The Muhammadan Creed

The Muḥammadan Creed

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.

Praise be to God, who by His bounty guided us to the knowledge of Him; and blessing and peace upon our master Muḥammad, sent with guidance and the religion of truth, that He might make it prevail over all religion; and upon his pure family and his companions, the stars of certainty.

To proceed: these are the beliefs of the people of the truth, the people of the Sunnah and the community — may God exalt their word and support their realm with victory. They are what every seeker of salvation and every desirer of felicity is obliged to believe. And this poor servant, Muḥammad ʻAbduh, son of ʻAbduh, son of Ḥasan Khayr Allāh, of the people of Maḥallat Naṣr in the province of al-Buḥayrah, one of the provinces of the northern region of the Egyptian country, sets them out in order as he believes them, avoiding the mention of the long-drawn proofs which the understandings of the common people and of the limited find it hard to grasp, and leaving that to the scholars and to those of broad learning.

The first thing obligatory upon us is the knowledge of God Most High. Its obligatoriness is by the revealed Law, and the way to attain it is reflection upon the fixed entities (al-aʻyān al-thābitah) and the originated existents. In our view the existence of the existents, whether entities or accidents, is verified, and our knowledge of that is established; and both of these are by the requirement of primary self-evidence.

The nihilists (al-ʻadamiyyūn) who claim otherwise are disordered in sensibility and deluded in intellect; no weight attaches to what they say, and their view is not reckoned a school to be mentioned when the schools are mentioned, since it contradicts what the innate disposition (fiṭrah) requires.

God has appointed causes for our knowledge of things, God’s customary way being to create knowledge upon their employment; and they are three. (The first) is the five outward senses, which are well known. (The second) is the intellect: the knowledge obtained by it may be self-evident, taking root in the soul without need of thought — thought being the soul’s movement among the things it knows in order to reach something unknown — and it may be discursive, standing in need of that; and this division is self-evident, known to every person by what he finds in himself. And (the third) is truthful report, which is of two kinds. [The first is] the widely transmitted report (mutawātir), which is what a body of men transmit whose collusion upon a lie the intellect holds impossible, this description holding good in every tier of the transmission; and it occurs only in matters of sense. (The second) is the report of the Messenger, confirmed by miracle. Both kinds are accompanied by primary intellection in the attainment of knowledge.

By each one of these three causes firm certainty and decisive belief are obtained. Thus the Messenger’s reporting of something unseen yields us, by way of certainty about it, what sensation and the self-evidence of the intellect yield. Inspiration (ilhām) is among the causes of knowledge, but it is confined to individuals whom the Real Most High singles out for it.

And upon all these causes the knowledge follows by God’s creating, as we have said, and not by way of necessitation (ījāb) nor of generation (tawlīd) — contrary to the philosophers and the Muʻtazilah.

The relations to which our rational judgement attaches have three modalities, no two of which come together in a single relation: necessity, that is, obligatoriness; impossibility, that is, absurdity; and possibility, that is, admissibility. The necessary relation is that whose obtaining the intellect judges, whether by negation or by affirmation, and it is not possible for it to refrain from judging, or to allow the judgement of its removal, in any state whatever or at any time whatever. The negated relation is that whose removal the intellect judges, and it is not possible for it to judge, or to allow the judgement of, its obtaining in any state whatever or at any time whatever. The possible relation is that whose establishment it is possible for the intellect to judge in one state or time, and whose removal it is possible for it to judge in another state or time.

And this is the sense of the words of the learned al-Sanūsī: rational judgement is confined to three classes — obligatoriness, absurdity and admissibility. The obligatory is that whose non-existence cannot be conceived in the intellect; the absurd is that whose existence cannot be conceived in the intellect; and the admissible is that whose existence and non-existence can both be conceived in the intellect. End of quotation.

The world, in all its parts, its substances and its accidents, is originated of necessity. Witness to this is what belongs of necessity to its reality: change and alteration, renewal and expiry in the attributes that never leave it. For everything in the world is either observably perishing or inseparable from what perishes; and nothing is inseparable from what perishes save what is susceptible of perishing — and that is the originated, by the verdict of sound reflection.

And by this origination, established for all the parts of the world, or for its genera and species, we intend temporal origination, which is what is preceded by non-existence — contrary to the naturalists, who say that matter is eternal in its very essence, and to the divine philosophers, who maintain the eternity of certain bodies and matters with respect to time, and to some of them in holding to a specific eternity, even though both have acknowledged the origination of all individuals and particulars. And the self-evidence of the intellect judges that the origination of a thing from itself is impossible — so the totality of the world, which is originated of necessity, stands in need of an originator outside it.

