The core
Where is God? The question sounds naive, but the answer you give determines more than you might expect — your understanding of prayer, of science, of moral responsibility, of what it means for a human being to act in the world. Three major answers have been given, and the differences between them are not academic. They shape civilisations.
Theism: God is beyond the world
Classical theism holds that God is radically distinct from the created world. God made the universe but is not part of it, not contained by it, not identical with it. God transcends creation the way an author transcends a novel — present in every line as its source, but not a character within the story. This is the default position of mainstream Islamic theology (kalām), and of most orthodox Christian and Jewish theology as well. Its strength is that it preserves God’s sovereignty, freedom, and perfection: God is not limited by the world, not affected by its suffering, not diminished by its failures. Its risk is distance — a God so far beyond the world that the world begins to look orphaned, and the human relationship with God becomes a relationship across an unbridgeable gap.
Pantheism: God is the world
Pantheism identifies God with the totality of existence. God is not beyond the world; God isthe world. Every tree, every stone, every human being is a manifestation of the one divine substance. Spinoza’s formula — Deus sive Natura(“God, or Nature”) — is the classic Western expression. In the Islamic context, the strongest readings of waḥdat al-wujūd tend in this direction: if all existence is ultimately one, and that one is God, then the world is not something God made — it is something God is. Pantheism’s strength is intimacy: God is not distant but present in every grain of sand. Its risk is that it dissolves the distinction between Creator and creation — and with it, the possibility of a genuine relationship between God and the world. You cannot have a relationship with yourself.
Panentheism: the world is in God
Panentheism— the term means “all-in-God” — attempts to hold both truths at once. The world is in God, but God is more thanthe world. God contains and permeates creation, but is not exhausted by it. Think of the ocean and a wave: the wave exists within the ocean, is constituted by the ocean’s water, and cannot exist apart from the ocean. But the ocean is vastly more than any single wave. The wave is real — it has its own shape, its own motion, its own character — but its reality is sustained by, and participates in, a reality far greater than itself.
Panentheism preserves both divine intimacy (God is present in all things) and divine transcendence (God exceeds all things). It allows the world to be genuinely real — not an illusion, not a mere appearance — while grounding that reality in the divine. And it preserves the possibility of a genuine relationship between God and created beings: the wave can respond to the ocean, even though it exists within the ocean. Whether panentheism is a genuine third option or merely an unstable compromise between theism and pantheism depends on whether the metaphor can be cashed out in rigorous philosophical terms.
In the Islamic tradition
The dominant position in Islamic theology has always been theism: God is utterly transcendent, utterly distinct from creation. The Qur’anic formula laysa ka-mithlihi shay’ (“There is nothing like unto Him,” Q 42:11) has served as the foundational text for this commitment. The Ash’arite and Maturidi schools, which between them account for the vast majority of Sunni theological opinion, both insist on God’s radical otherness.
But the Qur’an also says that God is “closer to him than his jugular vein” (Q 50:16) and that “wherever you turn, there is the face of God” (Q 2:115). These verses have nourished a counter-current in Islamic thought that emphasises divine intimacy — the nearness of God to creation, the presence of God withinthe world rather than only beyond it. The Sufi tradition, and particularly the school of Ibn ’Arabi, developed this intimacy into a full metaphysics: waḥdat al-wujūd, the unity of being, which holds that God is the only true existent and that the created world is the self-disclosure of divine reality.
The tension between these currents has never been resolved. It cannot be, because the Qur’an itself holds both simultaneously — radical transcendence and radical intimacy, a God utterly unlike anything in creation and a God closer than your own breath. The history of Islamic theology can be read as an ongoing attempt to honour both affirmations without collapsing one into the other.
Ahmad Sirhindī’s waḥdat al-shuhūd(unity of witness) represents one attempt at resolution: the mystic experiences God as all-pervading, but this is a feature of the mystical state, not of ontological reality. In reality, God and creation remain distinct. Sirhindī’s position preserves both the experiential data of Sufi practice and the theological non-negotiable of Creator–creature distinction. Whether it fully satisfies either the mystics or the theologians is another question.
Why this matters
Iqbal’s position is, in contemporary philosophical terms, closest to panentheism — though he does not use the word, and his version is distinctly his own. God is the Ultimate Ego: the supreme creative self whose activity sustains all reality. Finite egos — human beings, and in diminishing degrees all centres of experience in nature — exist within the divine creative activity. They are real, distinct, genuinely free, and capable of creative fellowship with God. But they do not exist independentlyof God; their reality is sustained by God’s ongoing creative act.
This position lets Iqbal reject both extremes at once. Against pantheism (and against waḥdat al-wujūd as he reads it), he insists that individual selves are genuinely real — not illusions to be transcended, not waves to be dissolved back into the ocean. The plurality of selves is willed by God and constitutive of the universe’s meaning. Iqbal’s concept of khudi grounds this conviction. Against a rigid classical theism that places God entirely beyond the world, Iqbal insists that God is present in and through the creative activity of finite egos — that God is not a distant sovereign issuing decrees from beyond but a living creative reality whose activity permeates everything that exists.
For Pakistan, the practical difference matters. A pantheistic sensibility — “everything is God, nothing is separate, my individual efforts are ultimately meaningless against the backdrop of cosmic unity” — tends toward passivity and withdrawal. A purely transcendent theism — “God is utterly beyond, and my role is submission to a will I cannot fathom” — can tend toward fatalism. Iqbal’s panentheistic alternative says: God is real and near, your self is real and yours, and the creative work you do in the world — building institutions, pursuing knowledge, reforming societies — is a participation in God’s own creative activity. This is not a metaphysical footnote. It is the foundation of a civilisational attitude — one that treats human agency as sacred precisely because it is grounded in the divine.
Connections
Related pages
Appears in
Lecture II (Sections 2–7) · Lecture III (Sections 1–2, 9–12)
Further reading
- John Cooper, Panentheism: The Other God of the Philosophers (Baker Academic)
- William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, Chapter 5
- Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Lectures II–III