All of Creation Is in Submission

Now the verse says: do they seek other than the dīn of Allah, while all creatures in the heavens and the earth have willingly or unwillingly bowed in submission to Him? What it is saying there, in the Arabic, is: do they seek other than this dīn, when in reality everyone is in a state of submission, willingly or unwillingly, and to Him is their return? So the first meaning of Islam that the Qurʾān gives is that all of creation is in submission. That is the first meaning, because the word Islam means submission: aslama means to submit. If the word is broken down, this is the first meaning that will be found in the Qurʾān: the idea that everything in reality is in submission to God, willingly or unwillingly. We are all in submission.

Now there are areas of submission that the human being recognises. One of them is the call of nature: we have to do certain things that we cannot avoid. One of them is to eat. That is part of our nature: we get hungry, and we must eat or we die. We have to relieve ourselves, once we have eaten or taken drink. We have to sleep. Byron called sleep the gentle tyrant. It oppresses us, but it is not an oppression that we mind; sleep comes upon us and we cannot fight it, eventually — go a few days, maybe, too long, and one goes into acute psychosis. So the idea is that there are these aspects; and then there is submission in our very being. There are limitations to the physical body. We have limitations: we can only eat so much; we can only do so much physically before we are exhausted; we have limitations in our movement, given the structure of our bodies. So there is a type of submission of the self, given that we are temporal creatures, limited to the physical, and limited by the physical aspects of our nature.

So in the Qurʾān there is an idea that everything is in submission; and then there is a reminder that we will be returned. If one looks at creation, things are emerging and then returning into non-existence. Everything that has life comes into existence and then returns to non-existence: the plant, the vegetable kingdom, the animal kingdom, and ultimately the mineral kingdom. All of this is going into non-existence after it had come into existence.