He is the Powerful...

He is the Powerful, such that when imagination shoots its arrows to comprehend the extremity of His power; or the mind, making itself free of the dangers of thoughts, tries to find Him in the depth of His realm; or hearts, longing to grasp realities of His Attributes and openings of intelligence, penetrate beyond description in order to secure knowledge about His Being and cross the dark pitfalls of the unknown concentrating upon Him, He turns them back.

They return defeated, admitting that the reality of His knowledge cannot be comprehended by such random efforts, nor can an iota of the sublimity of His honor enter the understanding of thinkers.” ^5 Two points can be deduced from Imām ‘Alī’s ( ‘a ) statement: A person who knows Allah in the way that prophets ( ‘a ) and the Imāms ( ‘a ) have instructed mankind cannot believe that Allah has a partner.

In short, if a person believes that Allah created the earth and the sky and that whatever is between them belongs to Him can never hold that Allah has a partner and an equal. How can a rational man maintain that Allah’s partner is one of His own creatures? These two beliefs cannot co-exist.

Taking the first point into consideration, and also considering that idolaters used to believe that it was Allah who created the earth and the sky and whatever is between them, the question which comes to mind is: how did polytheists come to believe that Allah had a partner? The response to this question is that the root of their polytheistic beliefs lay in their misconception that Allah was like created things.

They imagined that Allah had a partner in the same way that two created beings could be one another’s partner in cosmic affairs. Self-worship It can be inferred from the Holy Qur’an that another cause of idolatry was following carnal desires.

A number of verses denote this: First verse: “Say, ‘I have been forbidden to worship those whom you invoke besides Allah.’ Say, ‘I do not follow your desires, for then I will have gone astray, and I will not be among the [rightly] guided’.” [^6] This verse denotes that in their idolatry, idolaters were under the influence of their carnal and sensual desires. Second verse: “These are but names which you have coined—you and your fathers—for which Allah has not sent down any authority.