects few enough to fit into a tale. But deficient as such an account must be, it may yet prove of interest to a now largely de­spiritualized world that sees only a “play of forces”; if only to ac­knowledge the hand of Allah, and if He will, to reach those who aspire to more than they find around them.

Born in 1954 in the farm country of the north­western United States, I was raised in a religious family as a Roman Catholic. The Church provided a spiritual world that was unquestionable in my child­hood, if anything more real than the physical world around me, but as I grew older, and es­pecially after I entered a Catholic university and read more, my re­lation to the religion became increasingly called into question, in belief and practice.

One reason was the frequent changes in Catholic liturgy and ritual that occurred in the wake of the Second Vatican Council of 1963, suggesting to lay­men that the Church had no firm standards. To one another, the clergy spoke about “flexibility” and “liturgical relevance,” but to ordinary Catholics they seemed to be groping in the dark. God does not change, nor the needs of the human soul, and there was no new revelation from heaven. Yet we rang in the changes, week after week, year after year; adding, subtracting, changing the language from Latin to English, finally bring­ing in guitars and folk music. Priests explained and explained as laymen shook their heads. The search for relevance left large numbers convinced that there had not been much in the first place.

A second reason was a number of doctrinal difficul­ties, such as the doctrine of the Trinity, which no one in the his­tory of the world, neither priest nor lay­man, had been able to explain in a convincing way, and which resolved itself, to the common mind at least, in a sort of godhead-by-committee, shared between God the Father, who ruled the world from heaven; His son Jesus Christ, who saved hu­manity on earth; and the Holy Ghost, who was pictured as a white dove and appeared to have a relatively lesser role. I remember wanting to make special friends with just one of them so he could handle my business with the others, and to this end, would sometimes pray earnestly to this one and sometimes to that; but the other two were always stub­bornly there. I finally decided that God the Father must be in charge of the other two, and this put the most formidable obstacle in the way of my Catholicism, the divinity of Christ. Moreover, reflection made it plain that the nature of man contradicted the nature of God in every particu­lar, the limitary and finite on the one hand, the abso­lute and infinite on the other. That Jesus was God was something I cannot remember having ever really believed, in childhood or later.

Another point of incredulity was the trading of the Church in stocks and bonds in the hereafter it called indul­gences—“Do such and such and so-and-so many years will be remitted from your sentence in purga­tory”—that had seemed so false to Martin Luther at the outset of the Reformation.

I also remember a desire for a sacred scripture, some­thing on the order of a book that could furnish guidance. A Bible was given to me one Christmas, a handsome edition, but on attempting to read it, I found it so rambling and de­void of a coherent thread that it was difficult to think of a way to base one’s life upon it. Only later did I learn how Christians solve the difficulty in practice, Protestants by creating sectarian theologies, each emphasizing the texts of their sect and downplaying the rest; Catholics by downplay­ing it all, except the snippets mentioned in their liturgy. Something seemed lacking in a sacred book that could not be read as an integral whole.

Moreover, when I went to the university, I found that the authenticity of the book, especially the New Testament, had come into considerable doubt as a result of modern hermeneutical studies by Christians themselves. In a course on contemporary theology, I read the Norman Perrin trans­lation of The Problem of the Historical Jesus by Joachim Jeremias, one of the principal New Testament scholars of this century. A textual critic who was a master of the origi­nal languages and had spent long years with the texts, he had finally agreed with the German theolo­gian Rudolph Bultmann that “without a doubt it is true to say that the dream of ever writing a bio­gra­phy of Jesus is over,” mean­ing that the life of Christ as he actually lived it cannot be reconstructed from the New Testament with any degree of confidence. If this were accepted from a friend of Christianity and one of its foremost textual experts, I rea­soned, what was left for its enemies to say? And what then re­mained of the Bible except to acknowledge that it was a record of truths mixed with fictions, conjectures projected onto Christ by later followers, themselves at odds with each other as to who the master had been and what he had taught. And if theologians like Jeremias could reassure themselves that somewhere under the layers of later accre­tions to the New Testament there was something called “the historical Jesus and his message,” how could the ordinary per­son hope to find it, or know it, should it be found?

