Tawhid
Tawhid, literally "to unite" or "to make one", refers to the principle of monotheism in Islam. It is the religion's central and single most important concept, upon which a Muslim's entire religious adherence rests. It unequivocally holds that God is indivisibly one and single.
Tawhid constitutes the foremost article of the Muslim profession of submission. The first part of the Islamic declaration of faith is the declaration of belief in the oneness of God. To attribute divinity to anything or anyone else, is considered shirk, which is an unpardonable sin unless repented afterwards, according to the Qur'an. Muslims believe that the entirety of the Islamic teaching rests on the principle of tawhid.
From an Islamic standpoint, there is an uncompromising nondualism at the heart of the Islamic beliefs that is seen as distinguishing Islam from other major religions.
The Quran teaches the existence of a single and absolute truth that transcends the world, a unique, independent and indivisible being that is independent of all of creation. God, according to Islam, is a universal God, rather than a local, tribal or parochial one and is an absolute that integrates all affirmative values.
Islamic intellectual history can be understood as a gradual unfolding of the manner in which successive generations of believers have understood the meaning and implications of professing tawhid. Islamic scholars have different approaches toward understanding it. Islamic scholastic theology, jurisprudence, philosophy, Sufism, and even the Islamic understanding of natural sciences to some degree, all seek to explain at some level the principle of tawhid.
Chapter 112 of the Qur'an, titled al-Ikhlas, reads:
Etymology
The wordName of God in Islam
In order to explain the complexity of the unity of God and of the divine nature, the Qur'an uses 99 terms, which are referred to as "Excellent Names of God". The divine names project divine attributes, which in turn project all the levels of the creation down to the physical plane. Aside from the supreme name "Allah" and the neologism ar-Rahman and a few other specific names like Malik al-Muluk in an authentic narration of Muhammad, other names may be shared by both God and human beings. According to Islamic teachings, the latter is meant to serve as a reminder of God's immanence, rather than being a sign of one's divinity or, alternatively, imposing a limitation on God's transcendent nature. Attribution of divinity to a created entity, shirk, is considered a denial of the truth of God and thus is a major sin.''Shirk''
Associating partners in divinity of God is known as shirk and is the antithesis of tawhid. Although the term is usually translated as "polytheism" into English, it is thought to be more complex. Alternatively, the translation 'associating ' has been suggested. The term includes denial of attributing any form of divinity to any other thing but God, which includes the self by elevating oneself above others and associating attributes of God with a created being. That has caused Sunni scholars to accuse Salafis and Wahhabis of depicting God as a created object ruling from the sky.Shirk is classified into two categories:
- al-Shirk al-akbar : open and apparent
- al-shirk al-khafi; ): concealed or hidden. It is when people perform the necessary rituals but not for God but for the sake of others, including social recognition. Hidden shirk might be unwitting, yet punishable, although to a lesser extent than greater forms of shirk.
Chapter 4, verse 116, of the Qur'an reads:
Discerning unity of God
According to Hossein Nasr, Ali, the first imam and fourth Rashid Caliph, is credited with having established Islamic theology. His quotations contain the first rational proofs among Muslims of the Unity of God.Ali states that "God is One" means that God is away from likeness and numeration, and he is not divisible even in imagination.
Vincent J. Cornell, a scholar of Islamic studies quotes the following statement from Ali:
The perception of tawhid laid the foundation of Muslim ethics. According to Islam, the world is sustained by God as the ultimate reality, unique in his attributes, distinct from everything else. Tawhid denies any affinity between the creator and its creation. That includes that invisible entities do not partake in creation but are created, rejection of an avatar or offspring of God, or a partner in creation in form of a sibling or consort. The uniqueness of the creator is expressed in the Daily Prayer's phrase Allāhu ʾakbar.
Arguments for oneness of God
Theological
Theologians usually use reason and deduction to prove the existence, unity and oneness of God. They use a teleological argument for the existence of God as a creator based on perceived evidence of order, purpose, design or direction or some combination of them in nature. Teleology is the supposition that there is a purpose or directive principle in the works and processes of nature.Another argument that is used frequently by theologians is reductio ad absurdum, which they use instead of positive arguments as a more efficient way to reject their opponent's ideas.
God as cause of causes
Against the polytheism of pre-Islamic Arabia, the Qur'an argues that the knowledge of God as the creator of everything rules out the possibility of lesser gods since these beings must be themselves created. For the Qur'an, God is an immanent and transcendent deity who actively creates, maintains and destroys the universe. The reality of God as the ultimate cause of things is the belief that God is veiled from human understanding because of the secondary causes and contingent realities of things in the world. Thus, the belief in the oneness of God is equated in the Qur'an with the "belief in the unseen". The Qur'an summarises its task in making the "unseen" become, to a greater or lesser degree, "seen" so that belief in the existence of God becomes a master truth, rather than an unreasonable belief. The Qur'an states that God's signals are so near and yet so far, demanding that its students listen to what it has to say with humility. The Qur'an draws attention to certain observable facts to present them as "reminders" of God, instead of providing lengthy "theological" proofs for the existence and unity of God.Ash'ari theologians rejected cause and effect in essence but accepted it as something that facilitates humankind's investigation and comprehension of natural processes. The medieval scholars argued that nature was composed of uniform atoms that were "recreated" at every instant by God. The laws of nature were only the customary sequence of apparent causes, the ultimate cause of each accident being God himself. Other forms of the argument also appear in Avicenna's other works, and the argument became known as the Proof of the Truthful.
Avicenna initiated a full-fledged inquiry into the question of being in which he distinguished between essence and existence. He argued that the fact of existence may not be inferred from or accounted for by the essence of existing things and that form and matter by themselves cannot interact and originate the movement of the universe or the progressive actualization of existing things. Existence must, therefore, be caused by an agent-cause that necessitates, imparts, gives, or adds existence to an essence.
God as necessary existent
An ontological argument for the existence of God was first proposed by Avicenna in the Metaphysics section of The Book of Healing. Other forms of the argument also appear in Avicenna's other works, and the argument became known as the Proof of the Truthful. Avicenna initiated a full-fledged inquiry into the question of being, in which he distinguished between essence and existence. He argued that the fact of existence can not be inferred from or accounted for by the essence of existing things and that form and matter by themselves cannot interact and originate the movement of the universe or the progressive actualization of existing things. Existence must, therefore, be caused by an agent-cause that necessitates, imparts, gives or adds existence to an essence. To do so, the cause must be an existing thing and co-exist with its effect.That was the first attempt at using the method of a priori proof, which uses intuition and reason alone. Avicenna's proof of God's existence is unique in that it can be classified as both a cosmological argument and an ontological argument. "It is ontological insofar as 'necessary existence' in intellect is the first basis for arguing for a Necessary Existent". The proof is also "cosmological insofar as most of it is taken up with arguing that contingent existence cannot stand alone and must end up in a Necessary Existent". Another argument Avicenna presented for God's existence was the problem of the mind–body dichotomy.
According to Avicenna, the universe consists of a chain of actual beings, each giving existence to the one below it and responsible for the existence of the rest of the chain below. Because an actual infinite is deemed impossible by Avicenna, the chain as a whole must terminate in a being that is wholly simple and one, whose essence is its very existence and therefore is self-sufficient and does not need something else to give it existence. Because its existence is not contingent on or necessitated by something else but is necessary and eternal in itself, it satisfies the condition of being the necessitating cause of the entire chain that constitutes the eternal world of contingent existing things. Thus, his ontological system rests on the conception of God as the Wajib al-Wujud. There is a gradual multiplication of beings through a timeless emanation from God as a result of his self-knowledge.