In Islam, God (, contraction of , , or , ) is seen as the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, whose existence has no beginning and no end. God is conceived as perfect, singular, formless, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, completely infinite in all of his attributes, and the only ilah that has and ever will exist. Islam further emphasizes that God is The Most Merciful and Most Forgiving. The Islamic concept of God is variously described as monotheistic, panentheistic,Anawati, M. M. "A Commentary on the Creed of Islam, Sa'd al Dīn al-Taftâzānī on the Creed of Najm al Din al Nasafi by Earl Edgar Elder." The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review 14.2 (1951): xxiv and monistic.Ahmadi, Fereshteh, and Nader Ahmadi. Iranian Islam: The concept of the individual. Springer, 1998.Austin P. Evans A commentary on the Creed of Islam Columbia University Press New York 1950 p. xxiv
The Islamic concept of tawhid (unification) emphasises that God is absolutely pure and free from association or partnership with other beings, which means attributing the powers and qualities of God to his creation, and vice versa. In Islam, God is never portrayed in any image. The Quran specifically forbids ascribing partners to share his singular sovereignty, as he is considered to be the absolute one without a second, indivisible, and incomparable being, who is similar to nothing, and nothing is comparable to him. Thus, God is absolutely transcendent, unique and utterly other than anything in or of the world as to be beyond all forms of human thought and expression. The briefest and the most comprehensive description of God in the Quran is found in Surat al-Ikhlas.
In theology, anthropomorphism () and corporealism () refer to beliefs in the human-like and materially embedded form of God, an idea that has been classically described as assimilating or comparing God to the creatures. By contrast, belief in the transcendence of God is called , which also rejects notions of incarnation and a personal god. Although is widely accepted in Islam today, it stridently competed for orthodox status until the tenth century, especially during the Mihna. Besides that, beyond purpose, excessive emphasis on God's uniqueness and transcendence may also mean stripping some of his human connotating attributes and names (Ta'til). Because, in addition to metaphors such as King (Malik) All except for ʻAsem, Al-Kesa’i, Yaʻqub and Khalaf in one of his narrations read al-Fatiha-4 as King of the Day of Judgement. and Master (Rabb), it may also clearly contradicts the image of a god who is arrogant (al-Mutakabbir), angry (al-Jalīl), avenger (al-Muntaqim) but also compassionate (ar-Raḥīm), pardoner (Al-ʻAfūw) etc. and living Al-Ḥayy, who, as in Sufism, establishes a closeness with humans."The man who realizes God as a friend is never lonely in the world, neither in this world nor in the hereafter. There is always a friend, a friend in the crowd, a friend in the solitude; or while he is asleep, unconscious of this outer world, and when he is awake and conscious of it. In both cases the friend is there in his thought, in his imagination, in his heart, in his soul."https://sufi.no/onewebmedia/innerlife.pdf (see; Sufi metaphysics, and Ali-Illahism) In premodern times, corporealist views were said to have been more socially prominent among the common people, with more abstract and transcendental views more common for the elite.
Nomenclature
Allāh is the Arabic word referring to God in Abrahamic religions."Islam and Christianity", Encyclopedia of Christianity (2001): Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews also refer to God as Allāh. In the English language, the word generally refers to God in Islam. The Arabic word Allāh is thought to be derived by contraction from al-ʾilāh, which means "the god", (i.e., the only god) and is related to El and Elah, the Hebrew and Aramaic words for God. It is distinguished from (), the Arabic word meaning deity, which could refer to any of the gods worshipped in pre-Islamic Arabia or to any other deity. It occurs in the Qur’an 2,697 times in 85 of its 114 suras.