I studied philosophy at the university and it taught me to ask two things of whoever claimed to have the truth: What do you mean, and how do you know? When I asked these questions of my own religious tradition, I found no an­swers, and realized that Christianity had slipped from my hands. I then em­barked on a search that is perhaps not un­familiar to many young people in the West, a quest for meaning in a meaningless world.

I began where I had lost my previous belief, with the philosophers, yet wanting to believe, seeking not philoso­phy, but rather a philosophy.

I read the essays of the great pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, which taught about the phenomenon of the ages of life, and that money, fame, physical strength, and intelligence all passed from one with the passage of years, but only moral excellence re­mained. I took this lesson to heart and remembered it in after years. His essays also drew attention to the fact that a person is wont to repudiate in later years what he fervently espouses in the heat of youth. With a prescient wish to find the Divine, I decided to imbue myself with the most cogent arguments of atheism that I could find, that perhaps I might find a way out of them later. So I read the Walter Kaufmann translations of the works of the immoralist Friedrich Nietzsche. The many-faceted genius dis­sected the moral judgments and beliefs of mankind with brilliant philological and psychological argu­ments that ended in accusing human language itself, and the language of nineteenth-century science in particular, of be­ing so inherently determined and mediated by concepts in­herited from the language of morality that in their present form they could never hope to uncover reality. Aside from their immuno­logical value against total skepticism, Nietzsche’s works explained why the West was post-Christian, and accurately predicted the unprecedented sav­agery of the twentieth century, debunking the myth that sci­ence could function as a moral replacement for the now dead religion.

At a personal level, his tirades against Christianity, par­ticularly in The Genealogy of Morals, gave me the benefit of distilling the beliefs of the monotheistic tradition into a small number of analyzable forms. He separated unessential concepts (such as the bizarre spectacle of an omnipotent deity’s suicide on the cross) from essential ones, which I now, though without believing in them, apprehended to be but three alone: that God existed; that He created man in the world and defined the conduct expected of him in it; and that He would judge man accordingly in the hereafter and send him to eternal reward or pun­ishment.

It was during this time that I read an early transla­tion of the Koran which I grudgingly admired, be­tween agnostic reservations, for the purity with which it presented these fundamental concepts. “Even if false,” I thought, “there could not be a more essential expression of religion.” As a literary work, the translation, perhaps it was Sale’s, was uninspired and openly hostile to its subject matter, whereas I knew the Arabic original was widely acknowledged for its beauty and eloquence among the religious books of mankind. I felt a desire to learn Arabic to read the original.

On a vacation home from school, I was walking upon a dirt road between some fields of wheat, and it hap­pened that the sun went down. By some inspiration, I realized that it was a time of worship, a time to bow and pray to the one God. But it was not something one could rely on oneself to provide the details of, but rather a passing fancy, or perhaps the beginning of an awareness that atheism was an inau­thentic way of being.

I carried something of this disquiet with me when I transferred to the University of Chicago, where I studied the epistemology of ethical theory—how moral judgments were reached—reading and searching among the books of the philosophers for something to shed light on the question of meaning­lessness, which was both a personal concern and one of the central philosophical problems of our age.

According to some, scientific observation could only yield description statements of the form “X is Y,” for ex­ample, “The object is red,” “Its weight is two ki­los,” “Its height is ten centimeters,” and so on, in each of which the functional was a scientifically verifiable is, whereas in moral judgments the functional ele­ment was an ought, a de­scription statement which no amount of scientific observa­tion could measure or verify. It appeared that ought was logically meaning­less, and with it all morality whatsoever, a position that reminded me of those described by Lucian in his advice that whoever sees a moral philosopher coming down the road should flee from him as from a mad dog. For such a person, expediency ruled, and noth­ing checked his behavior but convention.

As Chicago was a more expensive school, and I had to raise tuition money, I found summer work on the West Coast with a seining boat fishing in Alaska. The sea proved a school in its own right, one I was to re­turn to for a space of eight seasons, for the money. I met many people on boats, and saw something of the power and greatness of the wind, water, storms, and rain; and the smallness of man. These things lay be­fore us like an immense book, but my fellow fisher­men and I could only discern the letters of it that were within our context: to catch as many fish as pos­sible within the specified time to sell to the ten­ders. Few knew how to read the book as a whole. Sometimes, in a blow, the waves rose like great hills, and the captain would hold the wheel with white knuckles, our bow one minute plunging gigantically down into a valley of green water, the next moment reaching the bottom of the trough and soaring up­wards towards the sky before topping the next crest and starting down again.

