Negation Precedes Affirmation

And so, with Allah, when we say lā ilāha illallāh, there are two things happening here. The first is called nafī, which is a negation, and the second is called ithbāt, which is an affirmation. The idea for the Muslims is that one must negate before one can affirm. What is being negated? One is negating everything other than Allah. And this is the idea where reality is related to this word al-Ḥaqq, the Real.

In other words, the Muslims say — and the nice thing about Arabic, one of the many nice things, is that it does not have the verb "to be". So although it is read in English as "there is no god but God", in Arabic the "is", which is called an auxiliary verb, is not there. It is not there. Now, this has important philosophical implications, because when one relates to the idea of being — again, we can move out of being when we talk about God. The Muslims do not view God as a being in the sense of a supreme being in a hierarchy, like the Saint Thomas Aquinas idea of a hierarchy of being, with God at the top of the hierarchy. That is really alien to the Islamic tradition.

The idea of God here is that God is absolute, that God is ultimate reality: that when God's reality is articulated, every other reality vanishes into falsehood or non-existence. This is utter transcendence, in the sense that when we talk about God at one level in the Islamic tradition, we are talking about the radical other. We are talking about that which has no association with anything created — that when we even compare the created to this reality, creation in a sense disappears. Creation has a type of unreality.

For the Muslims, what this means is that any of these words can be supplanted with the divine names, or the attributes. We can say there is no ḥaqq except the Ḥaqq: in other words, there is nothing real except the Real. We can say there is no generous except the Generous — al-Karīm is a name of God. We can say there is no merciful except the Merciful. So we can literally take any of the ninety-nine names and put them in this formula, and it works. Why? Because when we speak about God, we are negating everything other than God. And this relates to God's absolute greatness, the magnificence of God.

Philosophically, it may seem that this is saying only that God is other — but what about God's immanence? That is a very important point, and it is taken up below.

So when we negate, what we are saying is lā ilāha, lā ilāha, lā ilāha: the sun — lā ilāha; the moon — lā ilāha; the stars — lā ilāha. All of this: lā ilāha. There is nothing that can be seen, that can be conceived, that can be pointed to, except that one has to say lā ilāha.

As to the difference between this concept and the concept of God that a Christian would hold: the two can be very similar. Many Christians will believe this. In fact, the Muslims believe that this is almost, really, a universal understanding. The Muslims would believe that lā ilāha is a universal understanding. But it is quite radical in its implications, and that is a matter to return to, in relation to tawḥīd and how this translates into the world — how we behave and act in the world. When we say illallāh, this is the affirmation. So negation precedes affirmation in the Islamic tradition. Negation precedes affirmation. We have to negate other before we can affirm what is real, or what is true.