Allah

There’s nothing,” as the Qur’an vows, “like the likes of Him” (42:11). This is precisely why Muslims worship Him, but also why we think our relationship to Him so indispensable. For this article, I’ll turn to three sources—the Qur’an’s 112th chapter, the “verse of the throne,” and God’s ninety-nine names (well, a few of them)—to help us better understand Islam’s photophobic and iconoclastic monotheism and what it enables us to do.

But as any other proper religious primer would do, we had better start with the caveats. First, although many anglophone Muslims prefer the Arabic, I’ll be calling “Allah” God, exactly as the contraction translates into English: Al (“the”) plus ilah (“God”). Second, all translations of the Qur’an offered here are my own. And third, I refer to God as “He” because He chooses to use this pronoun in the Qur’an—not because Islam or I believes He has gender. Much like in Spanish, all Arabic nouns are assigned a grammatical gender—there’s no neutered, neutral “it.” (Plus I think the English “it” comes across as disrespectful.) That out of the way, let’s proceed.

Who God Is

Because Muslims believe the Qur’an is the verbatim word of God, its 112th chapter, only four verses short, might reasonably be described as God’s autobiography. It comes in two parts. The first: Who God Is. The second: Who He’s Not.

The chapter starts: “Say, He is God, the One/Unique” (the word ahad may be translated either way—if you’re one of a kind, after all, you’re necessarily unique). The next verse describes “God”: “the Everlasting/Self-Sufficient.” Self-sufficiency is the ultimate distinction; unlike everything and everyone else, He’s never needed anything or anyone. What better kind of deity to be dependent on? Therefore the third and fourth verses stress difference: “He begat not, nor was He begotten; and there can be none like Him.”

Why is a quarter of God’s autobiography devoted to ruling out the idea of the Trinity and its idea of Christ as God’s “only begotten son”? In the Muslim view, Christianity (like Judaism) descends from Islam, and not any other way around. All prophets preached Islam, which means submitting (to God’s will); hence prophets like Moses and Jesus and their immediate followers are considered Muslims with whom Muslims therefore closely identify (3:84). Contrary to a common misperception, Muslims don’t believe Muhammad brought anything new. His mission was two-fold: to nudge previous monotheisms back on track, and to share their same message of Islam with those who hadn’t yet heard the word (21:107).

A ceramic wall tile from the seventeenth century depicts the Great Mosque in Mecca and instructs Muslims to travel there.

Though Judaism preserved the monotheism preached by the prophets (again, as a Muslim would see it), Christianity strayed far from Jesus’s teachings, which preached fidelity to the law and unitarian monotheism. The final pages of Reza Aslan’s Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth and Richard Rubenstein’s When Jesus Became God confirm this point. That is why the Qur’an’s 112^th chapter focuses on how God “begat not.” But of course that’s not the end. How do we square a deity we are supposed to worship with the implications of the fourth and final verse, “there can be none like Him”? In other words, if God says He’ll treat us with justice but also compassion, how do we know His concept of justice and compassion comport with our own?

“There is nothing,” not to belabor the point, “like the likes of Him.”

Of course, sometimes God answers our questions.

Because, for example, God preceded the Universe—He refers to Himself as “First” and “Last”—Muslims believe He cannot be said to exist in any time or space. God is not just not everywhere, but He is also not in any physical location. Therefore it would make no sense to say God is near or far...