Interesting perspective on the Attributes of God, from Javed Ghamidi

[ihsan]

http://www.monthly-renaissance.com/issue/content.aspx?id=39

I especially loved how he relates the highlighted portion to the verse mentioned:


Knowledge is nothing but the knowledge of hidden potentials; thus every knowledge bears witness to these potentials. If these potentials are not from a being who can perceive and can exercise His will, then they should be mere coercion; however, the organization found in this world and its deep meaningfulness refute this. None of these can be without exercising knowledge and intellect. Thus the creator is not merely powerful; He is knowledgeable and wise too:

قُلْ أَئِنَّكُمْ لَتَكْفُرُونَ بِالَّذِي خَلَقَ الْأَرْضَ فِي يَوْمَيْنِ وَتَجْعَلُونَ لَهُ أَندَادًا ذَلِكَ رَبُّ الْعَالَمِينَ وَجَعَلَ فِيهَا رَوَاسِيَ مِن فَوْقِهَا وَبَارَكَ فِيهَا وَقَدَّرَ فِيهَا أَقْوَاتَهَا فِي أَرْبَعَةِ أَيَّامٍ سَوَاء لِّلسَّائِلِينَ ثُمَّ اسْتَوَى إِلَى السَّمَاء وَهِيَ دُخَانٌ فَقَالَ لَهَا وَلِلْأَرْضِ اِئْتِيَا طَوْعًا أَوْ كَرْهًا قَالَتَا أَتَيْنَا طَائِعِينَ فَقَضَاهُنَّ سَبْعَ سَمَاوَاتٍ فِي يَوْمَيْنِ وَأَوْحَى فِي كُلِّ سَمَاء أَمْرَهَا وَزَيَّنَّا السَّمَاء الدُّنْيَا بِمَصَابِيحَ وَحِفْظًا ذَلِكَ تَقْدِيرُ الْعَزِيزِ الْعَلِيمِ (٤١: ٩-١٢)

Ask them: “Do you disbelieve in Him and associate partners with Him who created the earth in two days? The Lord of the Universe is He. And [after creating the earth] He set up on it mountains towering high above it and placed His blessings upon it and for all the needy according to their needs provided it with sustenance with correct measure – all this in four days. Then He turned towards the sky which was in the form of smoke and He said to it and to the earth: “Obey the directive willingly or unwillingly.” Both said: “We come forth willingly.” Then He made seven heavens in two days and to each heaven He assigned its task. And We decked the lowest heaven with brilliant stars and made it fully secure. All this is the design of the Mighty One, the All-knowing. (41:9-12)

[muhtadiyah]

Salaam all,

This may be tangential to the thread topic, but I have a question that's been floating around my cranium for some time now...

Islam tells us, as one of the basic tenets of tawheed, that Allah is unique and cannot be compared to anything we know. How can I therefore hope to understand the attributes of God, if my only possible references to such qualities as mercy and compassion lie entirely within the framework of human experience?

peace,
mhtdyh

[muhtadiyah]

No answers? :(

[Kabeer]

Islam tells us, as one of the basic tenets of tawheed, that Allah is unique and cannot be compared to anything we know. How can I therefore hope to understand the attributes of God, if my only possible references to such qualities as mercy and compassion lie entirely within the framework of human experience?


Walaikum Salaam,

Doesnt your question answer itself? You acknowledge that you have a human limitation in understanding God, and you have to look at certain attributes of God to understand him, and even then you can only see a limited version of those attributes.

Those attributes that you relate to in human life are just the bit and piece you use to understand God. Like imagine you are an ant on top of a great painting, you can appreciate the green paint stroke, the blue paint stroke, but you can never lift yourself off that canvas to view the whole image.

Or am I missing what you are saying, apologies if I am.

Peace

[muhtadiyah]

Salaam br. Kabeer,

I understand your analogy was only meant to point out my limited perspective, but it sort of illustrates my point. If God is unique and cannot be compared to anything, then He is not like a painting, and His attributes are not like strokes of blue or green paint.

