Information about the tawhid

these i found for you very easly on net

this are not my work because i write poems

 

God's Attributes:

For a Christian, Experiencing God's Attributes, is pursuing God with Your Whole Heart, Mind, and Soul. The study of God's Attributes can help grow in the love for God by helping the faithful to know the Lord better through the scriptures.

To a Muslim, Allah (God in Aramaic) the Almighty, is Creator and Sustainer of the universe, Who is similar to nothing and nothing is comparable to Him. If the Creator is Eternal and Everlasting, then His attributes must also be eternal and everlasting. He should not lose any of His attributes nor acquire new ones. If this is so, then His attributes are absolute.



Science of Kalam:

Ilm al-Kalam is a branch of Islamic philosophy, generally referred to as Fiquhe. The Kalam, a discipline which evolved from medieval religiophilosophic debates, deals with Islamic doctrine definition and its defense by discursive arguments.

The rise of Kalam was closely associated with the Mu'tazilah, a rationalist school that emerged at the beginning of the second Islamic century (8th century AD) and became prominent in the next.



The Mu'tazila failure to follow up their intellectual and political position by imposing their views as official Islamic state doctrine lead to a resurgence of traditionalism and the emergence of the Ash'ariyya school, which attempted to present itself as a compromise between the two opposing extremes. However, the problem was not Kalam's fusion with philosophy as its failure to evolve into a fully-fledged Islamic philosophy with its own complete frame of reference.

Al-Ghazali, the Sufi sympathetic Imam of the Asharite school, stated that one must be well versed in the ideas of the philosophers before setting out to refute their ideas. The Incoherence of the Philosophers is the title of his landmark polemic in Islamic philosophy against the Islamic Neoplatonic school of thought, in which philosophers like Ibn Sina and al-Farabi are denounced.



God's Unity and Justice:

Mu'tazilism sought to valorize, under the attacks of Moslem heretics (Zanadiqa), the absolute Unity and Justice of God; but this valorization became quite quickly, a 'justification' ie the Divine Essence and Action become justified before and through human reason. It is to counter this reduction of the mystery that the Ash'aris take their stand, proclaiming the Omnipotence and the Omniscience of God, rejecting any ontological basis for human freedom of action, but seeking to refute the Mu'tazilis, using their own weapons.



God's Eternal Attributes:

The first principle denied the distinction between God's eternal attributes and His essence. This raised a question concerning the concept of divine will in

relation to the doctrine of the world's temporal creation. Most Mu'tazilites rejected Aristotle's potentially infinite divisibility of substance, adopting atomism as the only view consistent with the Qur'anic statement that God knows the determinate number of all things. Its principal dogmas were three:

a. God is an absolute unity, no attribute can be ascribed to Him.

b. Man is a free agent. It is on account of these two principles that the Motazilites designate themselves the 'Partisans of Justice and Unity'.

c. All knowledge necessary for the salvation of man emanates from his reason; humans could acquire knowledge before, as well as after, Revelation, is by the sole light of reason. This factual statement makes knowledge obligatory upon all men, at all times, and in all places.



Attributes and Trinity:

As far as the Sunni Muslim concept of Attributes is concerned, it can be shown that their position is almost parallel to that of Orthodox Christian. If one is to put the Attributes, in Muslim understanding, in place of the second and third Persons of the Trinity (The Merciful, The Compassionate), the doctrine of the Trinity is transformed into Muslim Attributism. However, unlike the second and third persons of the Trinity, which are Intradeical and extradeical, by unification, that is, they were at once the same as God and other than He, these orthodox Muslim attributes were intradeical and extradeical by 'location,' that is, they were in God but other than He. Whereas the unorthodox position of the Anti-attributists in Islam corresponds to Sabellianism in Christianity.



Mutazilah on causality:

The doctrine of the world's eternity, the Mutazili maintained, deprived God of will. It meant the simultaneity of cause and effect which only obtains, as in natural causes, when the effect is necessitated by the agent's nature or essence. Here, however, their principle of divine unity faced a major difficulty: if the divine will is conceived as an eternal attribute and hence not distinct from the divine essence, God's acts become in reality essential, not voluntary. This led many Mu`tazilites to argue that the divine will itself is created�a doctrine vulnerable to the Ash`arite criticism that such a will requires another created will to create it and so on ad infinitum.



