Abdal Hakim Murad - The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology

Worship 235
‘‘magnificent’’. If Muh _
ammad has a magnificent character, if he is ‘‘a
light-giving lamp’’ (33:46), it is because he is a servant who asked help
from no one but God, and realised tawh _
ıd.
Further reading
Cragg, Kenneth, ‘‘Worship and cultic life: Muslim worship’’, in The
Encyclopedia of Religion (New York, 1987), xv, pp. 454–63.
al-Ghazalı, Abu H _
amid, Worship in Islam: Being a Translation, with
Commentary and Introduction, of al-Ghazzalı’s Book of the Ih _
ya’ on the
Worship tr. Edwin Elliott Calverley, (Hartford, CT, 1923).
Murata, Sachiko, and Chittick, William C., The Vision of Islam (St Paul, 1994).
Nakamura, Kojiro (tr.), Al-Ghazalı on Invocations and Supplications: Book IX
of the Revival of the Religious Sciences (Cambridge, 1990).
Padwick, Constance E., Muslim Devotions: A Study of Prayer-Manuals in
Common Use (Oxford, 1996).
Renard, John, Seven Doors to Islam: Spirituality and the Religious Life of
Muslims (Berkeley, 1997).
Rosenthal, Franz, Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in
Medieval Islam (Leiden, 1971).
Notes
1. The Qur’an employs four words from this root, in a total of 277
instances. It uses the verb ‘abada 124 times and the gerund form ‘ibada 9
times; the word ‘abd in the singular and plural 130 times; and the active
participle ‘abid 12 times.
2. There is also the far less commonly used ‘ubuda, ‘‘servitude’’,whichis
discussed by Qushayrı andIbn‘Arabı among others.
3. Bukharı, Tawh _
ıd, 1; Muslim, Iman, 49, etc.
4. Franz Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in
Medieval Islam (Leiden, 1970).
5. Hujwırı, Kashf al-mah _
jub, ed. V. Zhukovsky (Tehran, 1336/1957), p. 11.
6. Darimı, ‘Ilm, 29.
7. Muh _
ammad Baqir Majlisı, Bih _
ar al-anwar, 110 vols. (Beirut, 1983), i,
p. 116.
8. Ghazalı, Ih _
ya’ ‘ulum al-dın, 6 vols. (Cairo, 1992), iv, p.31.
9. Ghazalı, al-Maqs _
ad al-asna fı sharh _
ma’anı asma’ Allah al-h _
usna,
ed. Fadlou A. Shehadi (Beirut, 1971), pp. 42ff. See also Ghazalı: The
Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God, tr. by David B. Burrell and Nazih
Daher (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 30ff. The translators render al-takhalluq
bi-akhlaq Allah as ‘‘conforming to the perfections of God’’. The word
akhlaq means character traits, both virtues and vices. If one wants to
translate it as ‘‘perfections’’, one might better translate the whole
expression as ‘‘becoming perfect through God’s perfections’’.
10. Abu ‘Abd al-Rah _
man al-Sulamı, H _
aqa’iq al-tafsır, MS, commentary on
Qur’an 2:21.
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