SAYYID AHMAD KHAN’S CONCEPT OF GOD

Abdul Khaliq

As regards the dominant mood of his philosophy, Sayyid Aḥmad Khān (1817-1898) is a naturalist. He considers every natural phenomenon to be explainable in terms of the laws operating in Nature itself and, correspondingly, has full confi­dence in the capability of human reason to discover these laws. Reason has, however, its limitations too, so that it entirely fails to comprehend the supersensibles or the ghaib.[1] Anyhow, these limitations are not externally imposed but are rather inherent in reason and are recognised by reason itself.[2] Hence the appellation “Rational Supernaturalism”[3] for Sayyid Aḥmad’s position.

It is very much with reference to this supernatural compo­nent that an element of agnosticism enters into Sayyid Aḥmad’s otherwise robustly optimistic and positive approach towards the problems of religion and philosophy. He, no doubt, believes in the existence of God, in Whom existence and essence are identical,[4] the “that” and the “what” are one, as an absolute certainty, but commits at the same time that His attributes (and so, He Himself as well) cannot possibly be known by man. In this con­nection he records[5] a saying of Ḥaḍrat ‘Ali who is reported to have once observed that a person, who is sincere in his love of God, denies away His attributes. Anyway, Ḥaḍrat ‘Alī seems to have said this for no ontological reasons, nor does this saying involve a reference, as would be required by Sayyid Aḥmad in this context, to the infirmities of human understanding. What he appears to have actually meant was a sort of recommendation.

If we love God and, at the same time, ascribe to Him certain characteristics like kindness, forgiveness, etc., then, psycho-logically speaking, our love would, at least partly, be prompted by our personal needs and desires and would thus be in the danger of being tinctured with selfishness. Hence the necessity of love for, and communion with, the very essence of God. Sayyid Aḥmad, although he recognises the possibility of this interpre­tation, seeks to conclude here that we are incapable of knowing the attributes of God. He is above our thoughts, speculations and even imagination and above everything people can possibly talk of. There is no passage from human comprehension to the nature of God. Of course, the Qur’ān does qualify the Divine with many attributes, “the Beautiful Names”[6] as it calls them, but in so far as their dictionary meanings are concerned, these attributive words, Sayyid Aḥmad rightly points out, are derivable from our naturalistic observation of man and universe and consequently cannot serve as adequate epithets for the Unique, the Ultimate Real.[7] So God possesses all the attributes ascribed to Him by revelation but not in the sense in which we, with all the limitations and frailties of our comprehension, understand them. Even when we describe Him in most general terms as Infinite, Eternal, Supreme, Absolute and so on, we are not describing Him correctly and sufficiently, because, for one thing, these words are mutually limitative; if they were not so, they would be one word, not four. “No distinctive (human) conception of God can have an exclusive validity and God is greater than the sum of all possible conceptions. . . . If we insist on forming a mental image which we regard as adequate and exclusive, then the object of that image would not be God but merely some figment of our imagination.”[8]

Sayyid Aḥmad is an empiricist. He holds that the entire raw material of our knowledge of things is derived through sensations both external, like hearing, seeing, smelling, etc., as well as internal like common sensibility, imagination, memory and so on. Now, it is a fact that through none of these sensations man has been able to know the nature of a Being Who occupies the status of an “Uncaused Cause” because there is nothing like Him in Nature—neither in respect of His existence nor in respect of His attributes.[9] Thus the character of this Being cannot be known at all. Consequently, the well-known speculations of the philosophers regarding the dimensions of the knowledge of God (whether He knows particulars or universals) or regarding the problem of creation (whether the universe was created by God or it emanated from Him), etc., are all superfluous and un­warranted.

The sceptic attitude of Sayyid Aḥmad is, however, not abso­lute and total. Sometimes he appears to hold it in abeyance, though he does it with qualifications. In agreement with the Mu‘tazilite thinkers, the unitarians par excellence, he particularly believes that the attributes of God, as known to us, arc negations only. Sayyid Aḥmad has, in fact, tried to demonstrate the negative concept of God by desupernaturalising Him in various ways: He cannot answer the prayers of people and do favours to them in response thereto; He cannot intervene in the usual course of Nature and perpetrate miracles; He cannot declare a so-called good thing bad and a so-called bad thing good, so that things are good and bad independently of the will of God; and so on.

