V. GOD AND HIS CREATION

Islam emphasizes that God and His creation are distinctly different
entities. God is neither a part of His creation nor is He mixed in with it.
His creation is neither equal to Him in His attributes nor a part of Him.
Indeed, God is the Most High; He is above all creation, above the heavens
and above His Throne, as He informed us about Himself in the Qur’an and
in the previous scriptures. This might seem obvious, but man’s worship of
creation instead of the Creator is to a large degree based on ignorance or
negligence of this fact. The wrong belief that the essence of God is
everywhere in His creation or that He is a part of His creation, has provided
justification for the worship of God’s creation. Philosophical idol
worshipers justify their idolatry by saying that they do not actually worship
the stone or metal image, but God who becomes concentrated in it during
their rituals of worship! They claim that the stone idol is only a focal point
for God’s essence and is not itself God! Anyone who accepts the concept of
God being present in any way within His creation will be obliged to accept
this argument in justification of idolatry.
Actually, those who have claimed divinity for themselves down
through the ages have often based their claims on the mistaken belief that
God is present in humans. Taking this belief one step further, they claim that
God is more present in them than in others, and that other humans should
therefore submit to them and worship them as God incarnate or as God
concentrated within their person. Similarly, those who have asserted that
others were God, after their deaths, have found fertile ground among those
who accept the false belief of God’s presence in man.
Some idol worshippers try to justify what they are doing by saying:
“We treat idols as mediators and intercessors between us and God.” This is
also an incorrect belief because God does not need mediators between Him
and people. He hears everything and knows all the needs of His creation. In
fact, this argument reduces God to the level of His creatures who often use
intermediaries to achieve their goals. In hundreds of Qur’anic verses God
invites humans to have a direct relationship with Him without any mediator
or intercessor, and He prohibits them from worshipping anything other than
Him under any circumstance or for any justification. God, the Most Wise,
did not prescribe for people religious rites that would affect the direct
relationship between Himself and humans, such as baptism confession, or
belief in man as a savior, or as an intermediary. Indeed, God is too great and
perfect to will a thing that would lower Himself to a level of weakness and
inferiority. To claim that God humbled Himself and took a human form is to
claim that He became feeble. And to claim that He decided to die means that
He decided to be as weak as His weakest creature. It also means that those
who were alive when He died would have been superior to Him!
To conclude, all false religions have in common one basic concept
with regard to God; that God and His creation are one. They either claim
that all men are God, or that specific men are God, or that nature is God, or
that God is a figment of man’s imagination or that man is a mediator
between people and God. Thus, it may be said that false religions invite
humans to the worship of creation instead of the Creator by calling the
creation or some aspect of it ‘God’.

                                            SOURCE: DR. BILAL PHILIP

                          BOOK: IS ISLAM YOUR BIRTHRIGHT