This Religion Is a Science 151“Being,” in the classical philosophical sense, but only with the recog-
nition that these are meaningless terms when applied to God, who is
neither substance nor accident. Indeed, tawhid suggests that God is
beyond any description, beyond any human knowledge. “Imagination
does not reach Him,” stressed the Egyptian theologian al-Tahawi
(d. 933), “and understanding does not comprehend Him.” God is, in
other words, wholly Other: the Mysterium Tremendum, to borrow
Rudolph Otto’s famous phrase.
Because tawhid insists that God is One, a group of Muslim mys-
tics called the Sufis will claim that there can be nothing apart from
God. God is, according to the Sufi master Ibn al-Arabi, the only being
with real existence: the only reality. For al-Ghazali God is al-Awwal,
“the First, before whom there is nothing,” and al-Akhir, “the Last,
after whom there is nothing.” Al-Ghazali, it must be understood, is
making neither an ontological nor a teleological argument for the
existence of God; God is neither Thomas Aquinas’s “First Cause,” nor
Aristotle’s “Prime Mover.” God is the only cause; God is movement
itself.
If tawhid is the foundation of Islam, then its opposite, shirk, is
Islam’s greatest sin, for which some Muslims claim there can be no
forgiveness (see the Quran 2:116). In its simplest definition, shirk
means associating anything with God. But like tawhid, shirk is not so
simple a concept. Polytheism is obviously shirk, but so is obscuring
God’s Oneness in any way. For Muslims, the Trinity is shirk, for God
is nothing if not Unity. Any attempt to anthropomorphize God by
endowing the Divine with human attributes, thereby limiting or
restricting God’s dominion, could be shirk. But shirk can also be
defined as placing obstacles in the way of God, whether greed, or
drink, or pride, or false piety, or any other grave sin that keeps the
believer apart from God.
Ultimately, tawhid implies recognizing creation as a “universal
unity,” to quote Ali Shariati, without divisions into “this world and the
hereafter, the natural and the supernatural, substance and meaning,
spirit and body.” In other words, the relationship between God and
creation is like that between “light and the lamp that emits it.” One
God; one Creation. One God. One God.