Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

DEFINING AND DEFENDING BELIEVERS t 199
munities were concerned with matters of belief, what a Jew or
Muslim must believe or may not believe. Islam had neither bishops
and councils, and its closest approximation to a creed in the sense
of a baptismal formula is the simple shahada: “There is no god but
The God and Muhammad is his envoy.” By the mid–eighth century,
however, longer statements in the form of a creed (aqida)
began to appear anonymously in legal circles. Contrary to what
one might expect, they have nothing to do with the two basic elements
of the shahada, which are the affirmations required of the
individual Muslim, but rather addressed themselves to the issues in
current religio-political disputes. All these so-called creeds were
manifestly not documents to live by but somewhat sectarian statements
on problems troubling the early lawyers and theologians.
Many of the points were still in contention at the time of composition,
but if one moves forward to the period of Ghazali (d. 1111)
and beyond, when a consensus of sorts had developed in Sunni
Islam, the Muslim creeds have much the same appearance as a
Christian catechism, that is, of highly stylized, albeit abbreviated
and simplified treatises of scholastic theology, like the catechism
inserted by Ghazali himself in his Revivification of the Sciences of
Religion.
The creeds are the closest the community of Muslims ever came
to defining orthodoxy. Like their Christian counterparts, they
arose in the context of dispute, as a response to other views about
God, humans, and the universe that the community, or at least
its religious leaders, judged at variance with the Quran, the sunna,
or, simply, Muslim sensibilities. In place of these deviant beliefs,
the creeds express propositionally and affirmatively what it seems
fair to call a Sunni Muslim consensus. It may be summed up as
follows.
Regarding God, His Nature, and Attributes:
God is one, unique, without associates or offspring; He is eternal
and unchanging; His existence can be proven from the contingency
of the world; God is other than humankind; incorporeal, hence the
quranic descriptions of Him should be accepted “without asking
how” (bila kayf ). And yet God will be “seen,” bila kayf, by the