Is THEM Guilty of Shirk? - Dr. Wesley Muhammad

―So if it is said (by the believers in an embodied god): ―Why did he (the Prophet) … not say
[regarding God]:
He exists, (but) is not a body (jism),
nor a substance (jawhar),
nor an incidental attribute (‗arad),
nor is He inside the universe, nor outside of it, nor attached to it, nor separate from it,
and He is not in a location (makān),
nor is He in direction (jihah), rather all the directions are devoid of Him.
―For this is the truth with a people (i.e. the speculative theologians), and it is possible to express
that (belief) in this manner [using these words] just like the speculative theologians have
expressed it. And there is no shortcoming in [the Prophet‘s] (sallallaahu alayhi wasallam's)
expression, nor any laxity in his desire to reveal the truth, nor any deficiency in his acquaintance
(knowledge).‖ [End of Quote]
The believers in an embodied Allah take the mutakallimun to task here: given that the Prophet
Muhammad was in no way lax in terms of his desire to propagate the full truth as he knew it; though he
had no intellectual deficiency that would have limited the truth as far as he possessed it; though he lacked
nothing in terms of linguistic and semantic facility that would have precluded his clear articulation of the
truth as he knew it; why did he not affirm the bodiless, omni-located god to whom he (al-Ghazzālī) and
the speculative theologians were calling the people? Simply put, the anthropomorphist interlocutors ask:
why is there no evidence that the Prophet taught the people to believe in the same god to whom you
(mutakallimun and al-Ghazzali) are calling the people? (Note: this is not a rhetorical question from me, as
Bro Mubaashir assumes. This is an actual argument advanced and which al-Ghazzali addresses in a most
informative fashion). Now, one would expect al-Ghazzali to respond with: ―Well, the Prophet DID inform
the people of this god, and this is where…‖ How does he in fact address this objection? He says:
―We say [in response]: Whoever considered this [i.e. what the Mutakallimun are upon] to be the
reality of the truth has explained it thusly: That if he (the Messenger) mentioned [the
above, i.e. the omni-located and bodiless god], the people would have fled from
its acceptance, and they would have hastened to reject (it), and they would have
said: ‘This is completely impossible’, and they would have fallen into rejection
(al-ta'tīl)…And the Prophet (sallallaahu alayhi wasallam) was sent as a caller unto the creation
[inviting them] to the bliss of the Hereafter, as a mercy to all of creation. How can he speak
with that in which there is the destruction of the majority? Rather, he was
commanded not to speak except at the level of the people's intellects.‖[End of Quote]
Why didn‘t the Prophet, fully capable of affirming the truth of this bodiless god, actually do so?
Because, al-Ghazzālī claims, the Prophet was commanded by God to speak ―only at the level of the
people's intellects.‖ Because the people to whom the Prophet was sent were not intellectually capable of
grasping this ‗truth‘ and therefore would have rejected this god as an impossibility and thus rejected Islam,
the Prophet withheld the truth of the incorporeal god! It is not necessary here to deconstruct al-Ghazzālī‘s
elitist and condescending presumptions regarding the masses of the Muslim followers of the Prophet (i.e.
the Black Sheep!). It is enough to emphasize that al-Ghazzālī here clearly admits that the ‗Islam‘ of which
he is said to be the ‗Proof‘ is NOT the Islam that the Holy Prophet articulated, at least the god of his
Islam is not the God which the Prophet called the people to! This is a critically important confession that
agrees with the observation of (Psuedo-) Imam Juwayni quoted above: nowhere in the sources for the
Prophet‘s teaching is there evidence of this immaterial, formless god.
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