Ibn Khaldun's Thought:

Ibn Khaldun's fourteenth century, was dominated by 'neo-Hanbalism', which aired strong suspicion of both mysticism and philosophy. Ibn Khaldun, born in Tunisia in 1332 AD, lived at a time when it was possible to reflect upon a profound period of Islamic thought, as a writer, he was to sum up this period, pointing towards the future of Islamic intellectual enquiry. He used the terms and concepts of his time, and some have argued that he was a culturally-specific phenomenon, interpreting his thought in Western terms must distort it fatally. Logic cannot be applied to this area of enquiry, and must be restricted to non-theological topics.

Philosophy was regarded as going beyond its appropriate level of discourse, in that the intellect should not be used to weigh such issues as 'the oneness of God, the other world, truth of prophecy, real essense of the divine attributes, or anything that lies beyond the intellect's domain' (Muqaddima 3, 38).

Ibn Khaldun was also critical of Neoplatonic philosophy, mainly the notion of a hierarchy of being, according to which human thought can be progressively purified until it encompasses the First Intellect which is identified with the necessary being, that is, God. He argued that this process (Theosis) is inconceivable without the participation of revelation, so that it is impossible for human beings to achieve the highest level of understanding and happiness (Orasis) through the use of reason alone. Interestingly, the basis of his argument here rests on the irreducibility of the empirical nature of our knowledge of facts, which cannot then be converted into abstract and pure concepts at a higher level of human consciousness. Ibn Khaldun follows al-Ghazali in reconciling mysticism with theology, bringing mysticism completely within the jurisprudent, and viewing the Sufi master, as a theologian

 

Edited by poga

Bi ismillahi rahmani raheem

Hi,

You need hard copies for the references is that correct?

Its hard to find classical Islamic works that have been translated into english.

i know its not what you are looking for but you may be interested in these.

http://alghazzali.org/resources/articles/ashariAqeedah.pdf

http://www.livingislam.org/ashari_e.html

http://sunnah.org/aqida/tabyin_kadhib.htm

http://sunnah.org/aqida/alashaira.htm

I believe Imam al Ghazali was an Ashari you may be interested in his work on the attributes of God but it is a deep work and easy to confuse matters espetially if we dont have the prerequisite knowledge required to correctly interprate statments, im speaking from personnel experiance

http://www.islamicbookclub.com/Product.aspx?pk=12660


Edited by rami

Thanks for all the links!!!!

No I do not know Arabic....well, I do know a little but not enough to say I know Arabic...

Would anyone be willing to answer the following questions?

1. Why do you personally reject the notion of the triune God?

2. How do you understand the concept of the Trinity? That is how would you describe it?

Warriorofelyon wrote: Thanks for all the links!!!! No I do not know Arabic....well, I do know a little but not enough to say I know Arabic... Would anyone be willing to answer the following questions? 1. Why do you personally reject the notion of the triune God?

Greetings Warrior.

My reasons for personally objecting to the trinitarian godhead.

The lack of strong supporting evidence from a reliable source.

1) The verses used to establish the thesis from which to "interpret" the Hebrew Scriptures (HS) are at best "implicit".

2) The verses are not from a single verifiable authoritative source. (the NT cannot be verified to any author or any writer that can be established as a direct witness to what Jesus thought, stated, or acted)

3) The thesis is not found until after the first century, along with other competing ideas about the nature of Jesus and God. This kind of claim should require strong support from an authoritative source, since it delves into a form of "idolatry".  

 

The idea that God is a trinitarian godhead is an argument to try and explain the issue of the divinity of Jesus.

1) I reject that Jesus is divine based upon the lack of theolgical evidence that should be supported by some authoritative source that is verifiable fro some kind of "confidence".

2) The HS do not have a need for God to become "man" and have to die for our sins. The HSS cover every required need for sin expiation. A "perfect" blood sacrifice is simply not required in the HS.

So the issue of my rejection of the trinity goes into several components of Church theology. I am not one to reject it due to any "irrational" holes in the theology, since, as Nietzshe once stated, "The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existance, rather a condition of it."

Even the idea that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow has no pure logical bases since the history of the sun rising in the east for millions of years does not mean it must do the same tomorrow.

2. How do you understand the concept of the Trinity? That is how would you describe it?

That is a loaded question! Historically, the Christian doctors have not actually agreed with any consensus, and it has been pointed out to me by a knowledgeable member on this forum that the protestant movement delved into a shade of "modalism" that was considered a heresy in the first thousand years of the church (Israfil, you will have to clearify this as I forget the source you pointed out, and correct me if I have not quoted you correctly). Even the Jehovas Witnesses engage in the Arian Heresy. I think the safest place to start with a general understanding would be the " Athanasian Creed ".