And the originator of the world is God Most High, the Necessary of Existence, whose existence is by His own essence, so that He has no need of a bringer-into-existence nor of anything to complete His existence. He is the truly Existent, the Pre-eternal, the Everlasting, the Endless, the Abiding; free of need of every existent, in His essence and in His attributes; who shares with no existent, and with whom no existent shares, in genus or species or differentia or real description; rather He is exalted above genera, species and differentiae. He is the One who has no second, and the Single who has no partner. All of this is established for Him of necessity by the verdict that He is necessary of existence, creator of every existent. And He is for this reason exalted above place and direction (1), just as He is beyond having His innermost reality encompassed by apprehension. He is neither substance nor accident, and He resembles nothing of the world in His descriptions; neither definition nor number nor quantity nor quality holds true of Him, nor is anything of their concomitants predicated of Him — exalted be He above all of that with a great exaltation.

And He, Most High, is the Powerful by a power, the Knowing by a knowledge, the Willing by a will, the Living by a life, the Hearing by a hearing, the Seeing by a sight, the Speaking by a speech; and those attributes are additional to His essence: they are neither He nor other than He — contrary to the Muʻtazilah, who maintain the denial of the attributes themselves of Him, Most High. His power extends to everything among the possibles that has come to exist and that will come to exist, and is fit to attach to everything it lies within possibility should exist; and there is no act of any agent and no effect of any existent but that it issues directly by His power, Most High.

And the causes we see are outward appearances at which He creates the acts and the effects — contrary to the Muʻtazilah and the philosophers, in the statement of the former concerning generation and of the latter concerning causal efficacy. To attribute the act of creating to other than God is outright unbelief (1). And how could it be possible for anything to issue from a power or a strength that stands under the subjugation of the Owner of the powers and the capacities, who disposes of them by His will?

As for His knowledge, Most High: it attaches to universals and particulars, all of them; nothing minute or great, hidden or manifest, escapes Him; and it attaches to every concept and every relation — contrary to the philosophers, who say that He does not know particulars save in a universal manner; and though they have interpreted this away, it still does not remove conceiving on the side of [His] knowledge — exalted be He above that with a great exaltation. And His will attaches to the good and the evil, yet He is not pleased with anything from us save compliance with the divine commands and prohibitions; so there is a difference between will and good pleasure on His side, Most High: the business of will is to specify the originated thing with a time and a description, and this does not entail good pleasure — contrary to the Muʻtazilah. Glory be to Him: not the weight of an atom in the earth or in heaven escapes His knowledge; nothing that moves moves in the cosmos, and nothing at rest rests in it, save by His will. And the ordered arrangement of the cosmos and the subtleties of wisdom within it prove to us with certainty the establishment of the first four descriptions; and whoever looks minutely into himself and into the existents — and especially into the world of life, from the plant to man — his heart is filled and overflows with the lights of these divine attributes: “Surely in the creation of the heavens and the earth, and in the alternation of night and day, there are signs for those possessed of understanding.”

— Notes —

[25] (1) Place and direction belong to the relations and to the relative limits of bodies. Place is that in which a thing is; and direction is the relation of another’s place to us — so the relation to us of what lies over against our heads is aboveness, and of what lies over against the soles of our feet, belowness; and so we speak of what lies over against the right and the left, the face and the nape, or the front and the back. There is, then, no independent thing whose name is direction, and a spherical body has no direction in it, and the same holds of anything else in itself. And the meaning of the Lord’s being exalted above place and direction is that He, Mighty and Majestic, is above the totality of the world, of whose relations the two of them are — distinct from it, as the righteous forebears said. And once the relation between the Lord and His creation is distinctness, the realization of any other relation between the two, such as the six directions and the places, is precluded. Absolute aboveness and absolute loftiness are other than the aboveness and loftiness delimited by what lies over against a man’s head, which vary with his moving and shifting from one place to another. God Most High is therefore above His servants in their totality, and above each individual among them — not in respect of that individual himself, but in respect of the whole world.

[26] (1) Causal efficacy and generation do appear in certain things, as in the ring’s moving consequent upon the finger’s moving: this is assuredly a cause of that. But the creating intended in this context is another matter, namely bringing into existence and independent disposal by will in accordance with what knowledge requires; and the finger’s motion involves no knowledge on its part and no will. It is impossible that God’s bringing the world into existence should be in this sense, since what is in it of wondrous order — in every genus and every species and every individual, and in the whole of the species and the genera — is a proof that each was brought into existence by knowledge and will and choice; and the unity of this general order is a proof that its bringer-into-existence is One, Unique. And all of this does not preclude His having brought into existence causes efficacious in their effects, which He creates by them and not merely at them, as the Ashʻarīs say. Written by its publisher, Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā.