The Concept of God In Islam

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similar manner him In the name of Allah, Who is the most Gracious, the Most Merciful. hamdu Lillahi Rabbil alameen all praise or gratitude or thanks are deserving and belong to Allah, the One who controls everything that exists

or shall do La ilaha illa Allah and I bear witness that there is nothing to be worshipped except the one true Creator of all things.

Wha hoo luxury Cara and he is uniquely alone and he has no equal what I should do and Mohammed Abu rasuluh and I bear witness that Mohammed is indeed his servant and his last and final messenger. How is everyone? Good.

Tired of worship? My first go home

before we begin, how many guests Do we have with us here who are not Muslim right now? Please raise your hand so I can know that you here have a few Okay, how many of you this would be your first time ever visiting a mosque

okay for for you guys. How does it feel? Being surrounded by all these terrorists? I mean, Muslims Excuse me.

For I've been watching too much fox news today.

No, in reality,

I hope they've you've been made to feel welcome here. If you have not been except apologies from this community, from me on their behalf. We are supposed to treat guests in Islam. There are rulings for almost everything in our religion and guests is one of those things that are impressed upon so much that we are to treat our guests so kindly. One companion said that our Prophet Mohammed stressed upon us so much the treatment of guests that he thought that they would inherit from us. So we have to treat guests very, very honorably, as we would treat someone our own close family members. So we hope that you've received that cordiality from us. Hopefully, you've received some

southern hospitality along with it, we are in Nashville. I'm a southern boy born and bred in South Carolina. So I know about all about Southern I lost my train. quite a long time ago, I left South Carolina, you know, a very long time ago. But I hope that you've received not only some southern hospitality, but some Islamic hospitality.

And hopefully, if you have any questions at the end, we can answer them for you the best of our abilities. It's a bit tough to do talks when there is a mixed group of Muslims and non Muslims because you have to try to find a way to make things beneficial for all parties.

But what I'm going to try to do is be very simple, but be very intricate about the simplicity of the belief system in Islam, about the one whom we worship.

Because when I first heard about Islam, back in the late 90s, before I accepted Islam, accepted Islam in 1998, I was not born and raised Muslim, I was born and raised a Methodist. I accepted Islam in the winter of 1998.

Before becoming a Muslim, I had the conception and been had been taught that Muslims worshipped a completely different and unique God, whom they called a law. And I was also taught that he lived in a box in the desert in Saudi Arabia, and that he was symbolized by the moon. And you know, all of these week, there was a lot of weird things. I heard about this, a lot that this Muslims worshipped.

When I came to learn about Islam, and the more that I've learned about this concept, the more beautiful It's become to me. And I'm going to try to break that down for you. I'm going to try to break three things down for you tonight, and for our Muslim audience as well. These three things are uniquely important, they are of paramount importance in our religion. I think the Imam is even teaching after fudger, a book written about these three things called fella follow suit. Three, three principles that every Muslim has to know because it's paramount. Number one, what do we believe about our Lord? What do we believe about our Prophet? And what do we believe about our

religion? Because these are the three things that we as Muslims believe will be questioned about when we go to our graves and based on our answers to those questions, we will either have a good ending of our life into the next life or it will be bad. So I want to discuss these three things. The first of them being what do Muslims believe, about Allah, God, because it's the reason why Muslims use the word Allah rather than God. And a lot of people will say that they're synonymous and they're not. They're not they're not synonymous. They are used interchangeably, but they mean two different things. They mean two different things.

For instance, the word God can connote a lot of things

different ideas in the minds of human beings. If you were to ask a Hindu What does God mean to them it would be something totally different than what a Christian believes God means to them and to what

a Muslim believes God and some people have their own ideas they've made up their their these new age religions God has become something totally different. So that word God can have a connotation in people's minds, in people's minds.

That word God is also falling fault to the English language, the English language being a new language has linguistic issues. When it comes to God, God is a word that can be made pearl can become gods, it can be made feminine, can become goddesses, Goddess, gods or goddesses and things of that nature. So this, this word is very interchangeable. So the reasons why the Muslims used the word Allah, there's a reason why. And it's due to the language and its construct in Arabic.