Early in my career as a deck hand, I had read the Hazel Barnes translation of Jean Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, in which he argued that phenom­ena only arose for consciousness in the existential context of human pro­jects, a theme that recalled Marx’s 1844 manuscripts, where nature was “pro­duced” by man, meaning, for exam­ple, that when the mystic sees a stand of trees, his con­sciousness hypo­statizes an entirely different phenomenal object than a poet does, for example, or a capitalist. To the mystic, it is a manifestation; to the poet, a forest; to the capi­talist, lumber. According to such a perspective, a mountain only appears as tall in the context of the project of climbing it, and so on, according to the in­strumental re­lations involved in various human in­terests. But the great natural events of the sea sur­rounding us seemed to defy, with their stubborn, ir­reducible facticity, our un­compre­hending attempts to come to terms with them. Suddenly, we were just there, shaken by the forces around us without mak­ing sense of them, wondering if we would make it through. Some, it was true, would ask God’s help at such moments, but when we returned safely to shore, we be­haved like men who knew little of Him, as if those mo­ments had been a lapse into insanity, em­barrassing to think of at happier times. It was one of the lessons of the sea that in fact, such events not only existed but perhaps even pre­ponderated in our life. Man was small and weak, the forces around him were large, and he did not control them.

Sometimes a boat would sink and men would die. I re­member a fisherman from another boat who was working near us one opening, doing the same job as I did, piling web. He smiled across the water as he pulled the net from the hydraulic block overhead, stacking it neatly on the stern to ready it for the next set. Some weeks later, his boat overturned while fishing in a storm, and he got caught in the web and drowned. I saw him only once again, in a dream, beckoning to me from the stern of his boat.

The tremendousness of the scenes we lived in, the storms, the towering sheer cliffs rising vertically out of the water for hundreds of feet, the cold and rain and fatigue, the occasional injuries and deaths of workers—these made little impression on most of us. Fishermen were, after all, sup­posed to be tough. On one boat, the family that worked it was said to lose an occasional crew member while running at sea at the end of the season, invariably the sole nonfam­ily member who worked with them, his “loss” saving them the wages they would have otherwise had to pay him.

The captain of another was a twenty-seven-year-old who delivered millions of dollars worth of crab each year in the Bering Sea. When I first heard of him, we were in Kodiak, his boat at the city dock they had tied up to after a lengthy run some days before. The captain was presently indisposed in his bunk in the state­room, where he had been vomiting up blood from having eaten a glass uptown the previous night to prove how tough he was.

He was in somewhat better condition when I later saw him in the Bering Sea at the end of a long winter king crab season. He worked in his wheelhouse up top, surrounded by radios that could pull in a signal from just about anywhere, computers, Loran, sonar, depth-finders, radar. His panels of lights and switches were set below the 180-degree sweep of shatter­proof windows that overlooked the sea and the men on deck below, to whom he communicated by loud­speaker. They often worked round the clock, pulling their gear up from the icy water under watchful batteries of enormous electric lights attached to the masts that turned the perpetual night of the winter months into day. The captain had a repu­tation as a screamer, and had once locked his crew out on deck in the rain for eleven hours because one of them had gone inside to have a cup of coffee without permis­sion. Few crewmen lasted longer than a season with him, though they made nearly twice the yearly in­come of, say, a lawyer or an advertising executive, and in only six months. Fortunes were made in the Bering Sea in those years, before overfishing wiped out the crab.

At present, he was at anchor, and was amiable enough when we tied up to him and he came aboard to sit and talk with our own captain. They spoke at length, at times gazing thoughtfully out at the sea through the door or windows, at times looking at each other sharply when something ani­mated them, as the topic of what his competitors thought of him now did. “They wonder why I have a few bucks.” he said, “Well I slept in my own home one night last year.”

