The Debt of Submission

So what follows is a look at a few verses in the Qurʾān dealing with the idea of Islam — the word itself, in the Qurʾān. The first one is in the third sūrah, or chapter, at verse 83. It says: do they seek other than the dīn of God? That is what it says.

Two words are worth looking at first. Dīn in the Arabic language is related to debt. It is interesting that the origin of guilt in German is also debt, and there is an argument that a lot of religion is based on a sense of indebtedness, or guilt, towards God. The word dīn is related to debt; and the idea with the word dīn, because Islam is called in Arabic dīn al-Islām, the dīn of Islam, is that literally one could translate it as the debt of Islam, the debt of submission. In other words, the idea is that we have been endowed, or given blessings, by the Creator, and the debt that we owe is submission to the Creator.

Now the word dīn has many meanings, and it comes from a root word, dāna. One of the meanings is to discipline something. There is a tradition in which the Prophet said: man dāna nafsahu — whoever disciplines his soul. So dīn is related to disciplining the soul. Another meaning is the Day of Judgement, yawm al-dīn. In the first chapter of the Qurʾān it speaks of the Day of Judgement, and the word used for the Day of Judgement is yawm al-dīn: the day the debts fall due. The day the debts fall due; the Day of Reckoning; the day of ḥisāb.

Another meaning is a rain that returns again and again and brings the earth back to life. That is another meaning in the Arabic language. So with dīn one gets a semantic field, and one starts getting a feel for the word and what it means. There is an idea, definitely, in the Qurʾān — there is a concept — that there has been an unbroken chain of dīn since the beginning of the Adamic experience on earth. An unbroken chain since the beginning. There is an idea that there have been prophetic dispensations to human beings since time began, or at least since the experience of time for the human being.