ASK MAULANA

not just somewhere ‘out there’, that human beings are ‘divine’ etc. (these are claims made, among some others, by many so-called ‘New Age’ ‘spiritualists’), what would your response, from the Islamic standpoint, be? Deriving the above meaning from this verse of the Quran that you refer to is not right, because this verse means that God is aware of His creation. That God is nearer to us than our jugular vein does not mean that God is within us. The Hadith which says that God has created man in His image means that God has partially bestowed on us some of the attributes that He possesses, attributes which have not been given to animals. The Hadith does not have the meaning that God is inside us. Some claim that God is just another name for the totality of existence, and that since human beings are part of this totality, they are part of God and are not inseparable from Him and that by ‘finding ourselves’ we find Him. What is the Islamic position on this? This is a concept that has no scientific basis. It may exist in books but no person has been able to find God by simply looking inside himself. Is the notion of an impersonal God, which some advocates of meditation posit, compatible with Islam? There is no concept of impersonal God in Islam. According to Islamic teaching, we should love and fear God. We must know that one day we will be held accountable to Him and that He has the power to punish and reward us. All our blessings are from God. The life-support system and every bounty we enjoy is given to us by him. This realisation necessitates the belief in a personal God. If God were impersonal, then all this realisation about him would disappear. God would then become a vague idea, rather than an entity whom we ought to love for all blessings and fear for wrongdoing. Some advocates of meditation do not agree with the notion of a transcendent creator God of the theistic religions. In place of this understanding of God, they claim that God is immanent in the Creation. In other words, they say, they believe that Reality or God is ‘non-dual’. What is the Islamic position on this? Is this ‘non-dualistic’ understanding of Reality the same as what is posited according to the concept of Wahdat al-Wujud that some Sufis talk about? Is this concept Islamic? The concept of Wahdat al-Wujud is similar to the notion that reality is non-dualistic. However, this is not in accordance with Islamic teaching, which holds that the Creator and His creation are separate. The Creator