How Does Oneness Relate to God’s Attributes?

Answered by Ustadh Salman Younas

Question: 1. Are Allah’s attributes one in the sense of that all of them are one?

2.Are all of Allah’s actions one?

3. Is Allah’s attribute of will according to his knowledge?

Answer: assalamu alaykum

1. Oneness as it relates to God’s attributes refers to two things:

(a) that there is nothing that possesses attributes like God’s attributes.
(b) that the attributes of God are not multiples in the sense of His possessing two attributes of power, two attributes of knowledge, and so forth.

2. God’s actions are one in terms of no one possessing acts as He does. Otherwise, the actual acts themselves are a multitude, such as giving life, death, sustenance, and so forth.

3. Yes. The will of God accords to His knowledge. An important point to note here, however, is that the will of God does not follow His knowledge in the sense that God knows something and then He wills it. Such order does not apply to the eternal since God is free of change but only to created beings.

[al-Bajuri, Sharh Jawhara al-Tawhid (70, 96)]

Wassalam,
[Ustadh] Salman Younas

Checked and approved by Shaykh Faraz Rabbani

Ustadh Salman Younas graduated from Stony Brook University with a degree in Political Science and Religious Studies. After studying the Islamic sciences online and with local scholars in New York, Ustadh Salman moved to Amman. There he studies Islamic law, legal methodology, belief, hadith methodology, logic, Arabic, and tafsir.