He later had his crew throw off the lines and pick the an­chor, his eyes flickering warily over the water from the windows of the house as he pulled away with a blast of smoke from the stack. His watchful­ness, his walrus-like physique, his endless voyages after game and markets, re­minded me of other predatory hunter-animals of the sea. Such people, good at making money but heedless of any ul­timate end or purpose, made an impression on me, and I increasingly began to wonder if men didn’t need principles to guide them and tell them why they were there. Without such principles, nothing seemed to distinguish us above our prey except being more thorough, and technologically ca­pable of preying longer, on a vaster scale, and with greater devasta­tion than the animals we hunted.

These considerations were in my mind the second year I studied at Chicago, where I became aware through studies of philosophical moral systems that philosophy had not been successful in the past at significantly influencing peo­ple’s morals and prevent­ing injustice, and I came to realize that there was lit­tle hope for it to do so in the future. I found that comparing human cultural systems and societies in their historical succession and multiplicity had led many intellectuals to moral relativism, since no moral value could be discovered which on its own merits was transculturally valid, a reflection leading to nihilism, the perspective that sees human civiliza­tions as plants that grow out of the earth, springing from their various seeds and soils, thriving for a time, and then dying away.

Some heralded this as intellectual liberation, among them Emile Durkheim in his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, or Sigmund Freud in his Totem and Taboo, which discussed mankind as if it were a patient and diag­nosed its religious traditions as a form of a collective neu­rosis that we could now hope to cure, by applying to them a thoroughgoing scientific athe­ism, a sort of salvation through “pure science.”

On this subject, I bought the Jeremy Shapiro translation of Knowledge and Human Interests by Jürgen Habermas, who argued that there was no such thing as “pure science” that could be depended upon to forge boldly ahead in a steady improvement of itself and the world. He called such a misunder­standing scientism, not science. Science in the real world, he said, was not free of values, still less of in­ter­ests. The kinds of research that obtain funding, for example, were a function of what their society deemed meaningful, expedient, profitable, or impor­tant. Habermas had been of a generation of German academics who, during the thirties and forties, knew what was happening in their country, but insisted they were simply engaged in “intellectual produc­tion,” that they were living in the realm of “scholar­ship,” and need not concern themselves with what­ever the state might choose to do with their re­search. The horrible ques­tion mark that was attached to German intellectuals when the Nazi atrocities be­came public after the war made Habermas think deeply about the ideology of “pure sci­ence.” If any­thing was obvious, it was that the nineteenth-cen­tury optimism of thinkers like Freud and Durkheim was no longer tenable.

I began to reassess the intellectual life around me. Like Schopenhauer, I felt that higher education must produce higher human beings. But at the university, I found lab people talking to each other about forging research data to secure funding for the coming year; luminaries who would­n’t permit tape recorders at their lectures for fear that com­petitors in the same field would “go one step further” with their research and beat them to publication; professors vy­ing with each other in the length of their courses’ syl­labuses. The moral qualities I was accustomed to associate with ordinary, unregenerate humanity seemed as frequently met with in sophisticated academics as they had been in fishermen. If one could laugh at fishermen who, after get­ting a boatload of fish in a big catch, would cruise back and forth in front of the others to let them see how laden down in the water they were, ostensibly “looking for more fish”; what could one say about the Ph.D.’s who behaved the same way about their books and articles? I felt that their knowledge had not developed their persons, that the secret of higher man did not lie in their so­phistication.

I wondered if I hadn’t gone down the road of phi­los­ophy as far as one could go. While it had debunked my Christianity and provided some genuine insights, it had not yet answered the big questions. Moreover, I felt that this was somehow connected—I didn’t know whether as cause or effect—to the fact that our intel­lectual tradition no longer seemed to seriously com­prehend itself. What were any of us, whether philosophers, fishermen, garbagemen, or kings, ex­cept bit players in a drama we did not understand, dili­gently playing out our roles until our replace­ments were sent, and we gave our last performance? But could one le­gitimately hope for more than this? I read Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, in which he explained that for Hegel, philosophy did not culminate in the system, but rather in the Wise Man, someone able to answer any possible question on the ethical implications of human ac­tions. This made me consider our own plight in the twenti­eth century, which could no longer answer a single ethical ques­tion.

