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The Unity of Allah 1 - Al-Shia The Scientific and Cultural Website of Shia belief The Unity of Allah 1 2022-10-11 641 Views Tawheed , Oneness of God A follower of the Islamic religion must first accept the testimony of faith: “There is no god but Allah” (La ilaha illa-llah). This profession of God’s Unity is Islam’s first pillar (rukn). All other worships depend upon it and derive from it. But what does it mean to say that there is no god but Allah ?

For Islam, the manner in which the believer answers this question displays the depth to which he understands his religion. And, paraphrasing a hadith of the Prophet often quoted in Sufi texts, one might say that there are as many ways of understanding the meaning of this profession as there are believers.

[1] Contents The (PBUHH) Profession of Faith Islamic intellectual history can be understood as a gradual unfolding of the manner in which successive generations of men have understood the meaning and implications of professing God’s Unity.

Theology, jurisprudence, philosophy, Sufism, and even to some degree the natural sciences, all seek to explain at some level the principle of unity, “To profess that God is One.” Some of the most productive intellectual schools which have attempted to explain the meaning of unity have flourished among Shia. Many historians have looked outside of Islam to find the inspiration for Islam’s philosophical and metaphysical expositions of the nature of God’s Unity.

Such scholars tend to relegate anything more than what could derive-that is, in their view from a “simple Bedouin faith” to outside influence. Invariably they ignore the rich treasuries of wisdom contained in the vast corpus of Shia hadith literature pertaining to Islam’s first centuries, i.e., the sayings of the Imams who were the acknowledged authorities in the religious sciences not only by the Shias but also by the Sunnis.

Even certain sayings of the Prophet which provide inspiration for the Imams have been ignored. In particular, the great watershed of Islamic metaphysical teachings, Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law and the Shias’ first Imam, has been largely overlooked. In the following selections from Bihar al-Anwar, fifteen out of hundreds that can be found in Shia sources; the reader will see the seeds for much of later Islamic metaphysical speculation.