Website: www.aaiil.uk

The Quran presents the finest and most subtle concept of what is God

Friday Khutba by Dr Zahid Aziz, for Lahore Ahmadiyya UK, 21 July 2023

“Vision cannot comprehend Him, and He comprehends (all) vision; and He is the Knower of subtleties, the Aware.” — ch. 6, v. 103	لَا تُدۡرِکُہُ الۡاَبۡصَارُ ۫ وَ ہُوَ یُدۡرِکُ الۡاَبۡصَارَ ۚ وَ ہُوَ اللَّطِیۡفُ الۡخَبِیۡرُ ﴿۱۰۳﴾
“The Originator of the heavens and the earth, He has made for you pairs from among yourselves, and pairs of the cattle, too, multiplying you thereby. Nothing is like Him; and He is the Hearing, the Seeing.” — ch. 42, v. 11	فَاطِرُ السَّمٰوٰتِ وَ الۡاَرۡضِ ؕ جَعَلَ لَکُمۡ مِّنۡ اَنۡفُسِکُمۡ اَزۡوَاجًا وَّ مِنَ الۡاَنۡعَامِ اَزۡوَاجًا ۚ یَذۡرَؤُکُمۡ فِیۡہِ ؕ لَیۡسَ کَمِثۡلِہٖ شَیۡءٌ ۚ وَ ہُوَ السَّمِیۡعُ الۡبَصِیۡرُ ﴿۱۱﴾

A few days ago someone sent me a question about the first verse that I have recited, and this gave me the opportunity to look further into its meaning. But before I deal with that, I would like to point out that certain religions are regarded as teaching such a deep and subtle philosophy, consisting of fine and delicate notions, that a person needs to apply considerable intellectual effort and thinking in order to understand that philosophy. These religions include the Christian, Hindu and Buddhist religions. At the same time, it is alleged about Islam that the spiritual concepts it presents, such as its concept of God and the Hereafter, are meant for the crude, simple and uneducated minds who cannot think very deeply. It is claimed that whereas the other religions I mentioned earlier appeal to and attract the higher thinking people who can understand abstract matters, Islam appeals to worldly-minded people who can only think about physical things and nothing higher than that.

However, if you examine the concept of God as presented in the Quran in the above verses, and other verses, you find that that concept is quite above and beyond human imagination. Last week I read a verse of the Quran (7:143) which says that Moses said to God that he wanted to see Him. God said to him: “You cannot see Me”, but if you look at the mountain, I will project My glory on it, and if the mountain remains in place then you will see Me. But the mountain crumbled, being unable to withstand the glory of God, and Moses fainted. Of course, Moses was shown this in a vision. No actual mountain was made to crumble, otherwise many people would have seen it in a crumbled state afterwards.

Many interpreters of the Quran, including Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, have written that what Moses was shown in a vision was that the mountain of difficulties in his way would be removed by the support and power of God, and that such great power of God would be seen by people that they would faint. What God informed Moses by this incident was that God cannot be seen by the human eye, so that people come to believe in Him by seeing Him. But He performs such works in the support of His messengers, by showing His power acting to remove worldly obstacles, that it is like making a mountain crumble into dust. That is why the same verse goes on to say that when Moses recovered from his fainting he said to God: “Glory be to You! I am the first of the believers”. “First” here means excelling everyone else in being a believer, having the highest belief of all.

In the verse which I recited at the beginning, in its opening words “Vision cannot comprehend Him, and He comprehends (all) vision”, what is meant by “comprehend” is to have full, complete and entire knowledge about something, to bring something fully within your scope. The “vision” here is both the physical human eye and the eye of the human mind with which we visualise things in our imagination. Neither with physical eyes, nor with mental eyes, can a human acquire full knowledge of what is God. Hazrat Abu Bakr addressed God as follows: “You are the one that, the fullest knowledge we can have about You, still falls short of being full knowledge”.

As regards the physical eye, it is very limited in what it can see even in the physical world. The eye can only see things which send visible light towards it. Scientific discoveries of the past two centuries show, and it has therefore become common knowledge, that this light that our eyes see is only small segment of the types of radiations that exist. The eye cannot see in the dark because things are not sending any light towards us, but now we know that they are sending out other types of radiations that we can detect. So using an infra-red camera we can see things in the dark by detecting the infra-red radiation being given off by various objects. As science has progressed, it has discovered how extremely limited is the human eye in the range of what it can see. How can it then possibly see God?

