Allahu Ahad: Allah is ONE Lâ ilâha illâ Allâh: There is no ilâha (i.e. legitimate object of worship) but Allah. Why does My Islam differs from Yours? It is because mine is an AFRICAN Islam, and therefore the two above signature Muslim proclamations of the oneness of God do indeed mean for me that there is NONE who is worthy of WORSHIP but the ONE Supreme God, but it DOES NOT mean that there is only ONE singular GOD. A. Okechukwu Ogbonnaya, in his important book On Communitarian Divinity (1998), describes the traditional African view of Gods oneness, and in so doing he describes MY ISLAM: Scholars of African religion have to face the problem created by the English word god and the arbitrary distinction between God and gods... how [are] the gods with lower-case g ... related with the God of the upper-case G [?] Does the use of the upper case G imply primus inter pares (first among equals), or the existence of only one personal God with no equals, or no communal members possessing the same nature as the High God?… Divine communalism is the position that the Divinity is a community of gods who are fundamentally related to one another and ontologically equal while at the same time distinct from one another by their personhood and functions. So a god is a Divine Person and, as a Divine Person, is not the whole Divinity. This personification is not one but many. Manyness is not in opposition to oneness, but it is inclusive of all of the gods. To claim that only ONE can be Divine is similar to the claim that because a village has a chief who is a man, there must be only one real man in the village instead of seeing the chief as one man among many men. It is also similar to claiming that the chief is the only human being, because he or she represents society at a particular point in history. So capital letter or not, in African traditional religion, a god is a god, is a god, is a God. A god does not cease to be of the same nature with other gods even if that god has been chosen to represent the rest. It is precisely because a god shares in the same nature as all the other beings that warrants it being called god. One god is inextricably related to the other gods by virtue of the Divine nature. The presence of family, generativity, and proliferation among the gods points to the presence in African religious thought of the One (Divine force, or nature) and the Many (gods). The One in African thought should be understood in terms of communal oneness. Indeed. Allahu Ahad. Peace to the Godz!
Posted on: Tue, 16 Sep 2014 16:11:32 +0000
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