It was thus as if this century’s unparalleled mas­tery of concrete things had somehow ended by mak­ing us things. I contrasted this with Hegel’s concept of the “concrete” in his Phenomenology of Mind. An ex­ample of the abstract, in his terms, was the limitary physi­cal reality of the book now held in your hands, while the concrete was its interconnec­tion with the larger realities it presupposed, the modes of produc­tion that determined the kind of ink and paper in it, the aes­thetic standards that dictated its design, the systems of marketing and distribution that had carried it to the reader, the historical cir­cumstances that had brought about the reader’s lit­eracy and taste; the cultural events that had medi­ated its style and usage; in short, the “bigger picture” in which it was articulated and had its being. For Hegel, the movement of philosophical investigation always led from the abstract to the concrete, to the more real. He was there­fore able to say that philoso­phy neces­sarily led to theology, whose object was the ulti­mately real, the Deity. This seemed to me to point up an irreducible lack in our century. I began to wonder if, by materializ­ing our culture and our past, we had not somehow abstracted ourselves from our wider hu­manity, from our true nature in relation to a higher reality.

At this juncture, I read a number of works on Islam, among them the books of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who be­lieved that many of the problems of western man, espe­cially those of the environment, were from his having left the divine wisdom of revealed religion, which taught him his true place as a creature of God in the natural world and to understand and respect it. Without it, he burned up and consumed nature with ever more effective technological styles of com­mercial exploitation that ruined his world from with­out while leaving him increasingly empty within, be­cause he did not know why he existed or to what end he should act.

I reflected that this might be true as far as it went, but it begged the question as to the truth of revealed religion. Everything on the face of the earth, all moral and religious systems, were on the same plane, un­less one could gain certainty that one of them was from a higher source, the sole guarantee of the ob­jectivity, the whole force, of moral law. Otherwise, one man’s opinion was as good as anoth­er’s, and we remained in an undifferentiated sea of conflict­ing in­dividual interests, in which no valid objection could be raised to the strong eating the weak.

I read other books on Islam, and came across some pas­sages translated by W. Montgomery Watt from That Which Delivers from Error by the theologian and mystic al-Ghazali, who, after a midlife crisis of questioning and doubt, realized that “beyond the light of prophetic revela­tion there is no other light on the face of the earth from which illumination may be received,” the very point to which my philosophical inquiries had led. Here was, in Hegel’s terms, the Wise Man, in the person of a divinely in­spired messenger who alone had the authority to answer questions of good and evil.

I also read A.J. Arberry’s translation The Koran Interpreted, and I recalled my early wish for a sa­cred book. Even in translation, the superiority of the Muslim scripture over the Bible was evident in every line, as if the reality of divine revelation, dimly heard of all my life, had now been placed before my eyes. In its exalted style, its power, its in­exorable finality, its uncanny way of anticipating the argu­ments of the atheistic heart in advance and answering them; it was a clear exposition of God as God and man as man, the revelation of the awe-inspiring Divine Unity be­ing the identical revelation of social and economic justice among men.

I began to learn Arabic at Chicago, and after studying the grammar for a year with a fair degree of success, decided to take a leave of absence to try to advance in the language in a year of private study in Cairo. Too, a desire for new hori­zons drew me, and after a third season of fishing, I went to the Middle East.

In Egypt, I found something I believe brings many to Islam, namely, the mark of pure monotheism upon its fol­lowers, which struck me as more profound than anything I had previously encountered. I met many Muslims in Egypt, good and bad, but all influenced by the teachings of their Book to a greater extent than I had ever seen elsewhere. It has been some fifteen years since then, and I cannot re­member them all, or even most of them, but perhaps the ones I can recall will serve to illustrate the impressions made.

One was a man on the side of the Nile near the Miqyas Gardens, where I used to walk. I came upon him praying on a piece of cardboard, facing across the water. I started to pass in front of him, but sud­denly checked myself and walked around behind, not wanting to disturb him. As I watched a moment be­fore going my way, I beheld a man absorbed in his relation to God, oblivious to my presence, much less my opinions about him or his religion. To my mind, there was something magnificently detached about this, altogether strange for someone coming from the West, where praying in public was virtually the only thing that remained obscene.

