4وَلَم يَكُن لَهُ كُفُوًا أَحَدٌAli Unal“And comparable to Him there is none.”1/2The Divine Religion, which had been revealed to Prophets of various peoples was the same in essence; but over the course of time, its message had been misinterpreted as it had become mixed up with superstitions and had degenerated into magical practices and meaningless rituals. The concept of God, the very core of the Religion, had become debased by (a) the anthropomorphic tendency of turning God into a being with a human shape and passions;(b) the deification of angels; (c) the association of other personalities with the Godhead of the One and only God (as in Hinduism and Christianity); (d) the making of the Prophets or some godly persons into incarnations of God (e.g., Jesus, upon him be peace, in Christianity, the Buddha in Mahayana Buddhism, Krishna and Rama in Hinduism); and (e) the personification of the Attributes of God as separate Divine persons (e.g., the Christian Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and the Hindu Trimutri of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva). The holy Prophet of Islam, Muhammad,upon him be peace and blessings, rejected all such theological trends and restored the concept of God to its pristine purity as the only Creator, Sustainer, and Master of all of creation (Ezzati, 1980: ). Tawhīd -–unity – is the highest conception of the deity, the knowledge of which God has sent to humankind in all ages through His Prophets. It was this same knowledge that all the Prophets, including Moses, Jesus, and the Prophet Muhammad, upon them all be peace, brought to humankind. People became guilty of polytheism or idol-worship after the death of their Prophets only because they had deviated from the pure teachings of the Prophets. They relied upon their own faulty reasoning, false perceptions, and biased interpretations in order to satisfy their lusts, which they would have been unable to do with a Tawhīd-based system, in which they would have had to obey the commandments only of the One Supreme God. “The foremost in the Religion,” ‘Ali ibn Abī Tālib, the Fourth Caliph, may God be pleased with him, is reported to have said, “God’s knowledge, the perfection of His knowledge, is to testify to Him; the perfection of testifying to Him is to believe in His Oneness; the perfection of believing in His Oneness is to regard Him as pure; and the perfection of His purity is to deny all kinds of negative attributes about Him” (an-Nahj al-Balāghah) He is infinite and eternal; He is self-existent and self-sufficient. As stated in this sūrah: He, God, the One of Absolute Unity; the Eternally-Besought-of-All (Himself in no need of anything); He begets not, nor is He begotten; and comparable to Him, there is none. And elsewhere, the same sentiment is expressed: Vision perceives Him not, and He perceives all vision (6:103); and Nothing whatsoever (is there) like Him, and He (alone) is the All-Hearing and All-Seeing (42:11). Again, in the words of Ali, may God be pleased with him, “He is a Being, but not through the phenomenon of coming into being. He exists, but not from non-existence. He is with everything, but not by a physical nearness. He is different from everything, but not by a physical separation. He acts, but without the accompaniment of movements and instruments. He is the One, the only One Who is such that there is none with whom He keeps company or whom He misses when absent” (an-Nahj al-Balāghah, “First Sermon”).This short sūrah, which God’s Messenger describes as equivalent to one-third of the Qur’ān, has six sentences – three positive and three negative – which prove or establish six aspects of Divine Unity, and reject or negate six types of associating partners with God. Each sentence has two meanings: one a priori (functioning as a cause or proof), and the other a posteriori (functioning as an effect or result). That means that the sūrah actually contains 36 sūrahs, each made up of a combination of six sentences and each having many aspects. One is either a premise or a proposition, and the others are arguments supporting it, as detailed below: -Say: He is God because He is the One of Absolute Unity, because He is the Eternally-Besought-of-All, because He begets not, because He is not begotten, and because comparable to Him there is none. -Say: Comparable to Him there is none because He begets not, because He is not begotten, because He is the Eternally-Besought-of-All, because He is the One of Absolute Unity, and because He is God. -Say: He is God so He is the One of Absolute Unity, so He is the Eternally-Besought-of-All, so He begets not, so He is not begotten, and so comparable to Him there is none. And so on. In this way, there are thousands of Qur’āns within the Qur’ān.