I will rephrase the question: If God cannot be compared to anything, He therefore cannot be understood by relating Him to anything within my sphere of knowledge. Since the only knowledge I have of mercy, compassion, justice, etc. are constructs of my human experience, how can I apply those constructs to God without running the risk of anthropomorphization? Likewise, how can I disassociate my human understanding from those attributes and not turn them into a list of meaningless gibberish?

Thanks for the response, though. I'm sure I'm not the first person to wonder about this, and I'm sure there's a great answer out there somewhere.

peace,
mhtdyh

[The_Other_Admin]

Does this article helps? http://uiforum.uaeforum.org/showthread.php?t=2283


If God is unique and cannot be compared to anything, then He is not like a painting, and His attributes are not like strokes of blue or green paint.

It would be imo, because you can feel or see some strokes (i.e. some attributes) but not the whole picture (i.e. not all the attributes).


Likewise, how can I disassociate my human understanding from those attributes and not turn them into a list of meaningless gibberish?

I think you can't otherwise, God wouldn't had the need to send human prophets. But I think any plausible answer maybe found in life experiences. This is the only place a person may get this dilemma or their are other similar experiences in the everyday life of humans. I don't mean on the same level but in similar nature.


Likewise, how can I disassociate my human understanding from those attributes and not turn them into a list of meaningless gibberish?

Give some examples that might help.

[lumumba_s]

http://us.st11.yimg.com/us.st.yimg.com/I/islamicbookstore-com_1967_172867714 (http://islamicbookstore.com/b3303.html)

[Al-Boriqi]

Salaam br. Kabeer,

I understand your analogy was only meant to point out my limited perspective, but it sort of illustrates my point. If God is unique and cannot be compared to anything, then He is not like a painting, and His attributes are not like strokes of blue or green paint.

I will rephrase the question: If God cannot be compared to anything, He therefore cannot be understood by relating Him to anything within my sphere of knowledge. Since the only knowledge I have of mercy, compassion, justice, etc. are constructs of my human experience, how can I apply those constructs to God without running the risk of anthropomorphization? Likewise, how can I disassociate my human understanding from those attributes and not turn them into a list of meaningless gibberish?

Thanks for the response, though. I'm sure I'm not the first person to wonder about this, and I'm sure there's a great answer out there somewhere.

peace,
mhtdyh


what is obligated on you and I is to beleive in the realities of these Attributes for Allah, it was never ordained on us to understand the nature thereof.

secondly, these attributes, are or fall under the abstract, not something that is an entity per se. No one can literally see rahma or love, or hate, or pleasure. These are things that are felt, not seen. Yet Allah can and will be seen literally by the beleivers.

thirdly, these attributes come from Him to begin with. You and I are just recipients of a fraction of such attributes. In other words, were are poor excuses for the enactment of these attributes whereas Allah represents the perfect manifestation of them. This type fo linkiage betwen Him and the creation is tashbeeh. This is not what is deemed so unpraiseworthy within the two sources. However what is reprehensible is tamdheel or the likeining and limitation of Him to the functions and descriptions of the created

do you beleive Allah Hears, Sees, and is Living. If so, why is that not deemed by you as "not comparing him with Creation"

asalamu alaikum

[newsX]

http://us.st11.yimg.com/us.st.yimg.com/I/islamicbookstore-com_1967_172867714 (http://islamicbookstore.com/b3303.html)

Shalom,

Aaah, fan of Hujjat-al-Islam too, I see. You have good taste. :)

[ihsan]

that the following quote from iqbal is relevant:


But the question you are likely to ask is - ‘Can change be predicated of the Ultimate Ego?’ We, as human beings, are functionally related to an independent world-process. The conditions of our life are mainly external to us. The only kind of life known to us is desire, pursuit, failure, or attainment - a continuous change from one situation to another. From our point of view life is change, and change is essentially imperfection. At the same time, since our conscious experience is the only point of departure for all knowledge, we cannot avoid the limitation of interpreting facts in the light of our own inner experience. An anthropomorphic conception is especially unavoidable in the apprehension of life; for life can be apprehended from within only. As the poet Nasir ‘Alâ of Sirhind imagines the idol saying to the Brahmin:

‘Thou hast made me after Thine own image! After all what hast Thou seen beyond Thyself?’