Another was a young boy from secondary school who greeted me near Khan al-Khalili, and because I spoke some Arabic and he spoke some English and wanted to tell me about Islam, he walked with me several miles across town to Giza, explaining as much as he could. When we parted, I think he said a prayer that I might become Muslim.

Another was a Yemeni friend living in Cairo who brought me a copy of the Koran at my request to help me learn Arabic. I did not have a table beside the chair where I used to sit and read in my hotel room, and it was my cus­tom to stack the books on the floor. When I set the Koran by the others there, he silently stooped and picked it up, out of respect for it. This impressed me because I knew he was not reli­gious, but here was the effect of Islam upon him.

Another was a woman I met while walking be­side a bi­cycle on an unpaved road on the opposite side of the Nile from Luxor. I was dusty, and some­what shabbily clothed, and she was an old woman dressed in black from head to toe who walked up, and without a word or glance at me, pressed a coin into my hand so suddenly that in my surprise I dropped it. By the time I picked it up, she had hurried away. Because she thought I was poor, even if obviously non-Muslim, she gave me some money without any expec­tation for it except what was between her and her God. This act made me think a lot about Islam, be­cause nothing seemed to have motivated her but that.

Many other things passed through my mind during the months I stayed in Egypt to learn Arabic. I found myself thinking that a man must have some sort of religion, and I was more impressed by the effect of Islam on the lives of Muslims, a certain nobility of purpose and largesse of soul, than I had ever been by any other religion’s or even atheis­m’s effect on its followers. The Muslims seemed to have more than we did.

Christianity had its good points to be sure, but they seemed mixed with confusions, and I found myself more and more inclined to look to Islam for their fullest and most perfect expression. The first question we had memorized from our early cate­chism had been “Why were you cre­ated?” to which the correct answer was “To know, love, and serve God.” When I reflected on those around me, I realized that Islam, not Christianity, furnished the most com­prehensive and understandable way to practice this on a daily basis.

As for the inglorious political fortunes of the Muslims today, I did not feel these to be a reproach against Islam, or to relegate it to an inferior position in a “natural order” of world ideologies, but rather saw them as a low phase in a larger cycle of history. Foreign hegemony over Muslim lands had been wit­nessed before in the thoroughgoing de­struction of Islamic civilization in the thirteenth century by the Mongol horde, who razed cities and built pyramids of human heads from the steppes of Central Asia to the Muslim heartlands, after which the fullness of des­tiny brought forth the Ottoman Empire to raise the Word of Allah and make it a vibrant political reality that endured for centuries. It was now, I reflected, merely the turn of con­temporary Muslims to strive for a new historic crystalliza­tion of Islam, something one might well aspire to share in.

When a friend in Cairo one day asked me, “Why don’t you become a Muslim,” I found that Allah had created within me a desire to belong to this religion, which so en­riches its followers, from the simplest hearts to the most magisterial intellects. It is not through an act of the mind or will that anyone be­comes a Muslim, but rather through the mercy of Allah, and this, in the final analysis, was what brought me to Islam in Cairo in 1977.

Is it not time that the hearts of those

who believe should be humbled to the

Remembrance of God and the Truth which

He has sent down, and that they should

not be as those to whom the Book was

given aforetime, and the term seemed

over long to them, so that their hearts

have become hard, and many of them

are ungodly?

Know that God revives the earth after

it was dead. We have indeed made clear

for you the signs, that haply you will

understand.

(Koran 57:16–17)

Appendix

THE MUSLIM BELIEF IN GOD

His Oneness

He is one in being without partner, unique without peer, ultimate without opposite, alone without equal. He is one, preeternal, beginninglessly uncreate, ever­lastingly abiding, unceasingly existent, eternally limitless, the ever self-sub­sisting through whom all else subsists, ever enduring, with­out end. He is, was, and ever will be possessed of all at­tributes of majesty, unannihilated by dissolution or separa­tion through the passage of eons or terminus of interims. He is the First and Last, the Outward and Inward, and He has knowledge of everything.

