Ali Ataie – What is the Gender of God in Islamic Theology Ustadh (Interfaith Q&A)
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AI: Transcript ©
You called the God of Islam he. Yeah.
What an explanation.
Well, Muslims believe that God has a fire
promise. No. I'm just joking.
That's good.
That was good. So in Arabic as well
as Hebrew, there's something I have to understand
about the grammar.
So every noun in Arabic and in Hebrew
has a gender
assigned to it.
Every noun.
Sometimes it's obvious, what's known as natural gender.
And again, this is also a point of
contention
nowadays.
But traditionally,
a boy was masculine.
So is the word for boy, or Hebrew
ged ed. So the,
the ismulishara
the demonstrative
pronoun
would be masculine.
Right? So even the pronoun demonstrative pronouns in
Arabic and in Hebrew are genderified.
So I would say, had that one of
them, this is masculine, a boy.
Right? Or Hebrews says,
This is a boy. Natural gender. But sometimes,
there is no natural gender.
Right? For example, the moon.
No natural gender.
So, Arabs, in the distant past, and Jews
in the distant past, they would just assign
a gender.
We don't really know why they would assign
male or female, but they would just assign
gender. So they decided the moon is masculine,
and the sun is feminine and Arabic.
Right?
So God does not have a gender.
The Quran
says,
There's nothing like God whatsoever.
There's nothing like God.
So nothing in creation resembles God. So if
we're male and female, if we're black and
white, if we're made of matter, if I'm
standing on something, if I'm breathing, none of
these things apply to God.
God is completely
dissimilar to his creation, essentially.
But the word Allah
is grammatically
masculine.
It's grouped. So it has a lexical gender.
So
because it has a lexical gender of masculinity
assigned to it, in the Quran, it says,
huwa, he is.
He is.
Right? It doesn't mean God is male.
And anyone who says God is male, Muslim
scholars would say,
that's an ephemer. He's,
that position is not acceptable.
They would consider that blasphemy, to say God
is male
or female.
But God uses the masculine pronoun
because the word Allah has grammatical
gender.
The grammatical gender of the name of God
is masculine. It does not mean that God
has a natural gender.
Yes? The god's image be made in image
of God. Is that Yeah. So that's interesting,
because that is in Genesis 2, and there's
also a hadith of the prophets. So it's
not in the Quran, but there's a hadith
of the prophets
where it says
Basically, God created Adam.
And here Adam does not mean
the person Adam. It's generic. The human being.
Right? God created a human being in his
image.
Right? So Muslim scholars and like this, you
know, Maimonides
also deals with this first. Maimonides does not
believe in divine incarnation.
He is anti anthropomorphism.
Maimonides says the meaning of this, as well
as Imam al Hasabi,
they both say
that the meaning of this is, what is
this image of God? The image of God
is the ability to reason.
That's
God's image.
God doesn't have a physical image.
So God created a human being with the
ability to reason.
Just as God has infinite knowledge, he's
qualitatively
omniscient.
Human beings also have that ability. This is
our differentia
to use Aristotelian
nomenclature.
What makes the human being different than the
animals?
It isn't my physical strength.
Put me in a room with a a
lion, I'm done. Right?
It's not our, you know, my eyesight.
An eagle can spot fish underwater 2 miles
up in the air.
What makes us different? Why can we
build skyscrapers to do trionometry?
It's because of our intellect.
So that's the so called image of God,
according to Maimonides.
And according to,
Imam al Qazabi, who's,
sort of the Maimonides
or Aquinas of Islam. Because God doesn't have
a physical image. It's the ability to reason.
Yeah. Of course, there have been
anthropomorphism
in Islamic history that believe God has limbs,
and he sits on a physical throne and
things like that.
But it's considered a deviant position, at least
according to the
normative Sunni and Shia understandings of theology.