God

Now we know that if we are to understand our lives

and the world around us,

the most important thing for us to know

is that everything is created and sustained by God.

And we know that God is beyond our understanding,

but without God nothing in life makes any sense.

So muslims use the name Allah for the One God

like [Hu] there is no other.

But the name Allah is a name that means nothing else,

so it doesn't really help us to find a way to think about God.

For that we use lots of different names for God,

names that are known as 'the Beautiful Names'.

The Beautiful Names of Allah

are for us to find ways of understanding what God is like

by seeing the echoes of Allah's nature reflected in humanity.

So we know what we mean when we say that someone shows mercy to another,

but that is just a pale shadow of the Mercy of Allah,

[Hu] is Ar-Rahman the All-Merciful.

In fact, God's mercy is so important

that the Qur'an tells us to call God

Allah or Ar-Rahman

the Fount of All Mercy

and every chapter of the Qur'an

except one

begins in the Name of Allah,

the Fount of All Mercy and Ever Merciful

adding the kind of mercy that we feel for others

to the kind of mercy that can be given.

But the Qur'an also gives us other Names

by which we may approach an understanding of Allah.

People say that there are 99 Beautiful Names,

though different people sometimes have different names in their lists of 99.

So Allah is also known as

the First, the Last, and the Ever-Living,

the Provider, the Knower and the Forgiver.

Allah is Wise, Gentle, Loving,

Patient, Powerful, and the Only Truth.

But although we can understand these things in human terms,

we can only begin to imagine

how our human echoes of the Names apply to God.

And in the Qur'an Allah uses human language

to speak of other ways to understand

how God works in the world.

The Qur'an tells us that Allah sees and hears, and has hands,

but as God sees and hears everything in Creation,

we can be sure that for God seeing and hearing

involve a lot more than they do in humans.

So it is important to remember

that although we can see traces of God inside ourselves,

Allah is our Creator and far beyond us.

For just like so much of the Creation, humans have been made in two kinds

They need two kinds of themselves, male and female, to make more humans,

whereas God is neither male nor female, just One,

like [Hu] there is no other.

Now the Qur'an gives us the Beautiful Names

so we can look inside ourselves to help to understand Allah,

but it also gives us other ways to try to understand God

through seeing the creation around us.

These signs,

like the sun, moon and stars,

and the rain cleansing a dead land and giving it life again,

show us the way that God gives order to the Creation.

And in that order we can see the Will of the Creator,

and so come to understand God's Will for us

and the best way for us to live our lives.

And that way of life is known as our Deen,

living our lives in all their variety,

serving our Creator as best we can.