Moreover, Sayyid Aḥmad points out, a passage from Nature to God itself involves a process of negation and abstraction. Very much like Aristotle, he argues that whatever exists never really enters into nonentity; only accidents and forms change. It is, allegedly, by virtue of this kind of change only that liquid water, for instance, changes into vapour and vapours change into solid snow. The snow, in its turn, may change into water once again. This is how the process of cosmic evolution goes on. If all the transient forms, that we know, are taken away from the universe, the residue, says Sayyid Aḥmad, will be a permanent something which will be indestructible. The Qur’ān says:

“Everything will perish but He.”[10] Further: “Everyone on it passes away and there endures for ever the person of thy Lord, the Lord of glory and honour.”[11] Now, is that permanent, indestructible, enduring “something” one or many? Suppose it is many. The further question would arise whether or not these many have the capability of accepting the attributes which they actually do possess. Sayyid Aḥmad rejects the view that they have this capability inherent in themselves because, in that case, they must be self-subsistent all of them; but this cannot be the case. The units in an apparent multiplicity must be delimited by, and thus, in a way, be dependent upon, each other. They must have something common among themselves which would explain their mutual co-operation and co-existence. This, in its turn, establishes their being the products of a common cause. This one and supreme cause which holds together the abundant diversity is God. This is the theistic point of view.

The other possibility is that, after abstracting all the attri­butes and accidents, the substance that remains is one. Again, the question further arises whether that one substance has itself the capability of accepting various attributes or that capability is given to it by another being. The former is the standpoint of the upholders of the doctrine of Unity of Being (waḥdat al­wujud) ; the latter, of the upholders of the doctrine of Unity of Manifestation (waḥdat-al-shuhūd). Say Aḥmad does not go deep into a discussion regarding the relative significance and importance of these points of view. He simply ends up with the assertion:

آں برتر از خیال و قیاس و گمان و وہم
وز ہرچہ گفتہ اند و شنیدیم و خواندہ ایم[12]

 

]He is above thought, measure, fantasy and speculation,

And above everything people talk of, everthing we hear and read.]

Anyhow, agnosticism of Sayyid Aḥmad and his negativism, in whatever way it may be expressed and qualified, is not entirely justified. He, for one thing, does not recognise the possibility that there may be other sources of knowledge than the operation of reason on sense-experience. There is, we believe, an intuitive faculty, mystic or religious consciousness or the so-called sixth sense which is a matter of quite a common experience, although, like the aesthetic sense, for instance, there is more or less of it in people. In great mystics it is particularly and exceptionally devel­oped. “There seems to be no reason, then,” Iqbal once observed, “to accept the normal level of human experience as fact and re­ject its other levels as mystical and emotional. The facts of reli­gious experience are facts among other facts of human experience and, in the capacity of yielding knowledge by interpretation, one fact is as good as another. . . . For the purposes of knowledge, then, the region of mystic experience is as real as any other region of human experience and cannot be ignored merely because it can-not be traced back to sense-perception.”[13] R.M. Bucke who used the term “cosmic consciousness” for mystic experience, not only held that this experience “must not be looked upon as in any sense supernatural or supernormal,” but even went further to point out that this consciousness is ever going through a process of evolution in the human species and that it will some day become the psychological condition of a majority of the human race.[14] Anyway, the working of this faculty, if at all we can call it a faculty, is autonomous in the sense that it cannot be subjected to a strictly rational discipline or reduced to a logical syllogism. This was clearly recognised by no less a person than Plato him-self. According to this philosopher of antiquity, just as the Ideas are self-existent and cannot be derived from the facts of sense-experience, so the intuition which perceives these ideas is inde­pendent of discursive reason and sensations. With all the progress in sciences which were once supposed to be purely rational and naturalistic, a contemporary physicist would freely talk of the existence of a super-sensible reality and of the super-rational modes of knowledge for its comprehension. Modern science, although it does not offer a proof of religion which could exactly take the place of mystical experience, “encourages a spiritual view of the world and lends its support to the mystical insight”.[15] After all we can and must, somehow or other, have a knowledge of God’s attributes if He is really to be the goal of our moral aspirations and the object of our worship. An unknowable and “aloof-God” cannot become the basis of a popular religion.

