Allah, the Lonely God

Tawhid gives a clear account of divine unity and no account at all of eternal love

Every case for Islam I have heard begins with something true. There must be one necessary, self-existent Creator. No committee stands behind the world. No pantheon divides the deed to ultimacy.

Agreed. Fully, gladly agreed.

But that argument establishes monotheism, and monotheism is not the thing in dispute. Christians have confessed one God since before Muhammad’s grandfather was born. To establish tawhid—Islamic monotheism specifically—a Muslim must do something further. He must show that the one divine Being exists as exactly one person, and that a solitary person is sufficient to account for a world drowning in interpersonal reality.

That second step never gets taken. It gets assumed, repeated, and recited, but it does not get argued. And when you press on where it should be, you find the floor gives way.

The step nobody takes

Ask a Muslim apologist what premise carries him from one Being to one person, and watch what happens.

He will tell you God is one. Yes. I believe that.

He will tell you God has no partners. Yes. Neither do I confess partners—the Son is not an associate brought alongside the Father, and any Christian who says otherwise has misunderstood his own catechism.

He will tell you God is not begotten in the way creatures are begotten. Correct again, and Nicaea said it first.

Every one of these answers restates the agreement instead of addressing the dispute. The disputed question is narrow and specific: does unity of Being exclude personal distinction? Not does Islam deny it—obviously it does—but what argument shows it must be denied?

I have never received one. I have received volume. I have received the accusation that three persons is arithmetic gone wrong, which mistakes a claim about being for a claim about counting. I have received the suggestion that the doctrine came from Greeks or Romans or Constantine, which is history done by rumor. What I have not received is a premise.

Unity of essence and plurality of persons operate at different levels. One what, three whos. You may find that hard. Hard is not the same as contradictory, and a debater who cannot tell the difference is not defending tawhid—he is defending his own discomfort.

Before there was anything, whom did Allah love?

Here is the question, and I want it asked in the plainest words available, because plain words are what this doctrine cannot survive.

Before the angels. Before the Throne. Before the Pen wrote. Before there was a single created thing anywhere—whom did Allah know and love as another?

Notice what will not count as an answer.

Himself will not count. Self-love is not love of another, and every man knows this. We have a word for the man whose great love is himself, and the word is not a compliment.

A future creature will not count. What does not exist cannot be loved, only anticipated. A man does not have a wife because he intends to marry someday.

The capacity to love will not count. Potential is not actuality. A man who has never given anything away does not become generous because he could have.

The Quran itself will not count, and I will come back to that, because it is the most interesting failure of the lot.

The question asks about an actual relationship between distinct persons. On tawhid, the honest answer is that there was none. For eternity past—not a long time, but always, with no beginning at all—Allah knew only himself, spoke to no one, gave to no one, kept faith with no one, loved no one but Allah.

That is not an insult. That is the doctrine. I am simply refusing to look away from it.

What creation had to do for him

Follow the consequence, because Muslims rarely state it out loud.

If Allah’s first actual relationship with another person came about through creation, then creation introduced into the divine life something that was not there before. Not a new attribute in name—the Muslim will insist Allah was always al-Wadud, the Loving—but a new state of affairs in fact. Before, love had no object. After, it did. Something changed, and what changed was on God’s side of the ledger.

So the created order becomes the occasion on which the Almighty first became, in actuality, what he had only ever been in potential. The universe is what completed him.

A God who must create in order to love is a God finished by what he makes. Call that sovereignty if you like. I call it dependence in a good robe.

And notice the irony. The whole engine of Islamic polemic against Christianity is the horror of associating anything with God, of making the Creator dependent on or comparable to the creature. Yet tawhid hands creation the one job no creature should ever hold: it makes the world the necessary condition of God’s first act of love. Christians are accused of compromising divine independence. Meanwhile Islam has quietly made the cosmos indispensable to the divine biography.

The eternal beloved, and the trap with no exit

There is one escape route, and it closes on whoever tries it.

Suppose a Muslim answers that Allah did eternally love another. Then that other existed eternally. And now he faces a fork with no comfortable branch.

If the beloved began to exist, the relationship began. Eternal love with a temporal object is not eternal love—it is love that started, however long ago it started.

If the beloved never began to exist, then something uncreated stands alongside Allah. Which is shirk, by Islam’s own definition, and the one sin the Quran declares unforgivable.

There is no third door. Either the divine life was empty of actual relationship until the world showed up, or something eternal keeps company with God. Tawhid must choose, and both choices cost more than the doctrine can pay.

The uncreated Quran

Now to the most revealing part, and it comes from inside Sunni orthodoxy rather than from any Christian.

Classical Sunni theology holds that the Quran is the uncreated, eternal speech of Allah. This was not a minor position. Ahmad ibn Hanbal was flogged and imprisoned defending it during the mihna, the inquisition under al-Ma’mun, while the Mu’tazila insisted the Quran was created. Hanbal’s side won. Sunni Islam has held ever since that divine speech is eternal and uncreated, not a thing brought into being.

Sit with what that means.

If divine speech is eternal, then Allah has eternally been speaking. And speech that reaches no hearer is not communication. It is a sound in an empty room, if it is even that. The whole point of speech is that it goes somewhere, to someone, and is received.

So the most fiercely defended doctrine in Sunni history places an eternal communicative act in a God who eternally has no one to communicate with. Islam paid an enormous price—blood, prison, a generation of theological civil war—to keep divine speech uncreated. And the price it actually purchased was my objection, in Islam’s own vocabulary, at the center of its own creed.

Christians have an answer to what eternal divine speech could possibly be. The Word was with God, and the Word was God. Eternal speech implies eternal address, eternal address implies personal distinction, and personal distinction is exactly what tawhid forbids. Islam arrived at eternal speech and then refused the only ontology that makes eternal speech mean anything.

What Christianity says instead

Christianity does not solve this by softening monotheism. One God, indivisible, without parts, without partners, without rivals. We will not trade that away, and we never did.

What we confess is that this one God was never alone.

The Father loves the Son, and loved him before the foundation of the world. The Son glorifies the Father and speaks what he hears from him. The Spirit searches the deep things of God and proceeds from the Father in perfect communion. Speech, love, and fellowship in God did not begin. They had no first day.

So when God made a world full of persons who reason together and keep promises and give themselves away, he was not inventing a category foreign to himself. He was making creatures in the image of a life he had always lived.

Creation does not complete God. Creation receives from a communion already eternally full.

That is the difference, and it runs all the way down. Tawhid gives a God who had to make a world before he could love anything. The Trinity gives a God whose love overflowed into a world he did not need.

The question that stays

The question is simple enough for a child, and no scholar has answered it in fourteen centuries.

Before there was anything to love, whom did Allah love?

If the honest answer is no one, then the God of Islam spent eternity in solitude and needed a universe to end it. And a God who needed the world is not the God who made it.