Epigraph:

Such is Allah, your Lord. There is no God but He, the Creator of all things, so worship Him. And He is Guardian over everything.

Eyes cannot reach Him but He reaches the eyes. And He is the Incomprehensible, the All-Aware. (Al Quran 6:102-103)

Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD, Chief Editor of the Muslim Times

It is said that a good picture is worth a thousand words, the above video is worth a million or more. It has an opening statement by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and his concluding remarks and four to five different interviews in between. It is necessary to watch the whole of the above video to make the best use of this article and to get additional insights into the commentary of the verses of the Quran that I am going to quote here.

The first interviewee in the video is Yugin Nagasawa, a philosopher of religion in the University of Birmingham. He says that there may be an endless layers of explanations as we keep investigating our physical universe. This in my opinion, in a way reminds us of limitations of human knowledge and suggests the boundary of our understanding, where our finite beings and finite understanding meets the Infinite and suggests to a Muslim the verses quoted as epigraph of this article:

Such is Allah, your Lord. There is no God but He, the Creator of all things, so worship Him. And He is Guardian over everything.

Eyes cannot reach Him but He reaches the eyes. And He is the Incomprehensible, the All-Aware. (Al Quran 6:102-103)

Around minute 15 of the above video the interviewee is John Hick, a distinguished philosopher of religion and he beautifully describes the transcendent God and puts Him even as, ‘beyond categories.’ He uses the expression, ‘the Real,’ for God. He grounds Him in all the human experiences that human race has had over the millennia. Rather than taking the diversity of religions as a proof for claim that all the different religions of the world are an illusion, he looks at the common theme between Christianity and Islam and the commonality of their Monotheistic experience being reflective of a deeper reality and knowledge of God that he labels as ‘the Real.’ His expression of God being Trans-categorical reminds me of the following verse of the Quran:

He is the Maker of the heavens and the earth. He has made for you pairs of your own selves, and of the cattle also He has made pairs. He multiplies you therein. There is nothing whatever like unto Him; and He is the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing. (Al Quran 42:11)

On the one hand the God of Abrahamic faith is ‘the Hidden,’ despite being the First Cause and the ultimate reality that survives everything and in Islam is also called the Last:

Whatever is in the heavens and the earth glorifies Allah; and He is the Mighty, the Wise. His is the kingdom of the heavens and the earth; He gives life and He causes death; and He has power over all things. He is the First and the Last, and the Manifest and the Hidden, and He knows all things full well. (Al Quran 57:1-3)

Even though the God of Islam or the Abrahamic faiths is the Hidden, Arabic term الْبَاطِنُ, yet at the same time He is very close to every human consciousness:

And assuredly, We have created man and We know what his physical self whispers to him, and We are nearer to him than even his jugular vein. (Al Quran 50:16)

The last interviewee in this video is an atheist, who does not find any cosmic purpose in his life. He finds meaning only in what he seems to value in the moment. This would not be in keeping with the Quranic message and there are several passages to that effect in the scripture. But, that is for another day.