The 6 articles of faith, explained without the jargon

Tawḥīd, the oneness of God, comes first, and the rest hangs on it. The Quran puts it in a single line: “Nothing is like Him.”^[2] A short chapter, al-Ikhlas, repeats it in four verses, beginning “Say, He is God, the One” and ending “and there is none comparable to Him.”^[3]

That line carries more than the number one. It says God is not a thing among things. He is not a bigger version of a king, a father or a force of nature, and nothing in creation is a fit picture of Him. The scholar Ismail al Faruqi argued that this is why Muslim worship keeps images out and keeps the Arabic of the Quran in: nothing is allowed to stand in for the One who has no equal.^[4] It also explains the Quran’s argument against rivals: “If there were more than one god in heaven and earth, both would have collapsed.”^[5] A second ultimate power would be a limit on the first.

The strongest objection is that a God so far beyond comparison must be remote. The Quran answers in its own words: God is “closer to him than his jugular vein”, and when a servant asks, “I am near; I answer the call of the caller.”^[6] Transcendence describes what God is like. Nearness describes how He deals with people, and the text holds both together.

Angels are created from light, according to the Prophet, and they carry out God’s commands without disobeying.^[7] The Quran describes them as beings “who do not disobey God in what He commands them, and do what they are commanded.”^[8] Gabriel brings revelation, Michael is named in the Quran, and the angel of death takes souls.^[9] The Quran does not give that last angel a personal name. The name Azrail comes from later tradition.

Angels also keep records. The Quran says that over every person are “noble recorders” who know what they do.^[10] Belief in them is belief in the unseen, which the Quran lists among the marks of the God-conscious at the very start of the second chapter. It rests on revelation, as no instrument can measure them.

Two clarifications matter. Angels are not worshipped and have no share in divinity. And Iblis, who refused to bow to Adam, was not an angel: the Quran says he was one of the jinn.^[11] Some early commentators nonetheless counted him among the angels at the moment of the command, since the verse says all bowed “except Iblis”. Others, Hasan al-Basri among them, held that he was never an angel, and the plain wording of 18:50 supports them.

Muslims believe God sent scripture before the Quran: the Torah to Moses, the Psalms to David, the Gospel to Jesus.^[12] The Quran calls itself a confirmation of what came before and a guardian over it.^[13] It also speaks of earlier “scrolls” given to Abraham, so the list is not closed to the four names above.

This is why belief in the earlier books is a requirement and not a courtesy. A Muslim who denies that the Torah or the Gospel ever came from God has stepped outside the article of faith. The disagreement is about what has happened to the texts since, not about whether God spoke.

Jews and Christians reasonably object that their scriptures have been preserved and read for centuries. The Quran does say that some people altered words and forgot part of what they were given.^[14] Classical scholars differed over how far this went. Ibn Hazm argued that the written text itself was changed, and others held that the change lay mainly in interpretation. On either view the Muslim position is the same: the Quran is the measure against which the earlier books are weighed.

“There is no community to which a warner has not come.”^[15] That verse is the whole position, and another says the same of every nation: God sent a messenger who called people to worship Him alone. Every people received a messenger, and the Quran names twenty-five of them in the traditional count, among them Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, while saying that others are not named.^[16]

Faruqi drew a conclusion from this: since every people was sent a warner and every person is born with an innate sense of God, nobody is shut out of the knowledge that God is one.^[17] The Quran calls that sense fiṭra, the natural disposition on which God made people.^[18] Muslims believe in all the messengers without making distinctions among them.^[19] That phrase refers to belief. The Quran itself says that God favoured some messengers above others, so the article does not flatten their rank.

Muslims also hold that Muhammad is the last of them. The Quran calls him “the Seal of the Prophets”.^[20] Followers of earlier messengers answer that they already have their guidance. The Muslim reply is that the Quran came to confirm the earlier messengers and to complete the message, so that belief in all of them is a reason to hear the last.

Life is a test and it ends in a reckoning. “Whoever does an atom’s weight of good will see it, and whoever does an atom’s weight of evil will see it.”^[21] The Quran adds that God will set up just scales on the Day of Resurrection, and no soul will be wronged in the least.^[22]

The belief does two jobs. It tells a person that wrongs which no court ever sees are still seen. And it tells the wronged that the account is not closed. The Quran spends more words on the Last Day than on almost any other subject, because everything else in the creed leads to it.

The usual objection is that bodies which have decayed cannot return. The Quran records the same objection from its first audience and answers it: “He who produced them the first time” will give them life again.^[23] It also describes a barrier, the barzakh, that stands between death and the resurrection.^[24] The details of that interval are reported in hadith, and scholars treat their strength case by case.

The sixth article is qadar: God knows all things and His will is over all things. The Quran says, “We created everything by measure.”^[25] It also says that no misfortune strikes the earth or the people in it unless it is in a record before God brings it about.^[26]

It does not cancel responsibility. The same Quran says “Whoever wishes, let him believe, and whoever wishes, let him disbelieve”, and also says that people do not will except that God wills.^[27] Scholars explain that God’s knowing what a person will choose does not force the choice, in the way that your knowing the sun will rise does not make it rise. When the Companions asked the Prophet whether they should then rely on what is written and stop striving, he told them to act, since each person is made ready for what he was created to do.^[28]

The theological schools worked out the balance in different ways. The Mutazila said people create their own acts. The Ashari school spoke of God creating the act and the person “acquiring” it, and the Maturidi school gave human choice a larger place. The objection that punishment is unfair if everything is decreed meets the verse that God does not burden a soul beyond its capacity.^[29] The question gets its own article on this site.