What Do You Mean by God?

Now, many Muslims will say that if somebody says to them, "I do not believe in God", then a Muslim would want some clarification. What do you mean by God? Because we might not believe in the same thing. In other words, there are many people in this time, certainly, who have rejected more traditional concepts of God. If one moves into, in a sense, the Durkheimian view of God, which is really that human beings project — that we project; or the Freudian view, that, again, human beings felt insecure, and wanted to create a big daddy up in the sky who is going to take care of all of us and make us feel secure — this is the idea within a modern Western view that, in a sense, God is a psychological mechanism that enables a human being to create some psychic stability. And there are people who reject that. There are people who reject that idea.

From the Muslim point of view, the Muslims would say that belief in God is part of the fiṭrah nature. It is inherent to the individual. The Qurʾān uses a word, fiṭrah, which means the original nature:

The aboriginal nature of the human being is called fiṭrah, and that is that human beings are by their nature believers. They are believers. The problem is that the belief is not full; it is not a correct belief, because of a misunderstanding about ilāh. So there are animists. Animists believe in something outside of themselves. Or there is somebody who associates with God, who believes that there is duality — for instance Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism — or a multiplicity of gods, in Hinduism. And even when one gets into the Brahman — the Brahman is kind of… what the Brahmans do not tell the other people is that they really do not believe in the idols. At the highest level of Hinduism, these are kind of simple ways of allowing for people who have not evolved enough; they have not moved into the Brahman class, which takes several lifetimes. But the Brahmans can understand God as the ātmā, or that which does not have form. So they do have a concept of a formless God: nirguṇa. They do have that concept.

But the Muslims would say that all of these ways of viewing or understanding God, if they are not preceded by negation, will fall into an incorrect understanding. And the idea is that the intellect cannot know God except through God. There is a fiṭrah nature, which is to recognise that God exists — to recognise that there is something outside of oneself. But the intellect is not sufficient to understand God as God wants to be understood. And this is where revelation comes in.