البصير
al-Baṣīr
Topic
A divine name meaning He who sees everything.
What it means
Al-Baṣīr means the All-Seeing. It is a name of God and it teaches that nothing is hidden from Him. Faruqi glosses it as the One who sees everything. Believers think of the name when they need to remember that their deeds are known to God in every place and at every hour, in public and in private. It teaches that no deed, however small, escapes God.
The Quran often pairs it with al-Samīʿ, the All-Hearing, as in the verse which says there is nothing like Him, and He is the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing (42:11). The same verse protects against comparison with creatures, since God’s seeing is not like the sight of any created thing. The name is a basis for iḥsān, which a famous hadith defines as worshipping God as though one sees Him, for if one does not see Him, He sees one.
Often misunderstood as
That God’s sight resembles human sight, when the Quran says that nothing is like Him.
What the sources say
The hadith of Jibril, reported by Muslim, defines iḥsān in this way.
Term and Arabic as listed in Ismail al Faruqi, Toward Islamic English (International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1995), p. 25, listed as AL BAṢĪR. The definition is restated here.