monotheistic theology was that of the Mutazila,
who called themselves the People of Justice (adl)
and Divine Unity (tawhid). They argued on behalf
of God’s absolute unity and transcendence, and
they denied the reality of any human attributes
ascribed to him by the Quran (such as his hear-
ing, seeing, knowing, etc.). To recognize these
attributes as anything other than metaphors, they
thought, would compromise God’s essential unity.
They also argued that the Quran, as God’s speech,
was created in time, which they thought would
counter any tendency to believe that it possessed
its own godliness, like Christ, who was called the
Word of God in the Gospel of John. The doctrine
that the Quran was created, however, was firmly
refuted by scriptural literalists such as ahmad
ibn hanbal (d. 855) and by the ashari school of
theology, which argued that (1) God’s attributes
were real, even if we do not know how they are so;
and (2) the Quran was God’s speech and therefore
eternal and uncreated as he is. Asharis did not feel
that they had compromised the idea of his unique-
ness in taking this position, which has been the
dominant one in Sunni theology since the 12th
century. Tawhid is also the foremost of the theo-
logical doctrines espoused in tWelve-imam shiism,
which adopted most of the Mutazili doctrines.
In sUFism, the mystical tradition of Islam, the
fundamental doctrine of tawhid was recognized
and given new meaning. For the mystics, who
sometimes called themselves “the affirmers of
God’s unity” (muwahhidun), confessing “there is
no god but God” was an external aspect of faith
that as Muslims they had to embrace, along with
God’s law, the sharia. Their objective, however,
was to proceed to a special sense or awareness that
allowed them to discover that there was nothing
real or true in the world but God in his oneness.
abU al-qasim al-JUnayd (d. 910) spoke of how
God’s assistance was needed to annihilate the
self and abide in union with him. He also identi-
fied four aspects of tawhid: one for the common
people in accordance with belief in one God, one
for devout Muslims who are outwardly doing
what God commanded and prohibited, and two
for spiritual virtuosos who transcend the first
two aspects and calmly bear witness to the divine
reality, and then become immersed in God’s unity,
as they were before they ever existed. Following
previous Sufi teachers, the Persian writer Farid
al-Din Attar (ca. 12th–13th century) identified
tawhid in his allegorical poem, The Conference of
the Birds, as a stage where the seeker sees God
and the world as one on his journey to spiritual
self-annihilation. Sufis also eroticized their idea of
mystical oneness by identifying it with the union
of the lover with the beloved after suffering pain-
ful separation.
Doctrines concerning God’s unity (and unity
with him) were embedded not just in matters
of worship, theology, and the spirit, but also in
matters of the world. Muslims addressed issues
connected with defining their identities in relation
both to alternative understandings of Islam and to
their relations with non-Muslims. Concern with
tawhid helped Muslims set themselves apart as
a single community (umma) from those who did
not acknowledge God’s oneness, especially idola-
ters and disbelievers, and to connect themselves
to those whom they considered to be people oF
the book (Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and
others). Tawhid gave birth to periodic reForm and
reneWal movements, as exemplified in the “unitar-
ian” movement of ibn tUmart (d. 1130), who had
studied theology and mysticism in Baghdad, and
then established the almohad dynasty that ruled
Spain and North Africa from 1123 to 1269. Much
later, on the cusp of the modern era, the Ara-
bian preacher MUhammad ibn abd al-Wahhab (d.
1792) made tawhid a cornerstone in his campaign
to reform Islam in the Arabian Peninsula and to
eradicate what he considered to be the idolatrous
beliefs and practices of the people, especially
Shiis and Sufis. His puritanical, literalist under-
standing of Islam became the official ideology of
saUdi arabia. In the early 20th century, the Egyp-
tian modernist theologian mUhammad abdUh (d.
1905) revived Mutazili understandings of divinetawhid 665 J