There is a word synonymous for God in the Arabic language is a word that that doesn't mean God in the Arabic language. What word is that brothers sisters, ILA is a word called Illa, which means anything that is given worship, anything that is considered to be given worship, and that can produce harm or benefit for the person. And that can be anything, I can take this little thing here this little ornament, I could take it home, I could give it worship. And I could think that it brings me benefit or it could do me harm. And this in the linguistic sense, becomes anila becomes a god, it becomes a god to me. And this has been true throughout the history. The people at the time

of the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him, they had many of these gods, many of them, they had over 300 of them. And sometimes they would create their own God, they would fashion it out of clay and worship it. Some one companion said that one time I had nothing to make a God out of so I made one out of dates. And I worshipped it until I became hungry, and I had nothing left to eat, and I ate it. You know, this was this was their, their their belief system, but they would create their own God their own Illa they would have a personal Allah in their home, that they would worship they thought brought them benefit or harm.

But when we say Allah, we are saying, Al Illa v God, we are giving some proper connotation to the one who we worship. Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah is a word that is constructed to mean the Creator of the heavens and earth. And it is a word that linguistically has its own

rulings, it cannot be made plural, it cannot be made, it cannot be changed from its construct, it cannot be more than one it is singular. It is neither masculine or feminine in and Arabic language that's miraculous as well, because most words, especially proper words, they have a masculine or feminine tone to them, but the word Allah is neither is neither, it cannot be changed, it is the God. So when a Muslim says Allah, we are speaking of the only one who created the heavens and earth and who upholds it by his power, that's who we worship. So that's why Muslims will often use that word a lot, we will often use that word a lot in terms of or instead of saying, God, we and we

become habitual, it's saying it habitual it's saying it so I hope that makes sense that word a lot only in the mystic sense. singling out the Creator of the heavens and the earth is the one to whom we worship, there is no question in our mind, of what that means what that means. Now, what do we believe about Allah? This could get very lengthy, but I'm just gonna divided into the three most simplistic categories, according to the Islamic teachings. And is that number one, we believe a law is one and it's called the knee and meaning that we believe God is uniquely one, he is not one like the number one, you see the number one is also a interchangeable yes or no, I can manipulate the

number one, I can add another one to it, it comes to, I can take away half of it and it becomes one half or one third, that number is manipulatable. And there

is a

word in the Arabic language that means one word is that

one word, and again, that's a manipulated number. I add another to it, it becomes its name. If we refer to Allah as Whitehead, he's known as alpha one v one v one. But when God revealed about himself in the Quran in a very short chapter, he said, cool, say about me, whoa, Allahu. I had a had I had is a different word. It means one, it means one. We believe that God is one but we believe that he is ahead and is a number that

That is not like any other one night like any other than oneness. And when God spoke about himself in the Old Testament, he said, I, the Lord your God, he said, he wrote through the I, the Lord your God and I said, which also is very similar to this word grammatically, the word ahead if I were to take ahead and add it to another hand what happens? What do I get?

What do I get? You get ahead, because I had signifies a oneness that cannot be added to, it cannot be subtracted from it cannot be multiplied, it is unique of its own, and we say that oneness belongs to the Creator. So oneness like no other oneness. He is one uniquely alone by himself. He does not share his oneness with anyone else. He doesn't share what his attributes and his power and his ability to create in his ability to harm or to benefit mankind belongs solely to him alone. So we are truly monotheistic in that sense, as that we see our Creator Allah as uniquely one, unlike any other oneness that exists in the universe. That makes sense as how we look at our Creator. Now,

within his oneness, it also becomes very

broken down. And this is one of the things that I loved about Islam when I accepted Islam in 1998, was this very codified, our religion is very cool. I'm a person who is kind of a perfectionist at heart. My wife says, I have an OCD. She says, I have full fledged OCD, I don't think it's that far gone. But I'm a person who likes things a certain way. I like things orderly, I like things to have some system and Islam fulfills that within me because it's very systematic. Everything is laid out for us. When it comes to the oneness of Allah, his oneness is divided into three major categories. And these three major categories are beautiful when you understand them. And even as Muslims, when

we grasp the understanding of what these categories mean, it changes the dynamics of our relationship with the one whom we worship. Because when you go to the grave when we as Muslims go to the grave, we believe that there will be two angels that will come and question us, they will sit us up, and the first thing they will ask us is what?

