A Critique of the Structure of Certainty

Anyone who reflects on the thought of the Islamic movements finds a glaring contradiction. They raise the slogans “We affirm what God has affirmed of Himself” and “There is no independent reasoning where there is a text”. Yet when they come to the very foundation — existence itself — they abandon the text and run to reason and to innate nature, as they understand it. Take, for example, what Dr Umar al-Ashqar writes in his book Belief in God. He makes “the proof from innate nature” the first pillar, claiming that the Qurʾān did not dwell on proving God’s existence because sound innate nature acknowledges it without proof. I ask: where did he get this ruling, when the Qurʾān does not say it? And how can he dispense with the need for transmitted proof at the very root of belief, while demanding it of us in the most trivial questions of jurisprudence, such as whether to move one’s finger during prayer? This informational poverty shows itself in the confusion between al-wājid and al-mawjūd — the one who brings into existence and the one brought into existence — or between the Creator and the created. “Creator” is an active participle and “created” a passive one, and the language does not allow the two to be equated. And when they use the law of causality to prove God, they fall into the trap of anthropomorphism. If everything that exists must have something that brought it into existence, then, by their own logic, who brought God into existence? “A thing does not bring itself into existence,” they say. Is God, then, a thing for them? Their attempts to measure the Creator by His creatures — reasoning from camel dung to the camel, or from the ruins of a city in the desert to its builders — collapse entirely once we know that material laws do not apply to the Absolute. Hashem Nassar All rights reserved