However, Sayyid Aḥmad assures us, failure to know the nature of something does not at all imply its non-existenc.[16] On hearing a voice only, we are certain that there is someone around producing it, although we may not know as to who he is and what is his nature. Similarly, we may differ, as far as we can, regarding the exact characterisation of God, but about the existence of Him we have absolutely no doubt. This fact has nowhere been more clearly recognised than in the thought of Kant, the celebrated upholder of reason as the superiormost instrument of knowledge available to man. Equipped with the forms of per­ception and the categories of understanding, the maximum that man can know is the phenomenal existence: thing-in-itself or the noumenon is unknowable. But still he is reported to have said: “We cannot ward off the thought nor yet can we endure it that a being, conceived as the highest of all possible beings, should, as it were, say to itself: ‘I am from eternity to eternity, beyond me is nothing save that which exists solely by my will; but whence am I ?’ Here everything gives way beneath our feet.”[17]

The strong conviction regarding the existence of God, Sayyid Aḥmad points out, is not based on any blind faith in the vera­city of the Qur’ān and in the sayings of the Holy Prophet. In-stead, the Qur’ān, according to him, clearly envisages a demons­tration of the existence of God with the help of certain references to Nature and to the wonders that it displays. These references, he goes on, can be understood without any religious implications and without any involvement of faith. They have an appeal to common sense and, thus, can claim universal application. Thus all people, whether they belong to one religion or the other or, allegedly, to no religion at all, whether they follow any prophet or not, do necessarily believe in God as the Creator or Maker of the world.’[18] “Man,” he once wrote to a friend, “simply can-not forget God. He pursues us so tenaciously that even if we wish to leave Him, we cannot. Similarly, we ourselves are so indissolubly related to God that even if He wishes to leave us, He can-not.’’[19]

One of the most evident phenomena of Nature which have been shown to prove God’s existence is the fact of causation. We find things and events around us which owe their existence to certain causes. These causes, we discover, are themselves the effects of certain causes of their own. And so on. The unending character of this receding series of causes and effects is unthinkable. Rational propriety demands that we should stop at an uncaused cause which itself may be understood as the cause of everything. This supreme cause is God.[20] The possibility that Nature as a whole may be self-existent and uncaused is summarily ruled out. A whole entirely consisting of contingent elements, Sayyid Aḥmad holds, cannot but be contingent itself. Further, God, Who is thus proved to be uncaused, would be a Necessary Being because, if He were possible and contingent, He would have been dependent for His existence on a cause external to Him. From the necessary nature of this being, it, according to Sayyid Aḥmad, irresistibly follows that He is without beginning and without end, primordial as well as everlasting.

The above is a “cosmological” argument for the existence of God. In the widest sense of the term, all a-posteriori argu­ments, i.e. those which proceed from the world (cosmos) to God, are cosmological. In a narrower sense, however, the term stands for those arguments which go from the non-self-explanatory character of the universe to the self-explanatory being of God. Now what exactly is the principle of explanation involved here? if it is the principle of sufficient reason, then God’s priority over the universe would be only a logical one and in phrases like “impossibility of infinite regress,” “receding series of causes and effects,” etc., the references would have no sequential import. If, on the other hand, it is the causal principle, cause-effect relationship having been understood as succesional in Nature, then God is proved to be chronologically prior to the world. In the history of religious thought this argument has generally been propounded in such a way that it would admit of both these interpretations. The former, which is more plausible and less open to objection, is, however, most generally accepted as the true version of the cosmological argument. The latter is charac­teristically the layman’s point of view which Sayyid Aḥmad also seems to hold. Declaring God as the uncaused cause of every-thing, he, in one of his essays, goes on to enumerate the characteristics of the law of causation. Here he expressly states that the chain of causes and effects is extended in time in such a way that cause always comes before and the effect later on.[21]

