Abdal Hakim Murad - The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology

Revelation 181
need of Him, simply in order to be and to act. This ontological situation
of total dependence on God’s lordship is common to all – believers and
unbelievers, libertines and good-doers. In the Qur’an, even the Devil
says ‘‘O my Lord!’’ to the creator.
To proclaim the unique and exclusive lordship of God and to
approach Him from the viewpoint of His rulership does not, however,
introduce the real essence of God qua God. In order to do so, one must
leave ontology in favour of ethics, and ascribe to God’s moral will, which
He expresses through revelation, at least as much importance as is to be
ascribed to His creative lordly will. Manifestly, the world was not created
in vain. Creation, as such, however, is not an end in itself, and there
is no self-justification for it. Rather, it is as if creation were nothing but
an occasion for revelation, which alone will lead to its completion. Just
as the power to create belongs to none but God, He alone is entitled to be
served, worshipped, adored, feared and trusted. In other words, it is
relative to religion, not metaphysics, and thus beyond His seignioriality,
that God’s godhead can properly be investigated. Godhead (ilahiyya), the
Damascene theologian Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) explains, is not the power
to create of a God (al-ilah), understood in the sense of the active participle
alih, ‘‘creating’’.Al-ilah, ‘‘the God’’, is to be understood in the
sense of the passive participle al-ma’luh, ‘‘the divinised one’’, or ‘‘the
divinisable one’’, which is to say, He who has the exclusive right to be
made divine (uliha) and is the only one entitled to be worshipped and
loved. 1 It is revelation which, beyond creation, inaugurates such a
relation and, by doing so, gives the first all its sense. Beyond the realm of
what the Lord creates, the dimension of what God says should be given
even more importance, as it is exclusively according to this other
uncreated reality that the fullest kind of relation can be developed with
the divine. It is revelation that brings some moral distinctions into the
created reality, with its commands and its prohibitions, and thus initiates,
through religion, the differentiation between good and evil,
between virtue and sin, between God’s friends and His foes.
However great His creative power would be, a God who would not
do anything else and, specifically, would not communicate with
humans, would be a remote abstract principle closer to the prime mover
of Aristotle’s metaphysics than to the God of the Qur’an. The latter has
indeed frequently spoken and has been the source of innumerable
revelations in different ages. The first man was also the first prophet to
whom a revelation was given, as the creation of the world and, afortiori,
of mankind, would not have been accomplished without a further
manifestation of God’s will, this time the ethical and religious one,
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