DUALITY OF TIME: Complex-Time Geometry and Perpetual Creation of Space (The Single Monad Model of The Cosmos Book 2) by Mohamed Haj Yousef

Author:Mohamed Haj Yousef [Haj Yousef, Mohamed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: IBNALARABI
Published: 2018-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

4.1.3 Unicity of God and His Names

According to Ibn al-Arabi, and more generally to Islam, and also some other religions, Allah is both One and (indivisible whole) Unit, or Unique. The first attribute means that He is one God, not many or multiple in any way, and the second means that He is not divisible into other entities that He is otherwise somehow composed of. Moreover, as indicated by the more metaphysically problematic second attribute of “Unity”, or “Unicity”, we can’t describe Him as a single entity, like other ordinary entities, with specific dimensions that are placed somewhere in space or began at a point of time. Allah is simply uniquely different from whatever we may know or imagine, because He is incomparable to any creation. Therefore, we can’t achieve full knowledge or awareness of the Essence of Allah, because this is beyond our human limited perception. It is, however, possible to describe Him and speak about His Attributes and divine Names, for example as they are mentioned in the Quran and Hadith. We may attain knowledge about the divine Names and descriptions of Allah, but not about His Essence Himself. As Chittick has pointed out, for Ibn al-Arabi: “God is known through the relations, attributions and correlations between Him and the cosmos. But the Essence is unknown, since nothing is related to It” Chittick (2010).

Therefore, whatever the human being may know about Allah is in the end partial and incomplete. No one can ever achieve full knowledge or awareness of Him; the best knowledge one might gain of the Essence of Allah is to know that He is different from anything [IV.301.17]. Ibn al-Arabi expressed this lack on knowledge nicely in his prayers by saying: “it is enough for me that You know my ignorance. You are as I know, but beyond what I know to a degree that I do not know.” This is because, being some individuals of His creation, we may know Allah only through His manifestations in us and in our limited view of the world, and His manifestations are never exactly repeated the same for any one person, nor the same for any two. This means that knowing Allah is an infinite process for us, because Allah Himself is not finite, in the sense that He never manifests in the same form twice [I.266.10], and also because His manifestations reveal some of his attributes and descriptions, but don’t fully reveal His ultimate Essence or Identity. Ibn al-Arabi summarizes this again by saying, in one of his many elaborations of the famous divine Saying of the “Hidden Treasure”, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, that: ‘Allah, the Exalted, “loved to be known” in order to grant the world the privilege of knowing Him, the most Exalted. But He knew that His Identity (or Essence) can’t be (completely) known, and nobody can ever know Him as He knows Himself. The best knowledge that can be achieved about Him, His Highness, in the world is that the knower knows that he doesn’t know.

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