Apart from the general criticism that has traditionally been levelled against the popular version of the cosmological proof of God’s existence as formulated above, it may here be pointed out that it, at least, suits well the kind of naturalistic philosophy which claims to be theistic at the same time. Naturalism and, for that matter, any philosophy that gives priority to Nature over everything else or regards it as sufficient in itself to explain all happenings cannot really admit of a personal God. Cosmo­logical argument does establish the existence of a God, but certainly not of one who may be called a person characterised with what Iqbal has termed “a terrific be,” having a direct organic concern with the affairs of the world and of man. “A first Cause of the Universe,” says John Hick, “might or might not be a deity to whom an unqualified devotion, love and trust would be appropriate.”[22] In fact, by virtue of this argument, God is reduced to just an item in the long chain of causes which is arbitrarily raised “to the dignity of an uncaused first Cause”.[23] His relation to the world, on these premisses, stands reduced to a temporal one. God is made a participant in the time stream and, in the last analysis, a part of the natural order itself which is a temporal existence. And, moreover, strictly on the basis of this argument, God is practically rendered a superfluity—an “absen­tee God” of Carlyle—in so far as the present affairs of the world are concerned. Long ago, we are made to believe, God created the first caused cause and gave to it all the laws to be passed on to further causes and to the whole Nature. Once thus reposed in the natures of things, they cannot be changed even by God Himself. God, says Sayyid Aḥmad, is free to enact any law He likes, yet once a law is made nothing at all happens against it.[24] Now, to say that the laws of Nature cannot be violated by God is to say that they have a fixity and are made to he independently operative for all times. God, on these premisses, would be like an emperor who has abdicated his sovereignty in favour of his disobedient offspring who now refuses to give back to his predecessor any of the powers once given to him by the latter or relinquish in his favour any part of his territory. Such a conception of God, says J.M.S. Baljon, is thoroughly “abstract and bloodless”.[25] God, the creator, according to ‘Alī Bakhsh, a contemporary critic of Sayyid .Aḥmad, is thus “not the originator of everything but is merely the First Cause, the cause of the first thing caused; everything else is produced by its own cause... . Thus it comes to this that it would be wrong to say that God creates everything.”[26]

The basic fallacy committed by the cosmological argument due to which it easily invites such criticism is that it abstracts only one aspect of our experience of the cosmological happenings, i.e. their causal behaviour, at the total exclusion of our experience as such. Hence the incomprehensiveness of the conclusion. Talk­ing of the cosmological proofs for the existence of God, H.J. Paton writes that “they appeal . . . not to a rich and full and diversified experience but to its bare bones. The inference, so to speak, is not from the living body of experience, but only from its skeleton. Hence,” he goes on, “the cosmological argument is arid and it may be asked whether it is worthwhile trying to make these dry bones live.”[27] This can be expressed otherwise by saying that this argument takes the universe as, at the most, the sign of God and not His symbol. The difference between a sign and a symbol will be made in the sequel.

Further, the cosmological argument, as enunciated by Sayyid Aḥmad, evidently moves round the concept of cause as it was popular in the contemporary world of science. Cause was con­sidered to be a sufficient principle of explanation and one that always produced the corresponding effect. Having proved God as the final cause of everything, it was thought to have been estab­lished that the existence of God is indispensable for the existence of the universe. The definition of the notion of cause has since undergone a change. It is no longer a principle of explanation. Cause and effect have only a relationship of regularity of sequ­ence or even, as Russell says, of nearly invariable sequence. The maximum that we can talk of is material implication: necessity there is none. Consequently, the effect cannot be predicted with immaculate precision when the so-called cause has occurred, nor can the corresponding cause be named when the effect takes place. Causal laws are now a matter of statistical calculation of probabilities. Cosmological argument thus loses much of its significance against the context of twentieth-century thought.

