Abdal Hakim Murad - The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology

7 Creation
david b. burrell csc
‘‘Originator (Badı‘) of the heavens and earth. When He decrees a thing,
He says only ‘Be!’ And it is.’’
(Qur’an 2:117) 1
There are eight names for God, among the canonical ninety-nine,
which direct our attention to Allah as the source of all that is: al-Badı‘
(Absolute Cause), al-Bari’ (Producer), al-Khaliq (Creator), al-Mubdi’
(Beginner), al-Muqtadir (All-Determiner), al-Mus _
awwir (Fashioner),
al-Qadir (All-Powerful) and al-Qahhar (Dominator), each with various
connotations of creating. 2 Nothing seems simpler than identifying the
one God as creator of all that is; indeed, that has ever been the preferred
route for calling attention to the fact of divinity, as in the so-called
‘‘proofs’’ that there is a God. And understandably, since the standing link
between such a One and everything else is its origin in that One, so that
originary fact connects the revelations proper to each Abrahamic faith
tradition with everything we encounter: ‘‘the heavens and the earth’’, as
well as the human speculation which attends everything that surrounds
us, and especially ourselves as the portion of creation impelled to that
speculation. Moreover, when one is urged by those revelations to make
the fantastic attestation of a single creator of all, what results is an
ontological divide between the one creator and everything else. For if the
God of Abraham can be defined, as Thomas Aquinas does at the outset of
his Summa Theologiae, as ‘‘the beginning and end of all things, and
especially of rational creatures’’, that lapidary formula has but one clear
implication: God is not one of those things, and this affirmation sums up
Islamic tawh _
ıd. 3 For confessing divine unity (tawh _
ıd) entailsremoving
all so-called ‘‘gods’’ from the world; indeed, replacing them all with One
whose originating relation to the universe will never cease to occupy
thinkers in each of these traditions, as an enduring testimony to the utter
uniqueness of the attestation ‘‘There is no God but God’’, its novelty and
its intractability in human discourse. Yet as congruent as this affirmation
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