Posted on: 27 Aug 2019
Shri Anil asked: When someone asked Prophet Mohammed “Have you seen thy Lord?”, the Prophet replied, “He is a Light, how could I see Him?” There are several other references related to Allah and light in the Quran, such as “His veil is the light”; “You are the Light of the heavens and the earth (wa man feehin) and whoever is in them”; “So believe in Allah and His Messenger and the Noor (light) which we have sent down (i.e. the Quran). And Allah is acquainted with what you do.” But some Muslim devotees say that calling Allah a Noor (Light) is not permissible. It is shirk, which is the sin of worshiping anyone or anything besides God.
Swami replied: Allah is the absolute and unimaginable God, called Parabrahman in Hinduism and Jehovah in Christianity. Allah cannot be any imaginable item in the imaginable creation. Mohammad was a Human Incarnation like Krishna in Hinduism and Jesus in Christianity. The ‘light’ mentioned here is the knowledge with the help of which you can see and distinguish items. Hence, the Quran is the light or divine knowledge like the Gita of Hinduism and the Bible of Christianity, with the help of which, one can distinguish right from wrong and the true from the false. There is no difference between Allah and Mohammad because Allah had merged with the selected devotee, Mohammad, making Him a Human Incarnation of Allah.
Allah cannot be the imaginable light or the imaginable spiritual knowledge or the imaginable Quran. Allah is the Possessor of the light or knowledge. Even Mohammad was the possessor of knowledge or light and was not directly the knowledge or light. A possessor can be addressed as the possessed item. When you call out to the apple-seller saying “O apples! Come here”, it means that you are calling the possessor of the apples and not the inanimate apples. The possessor of a lot of knowledge is addressed as knowledge itself, in the sense that the possessor is an embodiment of knowledge. Hence, it is not wrong to say that Allah is light or knowledge, even though, actually, Allah is not the light, knowledge or any other imaginable item of this creation.
Mohammad did not like to be called Allah (monism) or the Son of Allah (special monism). He preferred being called the servant of Allah (dualism) in order to avoid being attacked by the kind of egotistic and jealous devotees, who crucified Jesus. Jesus had claimed that He was Jehovah, when He said, “I am the truth and light”. He had also said that He was the Son of Jehovah. Both these claims of the Human Incarnation, of being God Himself or the Son of God, are not tolerable to egotistic, jealous and ignorant devotees. The most they can tolerate is the Human Incarnation claiming to be the servant of God.
As far as pravṛtti is concerned, there is no problem if the Human Incarnation is called as a servant of God. In pravṛtti, only establishing the existence of the unimaginable, omniscient and omnipotent God is sufficient. The Incarnation, behaving like a mere servant of God can convey the spiritual knowledge to the devotees saying that He is only delivering the message from God. Here, the Incarnation behaves as if He were a postman delivering the letter sent by God to the public. However, in nivṛtti, the Human Incarnation must be correctly identified as God. If the receivers of the preaching are only of the level of pravṛtti, the Human Incarnation must only project dualism. He must say that He is a servant of God. Such a claim will not enrage the devotees because they already feel that every devotee is a servant of God. Seeing the cruel fate of Jesus, His succeeding prophet, Mohammad, minimized the risk by projecting Himself only as a divine messenger and not as God or even a Son of the God.
pravrutti nivrutti