Besides the cosmological argument, which Sayyid Aḥmad most often mentions, he sometimes also demonstrates the exist­ence of God on the basis of the phenomenon of purpose in the universe. He, in tact, holds on to a teleological concept of Nature side by side with a mechanical concept of it and easily moves from one to the other. B.A. Dar accuses him, in this case, of committing a self-contradiction. Sayyid Aḥmad, he says: “grafted the purely theistic view of nature [i.e. the view which admits of a divine purpose in the working of nature] on its totally anti-theistic interpretation current during his days. . . . It was . . . a totally illegitimate transition from a mechanical to a teleological view of nature; but Sayyid Aḥmad,” he goes on to say, “never seemed to bother about logical consistency so long as his arguments led him to the conclusion which he wanted to arrive at.”[28] However, these two forms of argument have sometimes been shown to be even complementary to one an-other, although Sayyid Aḥmad himself did not specifically recognise this. The cosmological argument, if at all it does prove the existence of an uncaused First Cause, does not prove neces­sarily one which is mental rather than material. To prove that it is mental, a recourse is also to be made to an argument from design or a teleological argument which allegedly explains the evidence of purpose, the adaptation of means to ends and a general harmony characterising the entire cosmos. The Qur’ān says: “He created the heavens and the earth with truth”[29] (i.e. for serious end). Further, “. . . Our Lord, Thou hast not created this in vain.”[30] So, when we find things of the world existing in a beauteous, proportionate manner, says Sayyid Aḥmad, we infer that there is a sagacious designer who has made them in order to realise some grand purpose of His. Talking of the variegated universe, he observes: “Scientists say that those various appear­ances are not caused by anything else, but that it is due to the peculiarity of this matter itself that those different forms occur. If these different forms of hydrogen are the products of chemical compounds, then it does not yet prove that these forms are caused by a peculiar quality of that matter. . . . No explanation can be given for this: how those atoms which resemble each other and belong to the same group become more united to each other, and how it can happen that by a special combination they take here the shape of a mountain and there that of a river or an ocean.... This shows that there must exist a Great and Wise One Who has the power to combine those atoms in such many ways.”[31]

Whatever be the argument—whether teleological or cosmo­logical—the one thing that is indubitably certain, according to Sayyid Aḥmad, is that God’s existence can be established on natural grounds and with the help of the natural reason of man:

We have no special need of an external revelation or any other source of knowledge for that purpose. This is the position which has been termed naturalistic theism. Sayyid Aḥmad quotes many verses of the Qur’ān to support his thesis, for example:

“In the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the alter-nation of night and day, and the ships that run in the sea with that which profits man, and the water that Allah sends down from the sky, then gives life therewith to the earth after its death and spreads in it all (kinds of) animals, and the changing of the winds and the clouds made subservient between heaven and earth, there are surely signs for a people who understand.”[32]

And so on Even prophets, according to Sayyid Aḥmad, had a recourse to naturalistic observation when they desired to have a comprehensive knowledge of God.[33] Prophetic experience of Abraham, as recorded in the Qur’ān, he says, points to the same fact. The Qur’ānic account is as follows:

“And thus did We show Abraham the kingdom of the heavens and the earth and that he might be of those having certainty. So when the night overshadowed him, he saw a star. He said: Is this my Lord? So when it set, he said: I love not the setting ones. Then when he saw the moon rising, he said: Is this my Lord? So when it set, he said: If my Lord had not guided me, I should certainly be of the erring people. Then when he saw the sun rising, he said: Is this my Lord? Is this the greatest? So when it set, he said: 0 my people, I am clear of what you set up (with Allah). Surely I have turned myself, being upright, wholly to Him Who originated the heavens and the earth, and I am not of the polytheists.”[34]

However, in spite of the usefulness of a naturalistic approach, it is nowhere implied in all the Qur’ānic references that the phenomena of Nature are in any way sufficient proofs for the existence of God. There can, in fact, be no logical argument for His existence in which Nature is accepted as the major premiss. Nature is finite and temporal and God is infinite and eternal. These are different orders of being and so cannot hold together. Stoics were among the earliest to uphold a natural theology, but their God, we know, was fundamentally an existing entity of the same kind as the world. Hence the inadequacy of a Stoic approach for the religion of Islam which conceives of God as essentially different from Nature. Observation of Nature as a prerequisite for the knowledge of God has, in fact, been empha­sised by the Qur’ān due to the mere fact that Nature furnishes pointers to God and suggests the right direction in which a search for Him can be fruitfully continued. So it is only an evocative technique. It simply furnishes the occasion to have a knowledge of God Who, thus, in spite of its relevance to Him, retains His singularity and autonomous character. This can be further elucidated by the fact that Nature displays symbols, not signs, of God. Paul Tillich has clearly distinguished between a sign and a symbol. “A sign signifies something by arbitrary con­vention whereas a symbol participates in that to which it points.” A symbol, thus, “opens up levels of reality which otherwise are closed to us” and also “unlocks dimensions and elements of our own soul.”[35] “ . . . higher plane of [reality],” says Lord North-bourne, “can never be described in terms of a lower, yet the lower is always a symbol of the higher and, as such, can suggest or evoke it. Thus on the terrestrial plane everything is a symbol of the higher reality from which it derives its own degree of reality, as it were by reflection or refraction.”[36]

