God

Of course the muslim understanding of God

is not one of an old man with a white beard in the sky.

For all the beauty of Michaelangelo's depiction of God in the Sistine Chapel,

it reduces God to the shape of man.

We know that when God speaks in the Qur'an

of seeing and hearing,

having hands

and sitting on a throne,

we need to work out what we mean by these words,

all the different ideas we associate with them,

the ways that we use and understand the words ourselves.

Because even when humans use the words,

they often use the same word for different meanings.

A hand doesn't just mean a thing with fingers at the end of an arm,

it can signify a whole person,

like a farm hand or a ranch hand.

When we ask someone to give us a hand, we are asking for help,

not a severed limb,

and when we say "on the other hand" we use it to mean an alternative.

Arabic has the same flexibility of meaning

to be "between someone's hands" simply means to be in front of someone,

not necessarily being held by them

and as with the English usage

the word tends to be used suggesting utility.

Hands are used to make things,

and two hands working together can do much more than one,

much as a community working together

can do more than any collection of individual efforts.

And God tells us in the Qur'an

that our hands, along with our feet

will testify

as to our behaviour in life.

How are they aware?

How can they see or hear as we think of those senses,

or speak to testify?

If it comes to that, how do we see?

How much is down to the mechanics of our eyes processing light rays,

and how much is our imagination building images within us?

Do we all see the same way inside?

How objective are we when we look,

and how much are we imagining

what we think we see is there?

In the same way, we know the Beautiful Names

from our surroundings and within ourselves,

not just the 99 as they are usually collected,

but all the Attributes of God from which they are drawn.

Of course there are all manner of relationships between the Names,

distinctions and similarities,

the Names of the Essence,

like Allah and Ar-Rahman, the Fount of All Mercy,

and the Names of the Attributes or Qualities.

Then the Attributes themselves are often defined as either Jamal or Jalal,

Names of Beauty or Names of Power,

qualities that humans share,

though no more than a faint echo of the Qualities

as they are manifested by God.

In teaching the Names to Adam,

God implanted the essence of those Qualities within him

and all of humankind,

and those qualities remain there for us to search out

and explore within ourselves,

then we can consider their meanings for us personally,

the importance of how the Beautiful Names affect our thought and behaviour

as we live our lives each day.

In this way we can try to understand what we can of the nature of God,

while at the same time we look towards God through God's Signs

that point towards the Attributes of God in the Creation around us and inside us,

and look to the way that the human parts of the Creation

relate to each other and the world, in all their wondrous variety.