All praise is due to Allaah, Lord of all the Worlds and Prayers and Peace
upon His Final Messenger Muhammad.
To proceed:
Today’s lesson will give us an overview of Tawheed at a
basic level. This will lead us to the next two lessons in which we will look in
more detail at some of the branches of Tawheed.
But before we go any further, we want to stop here and just
reflect a bit on exactly what we are doing - in other words we want to be clear
about what the objective of these lessons are. If you refer back to Lesson 1 (on
Eemaan), you will find that we introduced a small model which showed us the
components of Eemaan (faith). We will reproduce here again:
What we are trying to do is to use this model as a foundation.
In other words, all the lessons after this first one, will be building upon this
model. So every time we go through a topic, you have to stop and think and see
how it relates back to this diagram. If you recall Lesson 2 which was on
Allaah’s Attributes, you should have noticed that this falls under the
section ‘Speech of the Heart’ - since it is related to belief and is
knowledge-based. If you now reflect on Lesson 3 (Love, Fear and Hope), you
should have noticed that this falls under the section ‘Actions of the
Heart’, because it is to do with the feelings and states of the heart in
worshipping Allaah. In other words, all of our topics will fall into one of
these categories. This shows that week by week, inshaa’allaah, we are
steadily increasing our knowledge and understanding of eemaan, and also our
practice of it. When we finish this whole area of eemaan, we should all have a
good and solid foundation. Then we will move on to construct another model, i.e.
a whole new area or subject (for example Methodology, or the Science of Hadeeth,
or the Sunnah, or Bid’ah etc.).
So this is what we are trying to do inshaa’allaah.
Steadily build our religion as if we were constructing a building, section by
section, brick by brick, upon this foundation.
To continue with todays topic then, Tawheed.
Linguistically the word ‘Tawheed’
means ‘to make something one’.
In its Islamic usage it means ‘to testify to
the uniqueness and oneness of Allaah and to make all of one’s worship for
Allaah alone’.
[The word ‘wahhada’ from which the word Tawheed
directly comes from has been mentioned by the Messenger (sallallaahu alayhi wasallam) in the hadeeth of
Ibn Abbaas who explains that the Messenger (sallallaahu alayhi wasallam) sent Mu’aadh to Yemen and
told him: "…Let the first thing you call them to be that they
perform the Tawheed of Allaah, the Exalted (yuwahhidulLaaha Ta’aalaa). It
is also mentioned in the hadeeth in Muslim "Islam is built upon five: the
Tawheed of Allaah the Most High…."]
Lesson 4: An Introduction to Tawheed