Man rongbuk? Who was your Lord? Who did you worship? Who did you serve? Who did you serve? And all of us, at some point, have this as Muslims, we believe that we're going to have no problem saying or Allah that my Lord was alone, we see that's kind of problematic, because you need to really understand what that means first, because this is not going to be just like a normal questioning. This is an interrogation after your soul has been taken from your body and you are in complete stress. And this is a whole different, you need to really have something firm in your heart. What is known as scholars is the karma to genuinely be given a steadfast and firm heart to answer this

question properly. And how can you speak so boldly about someone whom you didn't really know? Well, because the angels are going to ask you Even if you say my load is a lot, they're gonna say, how did you know that? What is your evidence for that you need to show and prove. So when we say that Allah is one, we say that he is in he is one in terms of number one is Ruby, Ruby, meaning that he is the ROM or the lowered, sustainer, cherisher, maintainer controller of everything that exists. He is the one who maintains everything within existence, and we believe that he does so with no effort. It takes no effort on his behalf, he doesn't become tired. He doesn't have to exert for this, he does

it with no effort, meaning the entire universe, whatever exists, he maintains it with no effort. When we say that Allah is our rub, he is our Lord. We say that in an attempt to understand that everything is because of him. Everything if we were to someone were to ask me,

Why is the sky blue? Why is the sky blue? There are many scientific reasons behind this and many sciences have explained why the sky is blue. But simplistically in Islam, if you were to ask me, Why is the sky blue? My initial response is that because Allah is

Allah is wrong, because he sustains and maintains that he has decreed for it to be blue. So therefore, it's blue. You might understand the process by which he has made it blue. That still doesn't change that he's the one who made it blue. Why is grass green? Because

when I pick up food to eat, I believe as a Muslim that the reason I am able to eat the reason I have food in front of me and it's been given to me as a provision to eat is because Allah is because he has given me the ability, that ability to do so. You see, this is something that is supposed to create within the mind of a Muslim

sense of ease, a sense of ease. Because when you understand that your Lord is in control, then you don't stress as much you don't stress as much.

For instance, if you get behind and I'm not trying to say that you should is equating a low with a driver of a car, but I'm just trying to give you some mental understanding, you get behind the wheel of a car with a person whom is known to be a reckless driver. Yeah, not to be a reckless driver. And this is just about every car I get into in Saudi Arabia, you always have this fear that they drive like mad men over there.

Hmm.

No, no, no, I'm talking about him.

But you know, there are some people you get in the car with you putting on the seatbelt and you're paying attention. You're watching what they're doing. Because these these, this guy is going to drive like a nut. And you would have worry and stress about that trip, correct? Yes, you'd be some little bit worried. But now what if you get behind the wheel of somebody who you know, to be the best driver, this person is someone who pays attention on the road, he he's always very, very adamant about the way he drives, you wouldn't stress as much you might even sit back, relax and take a nap. Because you know, you're going to get to your destination safely. When when a Muslim

understands completely, that Allah is wrong, that Allah is in control, that he maintains and sustains all of the fears of his creation, then you don't worry as much because you know, if something bad happens to you, you become

you become submissive to that and have solace in it that Allah is Robert, he has decreed it to be so for whatever reason he has choose, therefore I'm going to trust it, I'm going to trust it. So when we say that our law is wrong, we say that he is wrong. And the reason why we say that as a part of tawheed, as that is because that we believe that only he is wrong. No one else controls the affairs of the heavens and earth. No one else is has the ability to give me food and drink and air and all of the no one except the one who created me. Even if it's another person who comes and gives me a plate of food, the original source of that is the one who created all of the means for it to exist

in the first place. So we say that a lot is that he is one that he is one in his lordship. He's one in his lordship, that gives you an understanding that you don't need to stress so much about your life and things that happen. You plan and you try the best to live your life, what happens this out of your control, you don't worry about it, you just do what you can within the means that are given to you.

Secondly, secondly, we say that Allah is one in terms of his earlier here, in terms of him being the only Allah The only God, that the reason why we worship Him, as the only true God is because he deserves to be worshipped as the only true God because He alone created creation, he alone fashioned, being the mother of my womb, he alone did all of these things. Therefore, if He alone is the source of all existence, then he deserves and have the right to demand that that which he created, worships Him. Therefore we serve him in that and we worship only him alone. As a Muslim, we don't give anything that's considered worship, to anything else to anyone else, except he who

created all things, anything that's considered worship, prayer, sacrificing, anything, anything that a person would consider to be worshipped. As a Muslim, we are not allowed to give that to anything other than he who created all things, because he deserves to have that. And everything other than Him, is not deserving of that they're not worthy of that, because they themselves are in need are part of the creation. So therefore, we would not worship something or give worship to something which they themselves are created in part of the need of the robe of creation, we worship the love of the creation, so we worship Him alone.

