Pure Faith

God is Absolute in the sense that He is beyond every frame of reference and exists independently of the existence of the universe. God transcends all creation, and His Mystery will remain forever. Creation needs a frame of reference to define itself, whereas God cannot be defined by what belongs to creation, because He is the Creator. God is Absolute in the sense that His oneness is absolute: God is not a Trinity, as Christians claim, but is One and Indivisible. God has no intermediaries, contrary to what sectarians and those who associate partners with Him believe, but true believers worship Him directly, without going through anyone. God is also Absolute because there is no physical representation of Him.

God is the only one of His ‘kind’: there is no ‘kind’ of ‘gods’ as there is a kind of ‘humans’ or ‘jinn’. Those who call themselves ‘gods’ share nothing of God’s nature, but are instead devils among the jinn. They want people to believe that they are indispensable intermediaries for reaching God, or that they are His emanations in the physical world, whereas God has no equals and He alone possesses all powers. These beings can neither benefit nor harm themselves, let alone others. Our fate is in God’s hands alone, and it is therefore Him alone that we must worship.

This surah defines in one sentence what pure faith is: the pure monotheistic faith of Abraham, the model and father of believers. Pure faith consists in worshipping God alone, associating nothing with Him and taking no intermediaries to Him, yet most people worship God only while assigning partners to Him or taking intermediaries. Such people are not believers, but sectarians and people who associate partners with God.