Allah by Gabriel Said Reynolds

Author:Gabriel Said Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2020-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Lord-Servant Relationship

Another way to understand the People of the Sabbath story is to remember that humans, according to the Qur’an, are not simply meant to love God. They are to obey him. God is “lord” (rabb), and humans are “servants” (‘ibad).36

In the alastu verse on the primordial covenant between God and all of humanity (Q 7:172), discussed in Chapter 2, God’s question to the souls gathered before him is simply, “Am I not your Lord?” This verse makes it clear that in his relationship to humans, God is above all “lord.” Humans are to obey him and to worship him in a way that befits a servant (the qur’anic term for proper worship of God is literally the “act of a servant,” ‘ibada). This is why, as Toshihiko Izutsu explains, the sorts of dispositions that the Qur’an asks of humans include “humbleness, modesty, absolute obedience, and other properties that are usually demanded of a servant.”37

This might help us understand better why the Qur’an so often calls on its audience to have a disposition of “pious fear” or “God-consciousness” (taqwa) before God or “to submit” themselves to God. The Arabic term for “submission” is, of course, islam, and early Muslims would eventually take this term as a name for their religion (being influenced by verses such as Q 3:19, 85 and 5:3). However, in the Qur’an itself the term islam, and the corresponding verb aslama, is not used to designate a religious movement, but rather a proper religious disposition.

This disposition is encouraged by Q 39:54: “Turn penitently to Him and submit (aslimu) to Him before the punishment overtakes you, whereupon you will not be helped.” In the Qur’an Abraham is a model of this sort of submission: “When his Lord said to him, ‘Submit,’ he said, ‘I submit to the Lord of all the worlds’” (Q 2:131). Accordingly, Abraham is elsewhere (Q 3:67) called a muslim, a “submitter” (although he cannot be thought of as a Muslim with a capital “M,” as he lived before Muhammad).

The original meaning of islam, then, concerns the disposition of the believer before God; it concerns the responsibility of humans, as servants, to be completely submissive to their master. Regarding this Izutsu writes, “The primary function of a servant consists naturally in serving his master faithfully, paying constant and careful attention to the latter’s wishes whatever he wishes, and obeying without murmuring his commands.”38

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