A Creator Without Any Need to Create

Article 11. Khāliqun bi-lā ḥājah, rāziqun bi-lā muʾnah. He is a creator without any need to create and a provider without any stores of provision.

This further emphasizes some of the points made before: that He is well in control of everything, now speaking specifically about creation. This is the translation used here.

Khāliqun: He is the creator of all creation, without any need for them. He did not really need to create us. This is something that Allah (swt) decided to do, and He did it. There are various things that are related, such as: I created creation so that I could be recognized. Not that He needed to be; it is just something He wanted to do. Allah knows best why He did it. Again, we cannot impute things onto Allah (swt). But the point is that Allah (swt) created us without any need for creating us.

He did not need to be worshipped. He was already glorious; being worshipped does not make Him any more glorious. He did that out of the mercy that He had for mankind, so that He could put them in Paradise. It is just as universities and colleges and schools are established to educate people, and to guide them, to illuminate them, to make them better individuals, and to make them successful. That is the goal of any university.

The unfortunate reality, though, is that human beings are weak. There are good and evil forces around us. There are attractions to good, and there is attraction to evil; there is incitement to evil as well. Allah wants everybody to be successful, but the human fails. Some humans fail, and they do not succeed, just as not everybody that goes to university necessarily succeeds, because they either do not try hard enough, or they are just in the wrong place; they are just not right for that particular position. With Allah (swt), He created in everybody that ability to choose right or wrong, and some people just decide to take it the other way around.

So this place was created so that Allah (swt) could shower His mercy onto mankind. That is one of the wisdoms. There are some who like to take that, and there are some who waste that opportunity. They waste that opportunity, and they get to the wrong place in the Hereafter.