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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books The Islamic Concept and Its Characteristics Chapter Vii : Dynamism Say: "Do good works! Allah will surely see your deeds, and (so will) His Messenger and the believers" (Al-Tawbah 9: 105). The fifth great characteristic of the Islamic concept is "dynamism." Dynamism is expressed in the active and ongoing relationship of Allah Most High with His creation, with the universe, life, and man.

And dynamism is expressed also in the activities of man himself in his own sphere. In the Islamic concept, the attributes of Allah are not negative attributes, and the perfection of Allah is not expressed in negative terminology, as is the case in Aristotle's concept; nor are His attributes deficient in some aspects of creation and planning, as is the case with the Zoroastrian concept of dualism, whereby Ahura Mazda, the god of light and goodness is equal to Ahriman, the god of darkness and evil; nor are Allah's attributes, according to the Islamic teachings, limited by necessity, as is the case with the God of Plotinus; nor is He confined to the concerns of a single tribe, as is the case with the Lord God of Israel; nor are His attributes mixed and mingled with the attributes of some nature other than Him, as is the case with the Godhead of some Christian denominations; nor are they completely non-existent, as is presumed by atheists who deny the existence of the Living and Purposeful Creator; and so on, down to the bottom of the heap of such nonsensical concepts.

Before we present the clear Islamic concept of the Divine Being, we should have a basis of comparison by considering the man-made alternatives. "In Aristotle's thought God is everlasting, absolutely perfect, with no will and no action, because action is due to a desire of some object and God is independent of any desire, and because willing means choosing between two courses, while God is the most good and most perfect, and is in no need of choosing between good and bad, or good and better.

Aristotle says that God is incapable of initiating action in time because, being self-sufficient and eternal, there is nothing that could persuade Him to action. Furthermore, God must be a self-sufficient Mind, for if it needed any external object to be the object of its thought, it would have in it an element of incompleteness. In fact, as it is a pure Mind entirely active in a single activity of thought, the only object of thought that it can have is itself.