God as the Bringer into Existence, Not the Existent

What I finally concluded, after my journey through the houses of learning and the schools of thought, is that God, glory be to Him, has not described Himself as the Existent — nor even as the Bringer into Existence. In our language what exists is limited, and God is absolute. Grammatically, mawjūd means that an action has fallen upon it, and this contradicts His being al-wājid, the one who brings everything into existence. God is al-wājid — an active participle — who pours forth existence: existence is the self-disclosure of His Name the Manifest. The two opposites, bringer into existence and brought into existence, cannot both be true of Him, just as we do not say He is both Creator and created. When we accept the term al-wājid, although the Qurʾān does not state it directly, we accept it as an active participle set against existence as the product of the agent’s act, just as “Creator” is the active participle set against “created”. In truth, the name al-wājid is used only to bring the concepts closer to understanding, not as a claim that it is one of the names of God. For we shall discover, as we go deeper, that existence does not come about through God’s direct act, but through Lordly degrees, by God’s command or permission. The Qurʾān ascribes to God the acts of forming, originating, making, bringing forth and finding, among others, and taken together these point, by approximation, to the act of bringing into existence. I found that a human being must have the courage to leave the shore of exegesis, crowded with sectarian illusions, and sail out on the ocean of abstract meaning. My independence in knowledge was built on refusing to force limited human logic into the description of God. God encompasses all things; far be it from Him to be contained by any existence or bounded by any conception. This is the Trust I carry: that we be vicegerents on the earth, and that we worship God as He is in the majesty of His transcendence, not as the jurists’ imaginations have drawn Him. Hashem Nassar All rights reserved