If God’s existence had been demonstrable for everyone simply on the basis of an observation of Nature, it is sometimes argued, it would really have been against God’s declared intention to treat human individuals as free and responsible persons. Given that intention, “He does not override the human mind by revealing Himself, in overwhelming majesty and power but always approaches us in ways that leave room for an un­compelled response of human faith.”[37] Once proof has been given, we lose our right to choose. We do not, for instance, decide to accept the conclusions of mathematics and logic; we merely look to the rigour of their respective arguments. So if the existence of God were conclusively demonstrable, we would not be left with any possibility of making a free decision to have a loving faith in Him. This is what has been known as the “religious coercion argument” against proofs for the existence of God. Evidently, the Qur’ān too envisages no compulsion in matters of religion.’[38] Although it declares itself to be a Book manifest[39] and fully explained,[40] it sufficiently guards against any encroachment on the pleasures of free choice of its readers. Reading the same verses from the Holy Qur’ān, some people choose to follow the right path while others choose to go the wrong way.[41] The Prophet of Islam is reported to have once said to some insistent questioners: “Do not put to me too many unnecessary ques­tions. Whoever does it is an enemy of the Muslims because the answers given would become binding on them and thereby their liberty of action would be curtailed.”[42]

God, Who is conceived to be the Cause of all causes and the Supreme Creator, is unique in being indissolubly and absolutely one. Even the essence of God is identical with His existence be-cause He essentially exists. There is no duality of substance and attributes, subject and predicate, in the nature of God. The Qur’ān, no doubt, describes Him as Willing, Knowing, Powerful, Just, etc., and the orthodox have always held that such expressions only imply that God possesses as qualities will, knowledge, power, justice and so on. Sayyid Aḥmad, however, in agreement with the Mu’tazilites, rejects the orthodox standpoint in the interest of Divine unity. Attributes of God, he holds, are His very essence: “God is alive, not by virtue of life, but by virtue of His essence; He knows, not by virtue of any organ of know-ledge, but by virtue of his essence; He sees, not by virtue of any organ of vision, but by virtue of His essence; He hears, not by virtue of any organ of audition, but by virtue of his essence.”[43]

Oneness of God is, really, the one cardinal principle on which the Qur’ān lays the maximum emphasis, polytheism being an abominable and unforgivable sin.[44] Sayyid Aḥmad tries to establish the truth of this principle, after the fashion of the Qur’ān itself, on the basis of the uninterrupted systematic unity of existence. Things of the world, to all appearances, are dis­jointed pieces, but, when we carefully investigate into them, they are found to be organically related to one another. That the universe is a cosmos and not a chaos and that there is, what Max Planck has called, “the unity of the World Picture,” is the basic conviction without which no scientific observer can validate his results. The finger that I raise, Spinoza is reported to have said, has its repercussions in the farthest of the stars that shine and in the remotest corners of the universe. Carlyle wanted to bring home the same fact when he paradoxically remarked that the co-operation of the entire universe is involved in the growth of a single blade of grass. Sayyid Aḥmad, in this connection, employs the analogy of a clock whose various parts jointly con-tribute towards the unitary working of the whole. The hands, that seem to be moving independently, have in fact the entire mechanism behind them from which they derive the justification for their movement.[45] It is such unity of Nature which necessari­ly points to the unity of its creator whose will has been carried through.

