Islam - Its Meaning for Modern Man — Page 154
154 Allah, the Lord of the Throne, above what they attribute” (21:23). God has throughout affirmed and borne witness to His Existence, His Unity, His various attributes, and revealed these to mankind at each stage to the degree to which their awareness was needed by mankind for the complete fulfilment of life in all its dimensions. The discovery of all this was not left to man. If that had been so, countless generations would have perished before a concept of God, even remotely approaching the reality, could have been evolved. “Allah bears witness that there is no god but He ⎯ and so do the angels and those possessed of knowledge ⎯ Maintainer of Justice; there is no god but He, the Mighty, the Wise” (3:19). The Quran not only excludes all idea of any equal or partner with Allah, it specifically excludes all idea of His having a son except in the purely metaphorical sense in which all mankind are His children, and in which the peacemakers are spoken of, in the Bible, as “the children of God” (Matt. 5:9). God is Ever-Living, All-Knowing, All-Hearing, the Creator of all, whose authority extends over everything. To attribute a son, in any but the purely metaphorical sense, to God, would amount to a denial of His Unity and in effect to a denial of His Godhead. “Verily, Allah is the only One God. Far is it from His attributes of Holiness and Perfection that He should