His Transcendence

He is not a body with a form, or a limitary, quanti­tative substance, not resembling bodies in quantifi­ability or divis­ibility, or in being a substance or qualified by substance, or being an accident or quali­fied by accidents. He does not re­semble anything that exists, nor anything that exists resem­ble Him. There is nothing whatsoever like unto Him, nor is He like unto anything. He is not delimited by magnitude, contained by places, encompassed by directions, or bounded by heavens or earth. He is ‘ascendant over the Throne’ (mustawin, Koran 20:5) in the way He says and the meaning He intends, ‘ascendant’ in a manner transcending contact, settledness, position, indwelling, or movement. The Throne does not bear Him up, but is borne up by the subtlety of His infinite power, as are the angels who carry it, and all are powerless in His grasp. He is above the Throne, the heavens, and all else to the farthest reaches of the stars, with an aboveness that does not increase His nearness to the Throne or the heavens, or His dis­tance from the earth and what lies beneath it. He is as exalted in degree above the Throne and the heavens as He is above the earth and its depths, though He is near to everything in existence, nearer to a servant than his own jugular vein, and is witness to every­thing. His nearness no more resembles the nearness of objects to one another than His entity resembles the enti­ties of objects. He does not indwell in any­thing, nor any­thing indwell in Him. He is as exalted above containment in space as He is above confine­ment in time. He was, before creating time and space, and is now even as He was. He is distinguished from His creation by His attributes. There is nothing in His entity other than Him, nor is His entity in what is other than Him. He is beyond change and motion: events neither occur within Him nor changes befall Him. He remains in His attributes of majesty exalted above change, and in the attributes of His perfection beyond need­ing any increase in perfection. The exis­tence of His entity is known by human reason, and in the afterlife is beheld by the eyesight of the righ­teous as a beatitude and favor, to consummate their perfect joy with the sight of His Noble Countenance.

His Life and Almighty Power

He Most High is living, almighty, overmastering, tri­umphant, unaffected by inability or weakness; un­suscepti­ble to drowsiness, sleep, annihilation, or death; possessed of absolute sovereignty and might, of irresistible power and force. His is the majesty and sway, the creation and com­mand. The heavens are enfolded in His right hand and all beings are power­less in His grasp. He alone creates, begins, gives exis­tence, and originates. He creates all beings and their acts, ordains their sustenance and terms. Nothing pos­sible is out of His grasp, the disposal of no matter is beyond His power. The number of things He can do is limitless, the amount He knows is infinite.

His Knowledge

He knows all things knowable, encompassing all that takes place from the depths of the earth to the highest heaven. He knows without an atom’s weight in the earth or heavens escaping His knowledge. He knows the creeping of black ant across a great stone on a lightless night, and the motion in the air of a particle of dust on a windy day. He knows the con­cealed and the yet more hidden, the buried recesses of hearts, the movement of thought, and the opaci­ties of the inmost soul; with preeternal, beginningless knowledge that He has always possessed from the limitless reaches of past eternity, not with awareness originating within Him through being imparted or conveyed.

His Will

He Most High wills all that exists and directs all events. Nothing occurs in the physical or spiritual world, be it mea­ger or much, little or great, good or evil, of benefit or detriment, faith or unbelief, knowl­edge or ignorance, tri­umph or ruin, increase or de­crease, obedience or sin; save through His ordinance, apportionment, wisdom, and deci­sion. What He wills is, and what He does not will is not. Neither sidelong glance nor passing thought is beyond His design. He originates all and returns it, does what He wills, and none can repulse His command. There is no rescind­ing His destiny, no flight for a servant from disobey­ing Him except through divinely given success therein and mercy, and no strength to obey Him save through His choice and decree. If all mankind, jinn, angels, and devils combined their efforts to move or to still a single particle of the uni­verse with­out His will and choice, they would be unable to. His will, like His other attributes, exists in His entity and He ever possesses it. He has willed from preeternity the ex­istence of all things at the times He has chosen. They occur at the times which He has destined from beginingless eternity, occurring neither before nor after, but taking place in accordance with His knowl­edge and will, without substi­tution or alteration. He directs events without successive thoughts or wait­ing for time to elapse, which is why noth­ing diverts Him from anything else.

