Tom Facchine – Minute with a Muslim #090 – What Is The Nature of God In Islam

			The nature of God within Islam is between two extremes. It's between the extreme of negative
theology which imagines a god that's completely indescribable remote, you can't even talk about it,
what it is and what it's not it exists and doesn't exist all this sort of nonsense and the extreme
of incarnation, imagining that, you know, God came into Earth and was encompassed and alive within
this earth and lived like part of the creation. So the concept of God and Islam is in between those
two extremes, okay, we do believe in a dualistic universe that means that there is a strict binary
between creator and creator when it comes to essence being entity right. And there is no sort of
		

			permeability between those two realms, okay. By definition, you know, the creator is perfect without
any needs, has, you know, all these specific attributes that are due only to him. And then the
creation is defined by need and defined by contingency and defined by imperfection and finiteness
and all these sorts of things. So it is a binary however, however, that doesn't mean that there is
not an intimacy of relationship or activity between the divine and the not divine or between the
creator and the creator. When it comes to all lost pounds, all his knowledge and his activity, His
love, His mercy, His his goodwill, these are things that permeate the creation, they are baked into
		

			the fabric of creation. And so Allah subhanaw taala as creative input, right, or the
characteristics, not saying that the entity is found in the creation, but the imprint of that beings
activity is found readily in the creation. And so we're between two extremes, right, again, negative
theology, the idea that God was came from Neo Platonism, and other sorts of traditions that God is
so remote that is so ineffable. You can't say anything about him, right? That, then we would say
what you don't believe in anything. You don't believe in a God at all. Such a God is not really a
God at all. Just an abstraction, and God is not just an abstraction and also the on the opposite
		

			extreme incarnation to imagine that we have to have this incarnate God that walked along the earth
with us in human form. And that's the only sort of way to focus our devotion and our worship. We
also reject that idea out of hand so the god and the slime or the concept conception of Allah is in
between those two extremes.