Three Essays On Tawhid pdf download

Three Essays On Tawhid by Shaykh Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al Wahhab Translated by Ismail Raji al Faraqi

THREE ESSAYS ON TAWHID

1, The Form of the Reformer’s Argument

This book contains three little-known epistles by Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al Wahhab, written toward the end of his career.

In them, the great reformer compressed all the essentials of his mature thought and presented it in succinct form for the instruction of the public.

The addressee, in every case, is his pupil or follower who, having convinced himself of the truthfulness of the plea, is now being instructed in the art of convincing others.

Both addressee-follower and contender are presumed Muslims, holding to the veracity of the Qur’an the reported word of God and to the authentic Hadith as the normative and binding directive of the Prophet—Salla Allahu ‘Alayhi wa sallam. The logical appeal is therefore in every case to internal coherence.

Abhorring inconsistency and self-contradiction, the Islamic mind has always sought to systematize its truth claims and harmonize them together.

Its driving inspiration has been the ideational equivalence and absolute convertibility of the unity of Allah (a/ tawhid) and the unity of truth (wahdat al Haqq). On this account, it has aspired to keep itself free from ambiguity and imprecision and has always sought to express itself in clear ideas and distinct terms. And it has succeeded!

Two essential features have contributed to its success. The first is Islam’s demythologizing tendency.

Its insistence on the absolute singularity and transcendence of the Godhead eliminated all possible fusion of the divine with the creaturely, and hence of any perception of the natural as supernatural or vice versa. “Con-fusion” of God, the Creator, with the creature is the very root and source of all immanence and all myth.

That the creature is an “incarnation,” a “representation,” a hierophany of the Godhead, or its symbol in a way which endows the symbol with vitality or being of its own—such as the assumption made by every claim compromising to the transcendence of God.

Systematically and, one might say, furiously, Islam demolished all myths woven around God, asserting that we either recognize God immediately and without anthropomorphisms or not at all.

The anthropomorphic way of speaking about God remains but it has been in Islam denuded of its myth-forming and mythifying power. The divine attributes are hence taken to mean what they say, naturally and immediately.

There is no feeling or evoking of any need to raise the question. How is the attribute a predicate of its divine subject? Such need to transform the meaning of the term into a myth demanded by the question was abated.

The second pertains to Islam’s primary noetic carrier, namely the Arabic language, where eloquence means clarity or the total conformance of what is said to what is beheld in consciousness.

The lexicographic clarity of Arabic is responsible, in the final analysis, for the Arabic nature of a revelation purporting to affirm the absolute disparity of Creator and creature, the total profanity of all creation and hence, of the naked reality of everything as it is. To everything, object, state, or event, Arabic gives one word which fits mugtadd al hal (the requirement of its actuality).

It was the Word of God that fulfilled all the requirements of Arabic bayan par excellence sublime, and thereby set the norms of clarity and precision and froze them to eternity.

It is hence not surprising, but nonetheless wonderful, that the reformative mind in Islam has perceived its cause as a case of logical consistency or internal coherence.

In its view, the Muslims who have strayed from the straight path have committed a logical error, that of violating the laws of internal coherence, inherent to the Islamic system.

 That is why, for Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al Wahhab, as well as for all other Muslim reformers, reform is the correction of an understanding.

But unlike other corrections of the understanding, Islamic reform does not seek to supplant one idea supposedly false by another supposedly true, It does not mean change at all, but the repudiation of a proposition introduced in violation of other propositions held to be essential to Islam.

That is why Islamic reformers have presented their case as an appeal to propositional consistency. Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al Wahhab did so in exemplary fashion. 

For the Islamic mind, propositions are statements about reality, not mere emotive expressions of a sentient subject, or mental relations between passing phantasms.

Although the Islamic thinker has never thought of identifying mental with real objects and relations, the stream of consciousness with reality, he has persistently held that reality cannot be in contradiction with itself because it is God’s work.

God Whose omniscience, justice, and wisdom preclude all ignorance, weakness, and arbitrariness, would not have created a self-contradictory world.

Hence although the consistent system of propositions would still have to pass the test of correspondence with the reality, no statement could claim to have passed that test which runs counter to the other statements integral to the system.

Again, this is not to identify the rest of reality with mankind’s cumulative wisdom; but it is to establish necessary parallelism between the two levels of thought and reality, parallelism consisting of an internal structure which man recognizes as coherence,