THE MOUNTAIN PATH April 1964

[Guest guest]

Aspects of Islam II

 

 

 

Shirk and Tawhid

 

By Abdullah Qutbuddin

 

 

 

 

 

It says in the Quran that the one unforgivable sin is shirk. This means literally 'association'; it implies the association of any other with Allah in one's worship: and one who thus associates is termed a mushrik. Literally interpreted, a Christian is considered a mushrik because he associates Christ and Christ's mother with God in his worship. For most Christians, of course, the Trinity is the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost; and in any case one who understands the doctrine of three Persons in One God is not a mushrik. The term might, however, fit educationally backward Catholics who pray to saints and the Virgin as well as to God.

 

Understood more profoundly, shirk is not necessarily the worship of any other god or person but of whatever one is devoted to - wealth or pleasure, political or financial power, social prestige, popularity or any other such intangible idol. Even love between man and woman can be shirk if the horizontal pull is strong enough to impede the vertical. The condemnation of shirk is equivalent to the Judaeic statement that the Lord is a jealous God and to Christ's saying that one cannot worship God and Mammon; but it is a point of doctrine which is more central to Islam than to the other two Semitic religions.

 

The Sufi goes still deeper. For him the 'other' that is associated with Allah is the ego, which is the basis of all sin. "A person grows up in a state of spiritual ignorance, turned towards the transient and incomplete satisfactions of this life and away from the radiance of Divine Bliss. Since this means turning away from God, Christianity calls it sin. 'Sin is nought else, but that the creature turneth away from the unchangeable God and betaketh itself to the changeable; that is to say, that it turneth away from the Perfect to 'that which is in part' and imperfect, and most often to itself.'"*

 

In this fullest and deepest meaning, so long as there is ego there is shirk, and therefore 'forgiveness' in its fullest meaning of Realization is not possible. The shahada, that there is no god but God, has not been fully realized.

 

 

Hinduism teaches that a necessary precondition for Realization is vairagya, which means non-attachment, equal-mindedness. Father Lazarus, in his article on 'The Spirituality of the Greek Orthodox Church'** speaks of the similar insistence by this Church on apatheia, which, he explains, is far from meaning 'apathy'.

 

Islam approaches the same point from the opposite end, saying that there cannot be Realization so long as there is shirk. One says that there must be non-attachment, the other that there must not be attachment. Because attachment to anything, and primarily to oneself, means giving it a share in the devotion that is due to God alone. Indeed, to combine the terminology of two traditions, one can say that vairagya means no shirk; shirk means no vairagya.

 

 

 

As Sufis sometimes express it, the great sin and obstacle to fana or Realization is 'otherness', the belief in a separate individual being apart from the One. And this is shirk.

 

I remember attending a Sufi session at which a chant or incantation was used that would run in translation: "I ask pardon of God for what (in me) is not God; and all things say 'God'." The first half is a rejection of 'otherness' as sin and error; the second half an epiphany, representing the entire universe as a hymn of praise to God.

 

Tawhid is Oneness. It is understood by the exoteric Muslim as the Oneness of God, a doctrine more rigorously insisted on in Islam than in any other religion, except perhaps Judaism. But for the Sufi tawhid is the state of Oneness, or more correctly 'no-other-ness' that remains when the shirk of ego ends; and that is Advaita or Identity.

 

I say 'no-other-ness' rather than Oneness. It is not really correct to say 'I am He' in the sense of A=B, since that supposes a duality to be dissolved. The right formula is: "There is no I; He alone is.' Nor is this mere verbal hair-splitting; it has grave practical implications, for the incantation 'I am He', used alike in Sufism and Hinduism, carries within it the danger of secretly, even unwittingly, implying 'the ego is God', which is the uttermost error and supreme blasphemy. Therefore a Sufi will not say 'I am Allah', but he may say: 'I am not other-than-Allah', for otherness is the shirk of ego which he has sacrificed; and when all otherness disappears what remains is tawhid.

 

For the Muslim the shahada, 'there is no god but God' is the great weapon: the first part of it rejects shirk, the second part affirms tawhid.

 

 

 

* Buddhism and Christianity in the Light of Hinduism, p. 119, quoting from the Theologia Germanica. By Arthur Osborne, Rider & Co., London.

 

* * The Mountain Path, January 1964