It was the fear of conceiving Divine life after the image of human life that the Spanish Muslim theologian Ibn Hazm hesitated to predicate life of God, and ingeniously suggested that God should be described as living, not because He is living in the sense of our experience of life, but only because He is so described in the Qur’an. Confining himself to the surface of our conscious experience and ignoring its deeper phases, Ibn Hazm must have taken life as a serial change, a succession of attitudes towards an obstructing environment. Serial change is obviously a mark of imperfection; and, if we confine ourselves to this view of change, the difficulty of reconciling Divine perfection with Divine life becomes insuperable. Ibn Hazm must have felt that the perfection of God can be retained only at the cost of His life. There is, however, a way out of the difficulty. The Absolute Ego, as we have seen, is the whole of Reality. He is not so situated as to take a perspective view of an alien universe; consequently, the phases of His life are wholly determined from within. Change, therefore, in the sense of a movement from an imperfect to a relatively perfect state, or vice versa, is obviously inapplicable to His life. But change in this sense is not the only possible form of life. A deeper insight into our conscious experience shows that beneath the appearance of serial duration there is true duration. The Ultimate Ego exists in pure duration wherein change ceases to be a succession of varying attitudes, and reveals its true character as continuous creation, ‘untouched by weariness’ and unseizable ‘by slumber or sleep’.49 To conceive the Ultimate Ego as changeless in this sense of change is to conceive Him as utter inaction, a motiveless, stagnant neutrality, an absolute nothing. To the Creative Self change cannot mean imperfection. The perfection of the Creative Self consists, not in a mechanistically conceived immobility, as Aristotle might have led Ibn Hazm to think. It consists in the vaster basis of His creative activity and the infinite scope of His creative vision. God’s life is self-revelation, not the pursuit of an ideal to be reached. The ‘not-yet’ of man does mean pursuit and may mean failure; the ‘not-yet’ of God means unfailing realization of the infinite creative possibilities of His being which retains its wholeness throughout the entire process.

In the Endless, self-repeating
flows for evermore The Same.
Myriad arches, springing, meeting,
hold at rest the mighty frame.
Streams from all things love of living,
grandest star and humblest clod.
All the straining, all the striving
is eternal peace in God. (GOETHE)

Thus a comprehensive philosophical criticism of all the facts of experience on its efficient as well as appreciative side brings us to the conclusion that the Ultimate Reality is a rationally directed creative life. To interpret this life as an ego is not to fashion God after the image of man. It is only to accept the simple fact of experience that life is not a formless fluid, but an organizing principle of unity, a synthetic activity which holds together and focalizes the dispersing dispositions of the living organism for a constructive purpose. The operation of thought which is essentially symbolic in character veils the true nature of life, and can picture it only as a kind of universal current flowing through all things. The result of an intellectual view of life, therefore, is necessarily pantheistic. But we have a first-hand knowledge of the appreciative aspect of life from within. Intuition reveals life as a centralizing ego. This knowledge, however imperfect as giving us only a point of departure, is a direct revelation of the ultimate nature of Reality. Thus the facts of experience justify the inference that the ultimate nature of Reality is spiritual, and must be conceived as an ego. But the aspiration of religion soars higher than that of philosophy. Philosophy is an intellectual view of things; and, as such, does not care to go beyond a concept which can reduce all the rich variety of experience to a system. It sees Reality from a distance as it were. Religion seeks a closer contact with Reality. The one is theory; the other is living experience, association, intimacy. In order to achieve this intimacy thought must rise higher than itself, and find its fulfilment in an attitude of mind which religion describes as prayer - one of the last words on the lips of the Prophet of Islam.