Thus God’s unity is derivable from the multiplicity—homo­geneous as it is—of the universe, because God is the wilful creator of them all. Earliest Muslim philosophers, Fārābi, Ibn Sind’ and others had, however, denied that God’s act of wilful creation can go along with His absolute oneness. These are mutually contradictory concepts, they believed. If God creates the multifarious universe directly by His own volitional act, then, by virtue of the nature of the result thus produced, He Himself becomes multiple. To avoid this alleged contradiction and to vouchsafe Divine unity, they resorted to the doctrine of emanation. According to this doctrine, from the One God only another “one,” i.e. the First Intelligence, emanated by an un­volitional process just as, for instance, certain corollaries would follow from the definition of a triangle or rays would proceed from the sun. Similarly, from the First Intelligence emanated the Second Intelligence; from the Second Intelligence, the Third Intelligence, and so on, till the Tenth Intelligence produced the world of form and matter of ours. So from one only one can come. This was the cardinal principle of the philosophers. Sayyid Aḥmad rejects this entire view and holds on to the doctrine of creation.[46] He says the kind of Absolute Oneness that the philosophers seek to vouchsafe stands violated by their own views too. If God is the One after the philosophers’ way, then, Sayyid Aḥmad rightly thinks, not even one should proceed from Him. God, he says, is one simply because He is the absolute creator of everything. The Qur’ān, when it demonstrates the oneness of God, irresistibly refers to the phenomena of Nature. Had there been more gods than one, it argues, the unity of Nature itself would have been disturbed and there would have been chaos and confusion all over.[47] Further, it says:

“Or, Who created the heavens and the earth, and sends down for you water from the cloud ? Then We cause to grow thereby beautiful gardens—it is not possible for you to make the trees thereof to grow. Is there a god with Allah’?.. .

“Or, Who made the earth a resting-place, and made in it rivers, and raised on it mountains and placed between the two seas a barrier? Is there a god with Allah? .. .

“Or, Who answers the distressed one when he calls upon Him and removes the evil, and will make you successors in the earth’? Is there a god with Allah? .. .

“Or, Who guides you in the darkness of the land and the sea, and Who sends the winds as good news before His mercy? Is there a god with Allah? .. .

“Or, Who originates the creation, then reproduces it, and Who gives you sustenance from the heaven and the earth? Is there a god with Allah. ...”[48]

Sayyid Aḥmad lightly dismisses the possibility that there might be existent another universe absolutely independent of, and unconnected with, the universe with which we are familiar. This will easily imply the existence of another creator in spite of the Qur’ānic arguments. This, according to Sayyid Aḥmad, is just an imaginary possibility and Islam cannot be left at the mercy of imaginary premisses.[49]

Oneness of God, according to Sayyid Aḥmad, has three aspects. There is, first of all, the unity of essence: God is essentially one. Even the trinitarian Christians talk of “three in one” and hence subscribe to the belief in the one essence of God. Second is the unity of attributes: It is not a different God who is, for instance, kind and forgiving from the one who is full of wrath and fury. All attributes are one and they are one with the essence of God. Third is the unity of being the sole object of worship: God is one and unique in being worthy of our prayers and our humility towards Him. This third as­pect, Sayyid Aḥmad points out, was specifically stressed by the Prophet Muhammad (peace be on him), while the other two were already known to the people of earlier revealed religions.[50]

God is eternal, whereas the things that we perceive with the help of our senses are fluctuating and transitory. In a way, as it has already been pointed out above in the beginning of the pre-sent paper, nothing that ever exists can enter into absolute nonentity. It is the forms and qualities of things that disappear and are replaced by certain other qualities. Thus, even if all the attributes of all the things disappear, something, Sayyid Aḥmad points out, must remain. It is this something which is God. By virtue of being thus the ground of all knowables, God is Him-self unknowable. And being the Supreme Creator of everything, He is all-knowing: It would be impossible that one does not know one’s own creation. This, says Sayyid Aḥmad, can be understood on the analogy of a watch-maker who knows, even before manufacturing the watch, as to what will be its constitu­tion and how it will operate.[51] So all the actions that a human individual performs are known to God beforehand. This, how-ever, does not amount to predetermination. It is only prescience or foreknowledge. If, for instance, I know by virtue of my know-ledge of my friend’s character and habits as to how he will behave in a particular situation, this does not amount to com­pelling him to behave that way,

