150 No god but God
identically dressed, there is no longer any rank, or class, or status;
there is no gender and no ethnic or racial identity: there is no identity
whatsoever, save as Muslims. It was precisely this communal spirit
that Malcolm X referred to when he wrote during his own pilgrimage,
“I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by
all colors together.”
These four rituals—communal prayer, the paying of alms, the fast of
Ramadan, and the Hajj pilgrimage—provide meaning to the Muslim
faith and unity to the Muslim community. Yet one could argue that
the primary function of these four is to express the fifth and most
important Pillar (and the only one requiring belief rather than action):
the shahadah, or profession of faith, which initiates every convert into
the Muslim faith.
“There is no god but God, and Muhammad is God’s Messenger.”
This deceptively simple statement is not only the basis for all arti-
cles of faith in Islam, it is in some ways the sum and total of Islamic
theology. This is because the shahadah signifies recognition of an
exceedingly complex theological doctrine known as tawhid.
The doctrine of tawhid is so central to the development of Islamic
theology that “the Science of Kalam” ( ‘ilm al-kalam) is synonymous
with “the Science of Tawhid” ( ‘ilm al-tawhid). But tawhid, which liter-
ally means “making one,” implies more than just monotheism. True,
there is only one God, but that is just the beginning. Tawhid means
that God is Oneness. God is Unity: wholly indivisible, entirely unique,
and utterly indefinable. God resembles nothing in either essence or
attributes.
“Nothing is like Him,” the mystic and scholar Abu Hamid al-
Ghazali (1058–1111) wrote in his Revival of the Religious Sciences, “and
He is not like anything.” God is, as the Quran repeatedly reminds
believers, “elevated”; God is “eminent.” When Muslims cry Allahu
Akbar! (literally, “God is greater!”), what they mean is not that God is
greater than this or that, but that God is simply greater.
Obviously, human beings have no choice but to speak of God in
human language, through human symbols and metaphors. Therefore,
one can refer to God’s attributes as embodying “Goodness” or