Website: www.aaiil.uk
Calling
on Allah, by which name? (2)
Friday
Khutba by Dr Zahid Aziz,
for Lahore
Ahmadiyya UK, 16 September 2022
“Say: Call on Allah or call on the Beneficent. By
whatever (name) you call on Him, He has the best names. And do not be loud in
your prayer nor be silent in it, and seek a way between these.” — ch. 17, v.
110 |
قُلِ ادۡعُوا
اللّٰہَ اَوِ ادۡعُوا
الرَّحۡمٰنَ
ؕ اَیًّامَّا
تَدۡعُوۡا
فَلَہُ
الۡاَسۡمَآءُ الۡحُسۡنٰی
ۚ وَ
لَا تَجۡہَرۡ
بِصَلَاتِکَ
وَ لَا
تُخَافِتۡ
بِہَا وَ ابۡتَغِ
بَیۡنَ ذٰلِکَ
سَبِیۡلًا ﴿۱۱۰﴾ |
“And Allah’s are the best names, so call on Him
thereby and leave alone those who violate the sanctity of His names.
They will be recompensed for what they do.” — ch. 7, v. 180 |
وَ لِلّٰہِ
الۡاَسۡمَآءُ
الۡحُسۡنٰی
فَادۡعُوۡہُ
بِہَا ۪ وَ
ذَرُوا
الَّذِیۡنَ یُلۡحِدُوۡنَ
فِیۡۤ اَسۡمَآئِہٖ
ؕ سَیُجۡزَوۡنَ
مَا کَانُوۡا
یَعۡمَلُوۡنَ
﴿۱۸۰﴾ |
Last week I began with the verses
which I have just read, and I said that these verses clearly allow us to call
upon Allah by any of His names which befit His attributes and dignity. I also
mentioned that in the past few years the common practice among Urdu-speaking
Muslims has changed from saying Khuda hafiz to Allah hafiz. This
is due to the impression that we must not refer to Allah by a name which is not
mentioned in the Quran or prescribed in the religion of Islam.
Many years ago there was an article
on this topic in The Dawn newspaper of Karachi by the columnist Nadeem
F. Paracha (May 24, 2009). He wrote that in 2002 banners appeared in Karachi advising
the people of Pakistan to “to replace the term Khuda Hafiz with Allah Hafiz”.
This was part of the attempt, he says, by some Muslim religious leaders to
create a true Islamic society. He further writes: “They believed that Khuda
can mean any God, whereas the Muslims’ God was Allah. Some observers suggest
that since many non-Muslims residing in Pakistan too had started to use Khuda
Hafiz, this incensed the crusaders [i.e., these particular Muslim
preachers] who thought that non-Muslim Pakistanis were trying to adopt Islamic
gestures only to pollute them.” He tells us that “the first time Allah Hafiz
was used in public was in 1985” by a TV
host at the end of her shows, and that this only became a widespread practice
among the public shortly after the year 2000. He writes that from that time
onwards: “the term Allah Hafiz started being used as if Pakistanis had
always said Allah Hafiz. So much so that today, if you are to bid
farewell by saying Khuda Hafiz, you will either generate curious facial
responses, or worse, get a short lecture on why you should always say Allah
Hafiz instead.”
Leaving aside the question of this
particular expression Khuda Hafiz, last week I gave some examples of the
general use of the word Khuda for Allah by the greatest and the most
eminent of Muslim writers and scholars of the Indian subcontinent in their Urdu
writings. I will give a few more examples now. Maulana Shibli Naumani (d. 1914)
was a great and famous religious scholar, author and researcher. His Urdu
biography of the Holy Prophet Muhammad is very well known and respected. He
also wrote a book in Urdu entitled ‘Ilm-ul-Kalām. It deals with the
various doctrines and beliefs (what we call ‘aqāid) of
Islamic theology, and the different interpretations given to them by various
Muslim groups over the centuries. At one place he refers to a statement by
Hazrat Aishah and he quotes her statement as follows: “Khuda to kehta
hai” (i.e., Khuda says), followed by a verse of the Quran (p.
23). Shibli goes on to write: “Hazrat Ibn Abbas says that the Holy Prophet ne
Mi‘rāj mein Khuda ko dekha (saw God during his Mi‘rāj).”
Obviously, neither Hazrat Aishah nor Hazrat Ibn Abbas used the word Khuda,
as it is not an Arabic word. They said “Allah”. But Maulana Shibli, when translating
their statements into Urdu, uses the word Khuda where they said Allah.
His book is sprinkled throughout with the word Khuda when he is describing
the concept of God as taught by the Quran and the Holy Prophet Muhammad.
Let us now move forward in time to Maulana
Syed Abul Ala Maudoodi (d. 1979), a prolific author on Islam in Urdu as well as
founder of an Islamic political party. His Urdu translation of the Quran, Tafhim-ul-Quran,
is a household name among Urdu-speaking Muslims of the world. Right at the beginning
of this book, commenting on Sūrah Fātiḥa, he describes
this Sūrah as: “a prayer which has been taught by Khuda to
every person who starts to study His Book”. He adds that by placing this Sūrah
at the beginning of the Quran the message is conveyed that: “if you really want
to benefit from this Book, you must pray to the Khuda-wand of the world
by this prayer”.