Another essential attribute of God is His will. Nothing can possibly happen unless He wills it so. There is, however, a difference of opinion among philosophers as to how this will operates. Sayyid Aḥmad does not agree with those who think that it comes into operation on every occasion, when something happens or when an action is performed. This is the doctrine of occasionalism which was held dear by the Ash’arite thinkers and by Ghazālī. This doctrine would envisage a direct impact of God on the affairs of man and the universe. Sayyid Aḥmad, on the other hand, thinks that God’s will operates indirectly through the laws of Nature and through the natures of things. Fire, for instance, burns by virtue of the will of God. The occasionalists would say that on every occasion of fire’s contact with something combustible, God creates the quality of burning in it. Sayyid Aḥmad would say that fire burns by dint of its nature which has been granted to it once for all by God, the Creator par excellence of everything.

A related problem is that of God’s omnipotence. Laymen think that, if God could not suspend the natures of things, per­petrate miracles and literally grant our prayers, He would not remain omnipotent. He would, instead, become impotent and powerless, they say, in the face of the callous regularity of the clock of Nature. Sayyid Aḥmad, however, thinks that God’s power is not to be conceived as haphazard. It would not negate omnipotence of God if we say that He cannot do anything that is inherently foolish, absurd and illogical. His omnipotence is wise and regular. Such a prudent and wise omnipotence of God, he thinks, can be vouchsafed only if we attribute the behaviour of things to the things themselves. Sayyid Aḥmad has explained this fact in a beautiful allegory described in one of his articles.[52]

God’s omnipotence and His autonomous will, as these attri­butes are understood by a layman, and, specially when these are bracketed together with the goodness of God, pose a difficulty with regard to the problem of evil which is generally regarded to be insoluble. Consider the following dilemma presented by Hume: “Epicurus’s old questions are yet unanswered. Is He [i.e. God] willing to prevent evil but not able? Then is He impotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”[53] The entire force of this poser, it must be noted, depends on all the words used here being understood literally. On that plain of understanding the charge has never been answered and never will be answered. There have no doubt been philosophers who tried to dismiss this problem by explaining away evil in one way or the other. For some of them evil has in fact no positive exist­ence; it is negative in nature, a mere privation of goodness. And God, it is said, cannot be held responsible for a mere absence, for something which does not even positively exist. According to another such device, evil is represented to be due to the partial view of the universe which is of course inevitable to finite human minds. If we had a whole view of the universe, it is claimed, we would find everything nice and the so-called ugly and evil spots would be seen even to enhance the beauty and goodness of the whole. “The very blemishes and defects of nature,” Berkeley once observed, “are not without their use in that they make an agreeable variety and augment the beauty of the rest of creation as shadows in a picture serve to set off the brighter and more enlightened parts.”[54] However, these, and all other, solutions of this kind seem to be a “patent fraud”. Evil may be a mere privation of goodness or simply due to our partial view of the entire scheme of things. But will it solve the problem? Does evil disappear simply because we have learnt to use harmless phrases for it? “To the cultured Irish Bishop com­fortable in his palace,” says W.T. Stace commenting on Berkeley’s point of view, “the terrible agony of the cancer patient, or of the man burned alive in fire, might seem to make in the world an ‘agreeable variety,’ but they are not this to the man who suffers them. And even if the appearance of evil is due to a partial view of the world, it will still be the case, that the partial view itself really exists and is an evil existence.”[55]

The solution to this and other such riddling and paradoxical difficulties regarding Divine characterisations can, we think, to some extent be found in the Mu’tazilite doctrine of the identity of God and His attributes. To say that the attributes of God are His very essence is to say that, essentially, they have an entirely ontological status and thus are independent of human understanding which, in the final analysis, is the source of all confusions. When the natural reason of man feigns to compre­hend supernatural concepts, confusions are bound to arise. Sayyid Aḥmad, although not in this very context, holds on to the Mu’tazilite position that the existence and the essence of God are mutually identical.

Reference