Allah The Exalted — Page 139
All a h the Exalted 1 3 ian of and provides for the virtuous. Then when a person relies wholly upon the means, and puts his whole trust in them, in so doing he ascribes to them some of the attrib- utes of God, and sets them up as another god beside Him. When he leans towards one side, he advances towards shirk. Those who lean towards officials and receive bounties and titles from them, honour them as they should honour God and thus in a way worship them. This alone uproots a person’s belief in the Unity of God and diverts him from his true purpose and casts him far away. The Prophets [peace and blessings of All a h be on them] teach that there should be no conflict between Unity and material means and that each should keep to its proper place and that the end should be Unity. They desire to teach man that all honour and all comfort and all fulfil- ment comes from God. If anything else is set up in opposition to Him there would be a conflict in two oppo- sites in which one would be destroyed. The Unity of God must always prevail. Means should be used but should not be deified. Belief in Unity gives birth to the love of God Almighty, as one realizes that all benefit and loss is in His hands, that He is the true Benefactor and that every particle pro- ceeds from Him without the intervention of anyone else. When a person achieves this holy condition, he is known as a believer in the Unity of God. One condition of belief in Unity is that man should not worship stones, or human beings, or anything else, and should express disgust and abhorrence against deifying them; the second condition is that no undue importance should be attached to material means. The third condition is that one's ego and its pur- poses should also be excluded and negatived. Very often a person has in mind his own qualities and power and