Tawḥīd

Tawḥīd, literally “making one” or “affirming oneness”, is the Islamic teaching that God is one: without partner, equal or division, the sole creator and the only one worthy of worship. It is expressed in the first half of the Muslim profession of faith, “there is no god but God”, and its opposite, shirk, “associating” anything with God, is regarded as the gravest of sins.

For the theologians, tawḥīd is a doctrine about God: God’s unity of essence, attributes and acts. For the Sufis it is also a path. To affirm God’s oneness truly is to see nothing but God acting in all things, and finally to be emptied of the self that stands apart from God. Al-Junayd of Baghdad defined Sufi tawḥīd as the separation of the eternal from what is originated, and the later Sufis distinguished degrees of it, from the believer’s confession to the vision of the saints.

Ibn ʿArabī and his school read tawḥīd in the light of the oneness of being, so that there is, in the end, only one reality, God, of which the world is a manifestation. Other Sufis and many theologians rejected this as blurring the line between Creator and creature.