I may also mention the famous and
widely-quoted verse of poetry by Dr Allama Sir Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938), the
great Islamic poet and philosopher:
خودی
کو کر بلند
اتنا کہ ہر
تقدیر سے
پہلے،
خدا
بندے سے خود
پوچھے بتا تیری
رضا کیا ہے
This may be translated as: “Raise your inner self so high
that before issuing any decree of fate (taqdīr), Khuda Himself may ask you
what are your wishes” (i.e., “what do you want to happen”).
If we now turn to the great Persian
literature produced by the topmost saints and scholars of Islam, the word Khuda
is used by them commonly. For example, there is Maulana Rumi, who lived 800
years ago, and he is frequently quoted from his famous poem Masnavi. In
that Persian poem he has used Khuda (as far as I can see) something like
a hundred times. For example:
گر خدا
خواهد نگفتند
از بطر،
پس خدا
بنمودشان عجز
بشر
“In their arrogance they did not say, ‘If God will’;
therefore God showed to them the weakness of man.”
Also: از
خدا جوييم
توفيق ادب — “Let us implore God to help us to adab (decent
behaviour)”. In many of his verses, he calls upon God, for example: اى خدا اى
فضل تو حاجت
روا —
“O God, O You whose bounty (fazl) fulfils need”.
Data Ganj Bakhsh, Ali Hujwairi, was a
great saint of Lahore who lived almost a thousand years ago. Neither his name
nor his book Kashf al-Mahjub need any introduction from me. It is said
to be the oldest and most ancient book in Persian on Islamic Sufiism. In his
very first paragraph, introducing his book, Data sahib uses both the names Khuda
and Allah. He writes: “Now I pray to God (Khuda-wand Ta‘ala) to
aid and prosper me in its completion … It is Allah Who helps and gives
success.” Then there is famous Persian verse about him which you see put up in
various places all over Lahore, the first line of which is:
گنج
بخش فیض عالم
مظہر نور خدا —
“He is the distributor of (spiritual) treasures, benefactor of the world, and a
manifestation of the light of God”.
We have the world-famous Shah
Waliullah of Delhi from about 300 years ago, who is regarded as the Mujaddid
of his time. He wrote a large number of books and translated the Quran into
Persian for the first time. In one of his books he writes the sentence: “No one
says that alongside Khuda there is another Khuda who is His
partner (sharīk)” (Al-Balāgh al-Mubīn, p. 16).
Of course, just because the greatest
scholars of Islam, who were also masters of Urdu or Persian writing, have used
the word Khuda, it does not prove that they could not have been wrong,
and that we cannot change what they did. But it is an important factor to be
taken into account, that how was it that it did not occur to all these most
eminent persons of Islamic history that they should use Allah and not Khuda?
And the Quran supports their usage because it allows people to call upon Allah
by any name, providing that that name does not go against the concept of God
taught in the Quran.
To preach to people to stop using Khuda,
and only use Allah, is to deny the entire Muslim heritage of the Indian
subcontinent. Just think: As Mr Nadeem Paracha informs us, it was at the say-so
of a TV show host in Pakistan and then a political group in Karachi that people
dropped using the word Khuda. No one realised that this was turning your
back on a usage of the greatest Muslim figures ever to arise in the Indian
subcontinent, without whom we today would most likely not be Muslims, because
without their work our ancestors in the subcontinent would not have embraced
Islam.
What is the meaning of the word Khuda?
It is said that this word consists of the words khud, meaning ‘self’,
and ā, which means ‘come’. So Khuda means the one who came
into existence by himself, without being created or made by someone, or being
born from someone. This is very similar to the attribute of Allah given in the
Quran, Al-Qayyūm, which means ‘Self-subsisting by Whom all things
subsist’.
Another point to note is that if a
word has been used for things other than Allah, it doesn’t mean that it is
forbidden to apply that word to Allah. In the story of Joseph in the Quran, the
king sends a messenger to Joseph, and Joseph tells the messenger to “go back to
your Lord (rabb)” with his reply to the king (12:50). The king is called
the rabb of his message-bearer. Allah is also called Rabb very
frequently in the Quran. Then there is a well-known prayer in the Quran, in
which we say to Allah: anta Maula-na, meaning You are our Patron or
Master (2:286). But in another place in the Quran the employer of a servant is
called the servant’s maula (16:76). And, of course, Muslims give the
title Maulana to religious scholars. And that is exactly how Muslim
address Allah in the above prayer: anta Maula-na — “You are Maulana”.
To sum up, what matters is that the
concept in our minds about our Creator is what is taught in the Quran and by
the Holy Prophet. Let people use the name for Him which they wish, if that name
expresses some attribute of Allah accepted in the Quran. To say Allah hafiz or
Khuda hafiz is your choice — I can’t tell you to say one and not the
other. What I can say is that no one become more Islamic by changing from
saying Khuda hafiz to Allah hafiz.
So
may Allah save us from gimmicks, cheap stunts and superficial thinking, and
turns our minds towards the real substance of our religion — Ameen.
Website: www.aaiil.uk