The third thing, the third part or the third major breakup of the oneness of Allah is in terms of what is known as a smart one is defects in his names and attributes, meaning that attributes qualities that belong to God belong to Him alone. And those qualities are not like any one else's qualities and they are not similar or have any similar to to anything else. If we say that Allah is alcoholic, the creator, He alone is the creator. No one else shares that with him. If we say that Allah is a rough man, He is the Most Merciful. Yes, people can have Rama, people can have mercy with one another. But it's not a perfect mercy, like the mercy of the Creator. When we say He is

merciful, he's merciful in the most perfect sense. There's no fault in it whatsoever. Human beings even if we're good in and merciful and kind to one another. There's always going to be fault in it because we're human beings. We're not always going to do the right thing. But when we say that, there is an

attribute are about our Creator, we say that he alone owns that attribute in the most perfect sense. In the most perfect sense. We say that always I will do these loving, he's loving towards his creation. But it's in the most perfect sense of the word. It's in the most perfect fashion, of the understanding, even to the point where we really can't comprehend it. But we know it's the most perfect form of it. So and when it comes to his, his

qualities, we believe that our Lord, what he says about himself, we affirm that for him, If Allah in the Quran, or in the authentic Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him, says that he has hands does not say that he has hands.

does Allah say that he has hands? Yes, we say that Allah has hands, but they're not like our hands. You can't equate them to the hands of human beings, but they are be fitting him and we don't even try to interpret it. We don't try to comprehend it. Because this little mind here, this little bitty brain is not possible and is not capable of comprehending how the Creator is. We say that our Creator has eyes, he speaks and things of that nature, things that human beings do, but they're not the same. They're not the same. We don't see our Creator like us. This is Islam breaks off from other religions that we do not believe that God created us in His image. We do not believe that we

believe that God is Allah is himself. Everything about him is unlike anything else. It's not like anything good in his creation. We believe you have Allah, Who is alcoholic, who is the creator, and everything else is known as my loop that which is created, and the two are not alike. The two are not alike, that which is created is not like the one who created it. Does that make sense? We distinguish that we distinguish that. And we believe that our Creator is not within his creation. He is above his creation. He is above his creation. And yes, we do affirm as Muslims for our Muslim brothers and sisters here that Allah is a above his creation. Yes, we say that allows above it. I've

had so many people rely on me when I say these types of things on my Twitter feed and things of that nature, that you've given a lot of place and therefore you've done all this and support. No, we believe that Allah is above his creation, because the Quran says he created the heavens and earth in six days from his tower. And then he ascended above his throne. When the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him. One of the companions came and said, I have a servant girl and I slept her you got angry and slept or what he should eat? What should he do? He said, Bring the girl to me. The girl was brought to him. The Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him asked her, where is Allah? What did she do?

If I know what she did, she pointed up. He said, she is a believer set her free. She's a believer set her free. So we say that Allah is above his creation, he's above his creation is not within his creation, he is separate from it. So these are the things that we believe about our Lord, that He alone is the creator of all things. He alone is the Sustainer of all things. He alone is the maintainer of the universe. Therefore, we worship Him because He is the one who deserves to be worshipped. He's the one who deserves to be worshipped. And based on that principle, we go into the next category, the next category, based on that principle, we believe, and it is only logical that

if God created everything, if God created everything, then he must have created a system by with which to govern it. Does that not make logical sense? If there were no system that govern the universe, if there were no rhyme or reason to the entire universe whatsoever, and it was in total chaos, it would have destroyed itself by now. It would have turned into shambles. By now. There is an order if you look at the universe, and I'm a person who loves

astrophysics, I love to look at the universe and how it is governed. And the little that we understand that we only understand about 5% of the known universe. The other 95% is unknown to us. A lot of it's what's called dark matter that we don't even grasp exactly what it is. We know that it's there. We're not figured out what it is yet. They've spent billions of dollars in the CERN supercollider to try to figure out what that dark matter is, but they've not gotten there yet. And looking for it. They call it the God Particle. I don't think it's gonna be found. But we believe that is governed by a system. It is governed by a system. Everything has a system. There's a reason

why the sun rises from the east sets in the west. There's a reason why the sun is a certain distance from the planet earth because if it was a little bit closer