His Hearing and Sight

He Most High is all-hearing and all-seeing. He hears and sees, no sound however slight eluding His hear­ing, and no sight however minute escaping His vision. Distance does not obscure His hearing nor darkness hinder His vision. He sees without pupil or eyelids, and hears without ear canal or ears, just as He knows without a heart, seizes without limb, and creates without implement. His attributes no more re­semble the attributes of His creatures than His entity re­sem­bles the entity of His creatures.

His Speech

He Most High speaks, commands, forbids, promises, and warns with beginninglessly eternal speech that is an at­tribute of His entity, not resembling the speech of creatures in being a sound generated by the passage of air or impact of bodies nor in letters articulated by compressing the lips or moving the tongue. The Koran, Torah, Evangel, and Psalms are His Books, revealed to His messengers (upon whom be peace). The Koran is recited with tongues, written in books, and memorized in hearts despite being be­ginning­lessly eternal, an attribute of the entity of Allah Most High, unsubject to disseverance and sepa­ration by conveyance to hearts or pages. Moses (Allah bless him and give him peace) heard the speech of Allah without sound or letter, just as the righteous see the entity of Allah Most High in the af­terlife without substance or accident.

Since Allah possesses all of the above attributes, He is living, knowing, omnipotent, willing, hearing, see­ing, and speaking by virtue of His life, power, knowl­edge, will, hearing, sight, and speech, not merely by virtue of His en­tity.

His Acts

Everything besides Him Glorious and Exalted exists through His action, proceeding from His justice in the best, fullest, most perfect and equitable way. He is wise in His acts and just in His decrees. His justice is not comparable to the justice of His servants, since injustice may only be imagined from a servant through his disposal of what be­longs to another, while this is inconceivable from Allah Most High, since nothing belongs to anyone besides Him that He should unjustly dispose of it.

Everything besides Him, be it human, jinn, angel, devil, heaven, earth, animal, vegetable, mineral, sub­stance, acci­dent, intelligible, or sensory, is contin­gent, and was brought into existence through His power after not being, created by Him after it was nothing. He alone existed in preeternity, and nothing else. He then origi­nated creation, that His om­nipo­tence might be manifest, His prior decree effected and His eternal word realized; not from needing or requiring anything in creation. Our origination, be­ginning, and re­sponsibility are of Allah’s generosity, not because of their being obligatory for Him, and His blessings and benefac­tion exist because of His favor, not because of being due from Him. Everything that exists is indebted to Him for His gen­erosity and good­ness, His blessings and benevolence; for He is well able to pour all manner of torments upon His ser­vants and try them with every variety of suffer­ing and illness, and were He to do so, it would be just on His part and not wicked or unfair. He Mighty and Majestic rewards His servants, the believers, for their acts of obedience be­cause of His generosity and in ful­fillment of His word, not because of their de­serv­ing it or His owing it to them. He is not obliged to any­one to do anything, nor is injustice on His part con­ceivable, for He does not owe any rights to any­one. The obligation of men and jinn to perform acts of obedi­ence is established by His having informed them of it upon the tongues of the prophets (upon whom be peace), and not by unaided human reason. He sent the prophets and mani­fested the truth of their messages by unmistakable, inim­itable mir­acles. They have communicated His commands, prohi­bitions, promises, and warnings, and it is obliga­tory for mankind and jinn to believe in what they have con­veyed.

His Messenger

Allah Most High sent Muhammad (Allah bless him and give him peace), the Qurayshite unlettered prophet, to de­liver His inspired message to the entire world, Arabs and non-Arabs, jinn and mankind, su­perseding and abrogating law, except for the provisions of them that the new revela­tion explicitly reconfirmed. Allah favored him above the other prophets and made him the highest of mankind, re­jecting anyone’s attesting to the divine oneness by saying “There is no god but Allah,” unless they also attest to the Prophet by saying “Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.” He has obliged men and jinn to believe everything the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) has informed us concerning this world and the next, and does not accept anyone’s faith unless they believe in what he has told us will happen after death . . . .

(Translated from the Arabic of the Ihya’ ‘ulum al-din [Giving life to the religious sciences] of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali [d. 1111 A.D.], 1:79–81. 4 vols. 1929. Reprint. Beirut: ‘Alam al-Kutub, n.d.)

MCMXCIII © N. Keller