Islam and Sufism

Islam is a monotheistic religion, which believes that God is completely unique, without a partner and incomparable to anything else. The first, and most important, pillar of Islam is called the Shahadah, which declares that "There is no god but Allah and Prophet Muhammad is the messenger of Allah".

The Shahadah affirms the Oneness of Allah and to become a Muslim one must simply recite and understand this declaration, but to become a complete Muslim one must also follow the practices set out by the Prophet Muhammad. 

In Arabic, Allah signifies 'The One Supreme Being worthy of all worship and devotion', which means that not only does Allah alone deserve to be worshiped, but that there is no partner co-equal to Allah who should be worshiped alongside Him. 

"Say, "He is Allah , [who is] One, 

Allah , the Eternal Refuge.

He neither begets nor is born,

Nor is there to Him any equivalent."

- Qur'an Surah 112

This reveals the supreme power and glory of Allah alone, and is similar to the declarations made by other messengers of God (Jesus, Moses, Abraham) that only God deserves to be glorified and exalted because He is all-knowing, all-seeing, all-hearing...

To say that a being other than God has the same divine attributes is the greatest sin of all, because God is unique and of a different nature to all created beings, as He is their source. As God is the eternal, necessary Creator of the universe and all His creatures are contingent on God for existence, we can only know God through his self revelation (found in the Qur'an) and other sources are misleading.

In order to emphasise the ineffable nature of Allah, Muslims use the 99 Most Beautiful Names of Allah to consider the different aspects of Allah. These include, "The Most Compassionate", "The Most Merciful", "The Almighty". Muslims believe that even when taken all together, these names will never be sufficient to truly describe Allah, due to the limited nature of human language. 

Sufism is often referred to as Islamic mysticism because Sufis seek to know Allah through direct mystical experiences. Sufis believe that Allah manifests in His creation and that there is a divine spark in each and every human, which will allow humans to come to know God. The aim of Sufism to become aware of the eternal spark within everyone and recognise the unity of God and all that is created. 

For a Sufi, the ritual, dogma and doctrines of religions should always be secondary to the search for knowledge of the reality of humanity, and the direct relationship with God. 

In the Qur'an 17.36 it is written "Do not follow that of which you have no knowledge of", which suggests that in order to truly know God you must experience Him directly and how you perceive God will be different for each individual because it is your own personal reality and each person is unique. By following scriptures that you do not personally understand blindly, you may not become any closer to rediscovering the ultimate reality within yourself and move away from knowing the wholeness of God. This is because sometimes the more you try to capture something in a description, the further you move away from the source you are trying to define, as our language can never give a whole understanding of a concept alone. For example, trying to define water by its chemical properties and molecular make-up brings you no closer to understanding what it is like to drink water if you have never experienced it for yourself. The same is true for knowing God, who must be perceived through mystical experiences, and not through language. 

The Use of Analogy in Religious Language

Religious language has been rejected by many philosophers as meaningless, due to an emphasis on the importance of language being cognitive, or factually significant, and supported by empirical evidence.
However, theologians have maintained that is possible to communicate meaningfully about God through the use of analogy.

An analogy is a comparison between one thing and another, and is not used in a literal sense, but for explanatory purposes. Thomas Aquinas proposed that it is possible to use an analogy to talk about God, as long as we recognise that the divinity has a distinctive quality of reality to humanity, because humankind was created by God in the imago Dei (i.e. in the image of God). Therefore, although human language and understanding of God is limited due to the epistemic distance between humans and God, we can still draw meaningful connections between creature and Creator. Aquinas had previously rejected other manners of talking about God as they were inadequate.

• First he rejects univocal language, which means that language is used in a spatio-temporal context and does not differ in the case of God at all.
  For example, to say "God is good" in the same way that "John is good".
  This is a fallacy because the language then anthropomorphises God and limits him to human understanding and language, when in fact God is a being transcendent of the realms of human understanding. 
• Secondly he rejects equivocal language, which means that language is used in a completely different sense to talk about God than ordinary objects of the world and that language has different meanings in different contexts.
  For example, "That bird is a crane" uses 'crane' in a different sense to "The crane lifted the skip".
  It is vital that you have the right context in order to understand the meaning of a statement, Ferdinand de Saussure would argue that we need the same sign for an object in order to communicate meaningfully. Therefore, it is not possible to speak of God in these terms because we do not understand God's nature and cannot speak about something beyond our experience.

For Aquinas, the correct way to talk about God is in analogical terms, whilst always remembering that this is a limited way to speak about God. In the Bible, God is often personified and seen to have behaviour like humans. 

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 

- Genesis 3:8

This demonstrates the likeness of humans to God because God is pictured as walking through the garden of Eden just as Adam or Eve would have. In addition there are other qualities that humanity shares with God, such as knowledge and kindness: 

If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given to him. 

- James 1:5

There are two ways in which we can use analogy to discuss God and they are analogies of attribution and analogies of proportion. An analogy of attribution is used to attribute qualities that are valued by humans to God. We are able to do this because God is the creator of the universe, and therefore all valuable traits in humanity are connected to the valuable traits of God. For example, we believe that mercy, power and love are admirable, so we say that God is merciful, powerful and loving. However, when using analogies of attribution it is recognised that although these qualities are not a magnified version of those possessed by humanity, but that they are different to the human qualities. Ludwig Feuerbach would argue that humans take all the best qualities of humanity and project them onto an external being who they feel is worthy of their praise and devotion, when in fact the analogy of attribution is really only a reflection of the pleasant side of humanity.

The analogy of proportion differs to attribution, because it recognises the quantitative difference between humans and God. In Aquinas' First Way of the Cosmological argument, he argues that all living things in the world have potential (i.e. they could be the 100% greatest) whereas God is pure actuality and does not have potential (i.e. he is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, he is 100% of everything that it is to be God). Therefore, in an analogy of proportion it is possible to say that whatever God is, for example, loving or powerful, he is infinitely so because he fulfills everything that it is to be God. Aquinas uses the biblical example of God speaking to Moses:

"I am who I am" (Exodus 3:14)

Which he interpreted that God perfectly fulfills his own nature. An issue to be raised here is whether we can really know God's nature in order to discuss him, because God is a transcendent reality beyond the realm of ordinary experience and therefore, we cannot have sufficient knowledge of God to say what he is like.