No life a little bit farther, no life, there is this moon however it got there from an asteroid that broke off and tore part of the earth. But what however, that Moon is, is paramount for sustaining human life, that moon were to disappear tomorrow, it would be a massive problem on Earth, we wouldn't survive very long without it. So we believe all of these things are part of the governance of the Creator, for his creation, for his creation for us to exist, he knew he was going to put us on this planet. So it had to be designed in such a way that it was going to sustain the life which he wanted to create. So everything has a system

as well as human beings, but we believe the difference between the rest of the creation and the human beings is that God gave them both a system, the rest of the creation just follows the system. They don't question it, they don't think about it, they just they just follow the system. They just do what they're supposed to do. Everything else just does what it's designed to do. The human being was given something called a free will, we were given a choice. Yeah, we were given a choice to choose refuse, it was a heavy burden that we didn't really understand the moment we accepted this choice, but it is part of the human creation is that we are allowed to choose. But we still believe

that it is part of God's justice, that if you are going to create human beings, placed them on this earth, tell them that at the end of your life, you will die, and that you will be resurrected, and you will face judgment and either go to heaven or hell, then he should have given us a system by with which to get there. Because if he would have just said, figure it out on your own, who then any form of judgment, any form of resurrection, any form of Hellfire and paradise would have been unjust, he should have sent us all to heaven. Because we did the best that we could we had we figured it out. We did we we did what we can do? No, there must be one system. It's like, if I were

to give you a computer, for to give you a brand new Mac, and you were to turn it on, and there's no operating system, you would come back to me and say, hold on a second, this thing doesn't work. There's no there's no OS. And I were to tell you look, you just make it work. You know, I mean, you figured out yourself, you would tell me how to there's no way there has to be a system designed specifically for this and like I just put any system on it. No, no, no, you have to put us in a system designed for it. Right.

This is the way that the human being there's a system for us. And if we don't use the system that was created for us, there's problems, there's going to be problems. We believe that that system is called Islam. That system is called Islam. Now that word Islam has, unfortunately been targeted with a very negative connotation. The word Islam has become synonymous with terrorism, with wickedness with killing, with murder, all this, the media does a good job of playing with the words that they've been. And it's nothing new. They've been doing this since media existed, we're not. And we as Muslims are not the first community to face this. We're not the first community to face this.

Native Americans have a lot more to complain about than most Muslims, when it came to

extremism and racism and, and terrorism quite a bit to complain about. As a matter of fact, African Americans went through a lot more than then than we will ever understand yet here in America, the the Jews went through the same things when they came here, the Chinese, the Japanese went through some of the same things. So it's always there's always kind of been a scapegoat for America to push forward some of its foreign policy and politics. But nevertheless,

things are happening, this Lamb has put in a negative connotation. So what does this land mean? Islam is a very simple understanding if it's put properly in its right context, the word Islam is also an Arabic word. So it has to be understood from that context, because a lot of people will tell you Islam means peace. And that's right and wrong. It's right. It's, it's, well, it's not wrong. It's right. But it's not completely right. It's not was not if I were to tell you that Islam means peace, then a very intelligent question for you would be then why are Muslims not living in peace? You know, I mean, if you have Islam, your countries are very peaceful. I'm telling you right now you

go to Muslim countries, they're not the most peaceful places on the planet. So why is it that Muslims are not peaceful? Let me tell you what,

Islam the root word of it doesn't mean peace, Selim selama. But that root word could also mean sincerity. That root word could also mean servitude, that root word could also mean submission. And it also could mean peace.

It also could mean peace. So when the word constructed Islam, what it means is a codified system, a codified system of servitude, a codified system of servitude to the creator sincerely in submission to him, in order to have peace in this life, in order to have peace in the next life. That's what Islam is. Islam is the operating system, a codified operating system for the human being sincere

Really submitting yourself to the Creator, so that the final result would be peace in this life and peace in the next life. If someone were to tell me that asked me, Why are Muslims not living peacefully then I would say it's because we're using the wrong operating system right now, we're not using the complete system of Islam, we might have a modified operating system that we're calling Islam. But there are bits and pieces missing, which make malfunctioning hardware, make money if like, if you put a half OS in there, it's some things are not going to work, right. And that's what we have in our countries right now we have a modified system that is not complete, therefore, it's

not doing its job. If you look back at the lifetime of the Prophet Mohammed is our dear brother Abu buddy was talking about, he established a very peaceful environment, very peaceful environment, and Muslims conquered a large portion of the civilized world for a very long time. And if you look at the history, unbiased history, about the history of the Muslim Empire, when it ruled over Spain, when it ruled over Europe, when it ruled over Arabia when it ruled over northern Africa, it was an extremely peaceful time for the world Jews lived under they would they Jews were migrating under to live under the Islamic system. Christians when Muslims took over Jerusalem, asked them not to leave

just and one of the things they want. He said, Please do not ever put this back into the hands of the Jews. You keep control. If you want control, you can have it just make sure you always run it. And there was a very peaceful time until the time of the Crusades. So when the system is put