Whether or not Allah can be considered as the personal name of God became disputed in contemporary scholarship.Andreas Görke and Johanna Pink Tafsir and Islamic Intellectual History Exploring the Boundaries of a Genre Oxford University Press in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies London p. 478 In Islamic usage and indoctrination, Allah is God's most unique, proper name,It is generally accepted that the word is not derived from any root and does not carry a dictionary meaning and constitutes the proper name of the real god, or even if it has a dictionary meaning, it loses this meaning when it becomes the name of the real god./Kelimenin herhangi bir kökten türemiş olmayıp sözlük mânası taşımadığı ve gerçek mâbudun özel adını teşkil ettiği, yahut sözlükte bir anlamı olsa bile gerçek mâbuda ad olunca bu anlamı kaybettiği genellikle benimsenmektedir. https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/allah and referred to as Lafẓ al-Jalālah (The Word of Majesty). Those who claimed that Allah was the personal name of God also denied that this name was a derivative name. Jahm bin Safwan claimed that Allah is a name God created for himself and that names belong to the things God created.Morris S. Seale Muslim Theology A study of Origins with Reference to the Church Fathers Great Russel Street, London 1964 p. 58 Some Muslims may use different names as much as Allah, for instance Rabb, Rahman and "God" in English. The Quran refers to the attributes of God as "most beautiful names"., , , Beside these Arabic names, Muslims of non-Arab origins may also sometimes use other names in their own languages to refer to God, such as Khuda in Persian, Bengali and Urdu. or Tengri was used in the Ottoman Turkish language as the equivalent of Allah. In Sufis, often characterised as the inner, mystical dimension of Islam, Hu, (depends on placement in the sentence), or Parvardigar in Persian are used as names of God. The sound derives from the last letter of the word Allah, which is read as when in the middle of a sentence. means 'Just He' or 'Revealed'. The word explicitly appears in many verses of the Quran:
The Divine Realm In Early Islam, the concepts of the Throne (Arsh), Pulpit (Kursi), Pen (Qalam), and others Bearers of the Throne described as being in the immediate vicinity of Allah, who is considered a personal deity,Williams, W. Wesley, "A study of anthropomorphic theophany and Visio Dei in the Hebrew Bible, the Quran and early Sunni Islam", University of Michigan, March 2009 living in the heavens along with concepts such as Allah's sitting on a Throne, His right, and His left, led to problems of understanding in later periods, when Islamic theology developed and adopted a transcendent understanding of God. While these concepts were sometimes interpreted by theologians as metaphorical expressions intended to emphasize transcendence, others approached them with the attitude of "we believe in the essence, but we don't investigate how it is" ; "It (al-Kursī) is the "seat" of God's power, but without God sitting on it with bones, since bones and body belong to the created things".al-Jawzi Zad al-Masir fi Ilm al-Tafsir
Many Muslim communities emphasize the transcendence of God over local traditions and "allow...little room for mythological stories", although tales about jinn exist in all of them.
Relationship with creation
In Islamic argumentation, while the existence of things is dependent, contingent, temporal, and dependent on a being beyond themselves, God is eternal, independent, self-sufficient, and does not require any other being for His existence, thus existing solely by Himself. The word used for God in Surah Ikhlas (al-Samad) is thought to imply this. This relationship also signifies that since God is the sustainer, he is in need of nothing, and even as he gives, nothing is diminished from his treasury.
Purpose; It is believed that God created everything for a divine purpose; the universe governed by fixed laws that ensure the harmonious working of all things. Everything within the universe, including inanimate objects, praises God, and is in this sense understood as a Muslim.Roger S. GottliebThe Oxford Handbook of Religion and Ecology Oxford University Press, 9 Nov 2006 p. 210 Humans and jinn have to live voluntarily in accordance with these laws to find peace and reproduce God's benevolence in their own society to live in accordance with the nature of all things, known as surrender to God in the Islamic sense.Rebecca Stein, Philip L. Stein The Anthropology of Religion, Magic, and Witchcraft Routledge 2017 chapter: Islam Muslims believe that God is the sole source of all creation, and that everything, including its creatures, are just a derivative reality created out of love and mercy by God's command,Sachiko Murata The Tao of Islam: A Sourcebook on Gender Relationships in Islamic Thought SUNY Press 1992 page 77 "..."Be," and it is" and that the purpose of existence is to worship or to know God.David Leeming The Oxford Companion to World Mythology Oxford University Press 2005 page 209
Creation theories
Muslim theologians and philosophers, with only a few exceptions, agree that God is the origin of the cosmos' existence. However, there is disagreement about how God creates the cosmos and what types of causalities exist; While most philosophers adhered to a theory of emanation (fayaḍān),Husam Muhi Eldin al- Alousi The Problem of Creation in Islamic Thought, Qur'an, Hadith, Commentaries, and KalamNational Printing and Publishing, Bagdad, 1968 p. 179 theologians usually preferred occasionalism (iḥdāth). The third theory, often represented in Islamic mysticism, understands the world as the manifestation (maẓhar) of a single reality.McGinnis, Jon and Rahim Acar, "Arabic and Islamic Philosophy of Religion", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/arabic-islamic-religion/.
"The emanation theory" states that the universe has emanated from God since eternity and assert a causal mediation between the lower and the higher things (i.e. the lower things do not come directly from God, but from the higher things). God is considered the only necessary existence, the rest of creation as contingent. Since God is described as "knowing" and "perfect," God must know Himself perfectly and know that He is the cause of all existence. But in order to have perfect knowledge of a cause, one must also know the effect of the cause. Therefore, God knows every form of existence in past, future, and present. Based on the model of ibn Sina, God knows about the existence of x because of x, whereas humans know about a thing x from another thing x'. Therefore, God would create the universe in eternity. To further support this argument, emanationists point out against Creation ex Nihilo, that, if God were to decide to create the universe at a certain point in time, God would have a change of mind, affected by something external. Since God is the source of everything, something external could not have affected God. This was contrary to the idea that God was eternal and unchanging (changing things would have a lifespan and could not be god). Theologians found the emanation theory to be unconvincing, because the theory equates God to much with nature, by that, restricting God's freedom. Instead, they propose, God created the world from nothing at a certain point t in time. In response to the emanationists' objection, that for Creation ex Nihilo, a change in the will of God would be required, al-Ghazali explains that God has willed from all eternity, to create the world at a certain time t. Additionally, God would not only have created the universe at a time t, but also continues to create the universe in any following moment.