Moreover, if God could be seen with the human eye, it would mean that He is of a certain size and dimensions and is in a certain place. God cannot be limited in that way. Similarly, God cannot be envisioned by our mind’s eye or imagination, because what we can imagine is limited by our own past experiences. When we imagine things in our minds, for example we might imagine what the world will be like in a hundred year’s time, what new inventions will be in use then, our imagination is based on the real things that we already know about, and it projects them further. So we cannot visualise what God is, because our imagination cannot take us beyond its limitations.

Anyone and anything which is taken as a partner with God, such as those who are believed to be God’s sons or God-like figures on earth, they could all be seen by the eyes of humans when they were in this world. Paintings and pictures of them have been drawn. So human imagination and the mind’s eye can also visualise them.

The verse then tells us that while human vision cannot comprehend God, He comprehends human vision. In other words, He knows fully how human vision works, whether through man’s physical eye or his mental eye, and what are its limitations. To give an example, a baby doesn’t know or understand fully what its parents do, where they go to work, why they do certain things like shopping, etc., but the parents know fully what the baby’s needs and limitations are, and how to fulfil them.

The verse ends with the words: “He is the Knower of subtleties, the Aware” — in Arabic, He is Laṭīf and Khabīr. The word laṭīf indicates one who knows the finer and most subtle points of knowledge, and also one who deals gently with people. If the concepts conveyed in the Quran were, as it is alleged, simplistic, lacking refinement, appealing only to the low-thinking, worldly people, then it would have only presented God as being all-Powerful, all-mighty, over-awing, before Whose great power nothing can stand, and Who can do anything. That is the kind of picture that simple minds can easily understand. To them, a great being is one who wields powerful authority and force over people, bringing them down into submission before him. A simplistic scripture would not be presenting God as One Who has knowledge of subtle matters and can do things in a subtle and refined manner. Here Allah is also called Khabīr, one who is aware of things. Allah is often called ‘alīm or ‘ālim in the Quran, meaning that He possesses knowledge of all things. These convey somewhat differing meanings. While ‘alīm or ‘ālim means one who possesses knowledge, khabīr refers to knowledge about the underlying reality of things and about obtaining the latest knowledge as it appears in the world, like knowing the latest news. The Quran says several times that “Allah is aware of what you do” (2:234, etc.) — w-Allāhu bi mā ta‘malūna khabīr. Before we do something, it is in the knowledge or ‘ilm of Allah. When we actually do it, it becomes the latest news, so to speak, and Allah is then “aware” of it.

So the Quran uses different words about Allah to convey different aspects of His attributes which are related to the same basic thing, in this case His knowledge. If the Quran was the work of an uneducated, simple-minded person and was meant for those people who have not much intellect or capacity for deep thought, it could not be making these fine distinctions between two things which are very similar on the face of it, but do have a meaningful difference. There are puzzles and intelligence tests in which you are shown two very similar pictures or scenes which have a slight difference, and you have to find what that difference is. To indicate a small difference between things which are largely similar is the work of great intelligence.

The second verse which I recited at the beginning has within it four words, saying about Allah: “Nothing is like Him” — Laisa ka-mithli-hī shai’-un. Although translated as “nothing is like Him”, the words literally say: “Nothing is like a likeness of Him”. This means that, firstly, nothing in this world is like God as such, and secondly, that nothing possesses any quality or attribute which is like the same attribute of God. If I may expand on this second meaning, God has many attributes such as the Creator, the One possessing knowledge, the Seer and the Hearer. Human beings also create things, possess knowledge, and see and hear with their eyes and ears. But these human powers and faculties have no comparison to the same attributes of God. In just these four words, the Quran has cleared the wrong beliefs which were widespread in the world at the time when the Quran was revealed, and are still held by large sections of humanity, that some person in the past was God Who had come into the world as a human being, or that God sent His own form or His own son into the world whose knowledge of matters unseen was the same as God’s knowledge.

Before the words “nothing is like Him”, the verse which I recited says: “He has made for you pairs from among yourselves, and pairs of the cattle, too, multiplying you thereby”. It means that the creation of God cannot be God or like God, because any such creation is created from its own kind, so it can only be a part of the same kind. Also, the creation is multiplied in the earth. If one of them could be God or like God, then so could all the others on earth.

So may Allah enable us to learn the deep knowledge contained in the Quran and convey it to others, ameen.

Website: www.aaiil.uk