Doctrine of Belief in Allah

Adopted from the book : "The Faith of Shi'a Islam" by : Allamah Muhammad Ridha al-Muzaffar"

We believe that Allah is One (wahid), Alone (ahad), Peerless (laysa kamithlihu shay'), Eternal (qadim), Without Beginning or End; He is the First and the Last (al-awwal wa al-akhir).He is the All-knowing (al-'alim),the Wise (al-hakim), the Just (al-'adil), the Living (al-hayn), the Omnipotent (al-qadir),Independent of all things (al-ghaniy), the All Hearing (as-sami'), the All-Seeing (al-basir). He is not to be likened to substance nor form; He is neither heavy nor light, neither moving nor motionless ; He has no place nor any time, and no-one can point to Him as there is nothing like Him. Nothing is equal to Him, nor has He any opposite. He has no wife, no child, no partner and there is none comparable to Him. Vision does not perceive Him, yet He perceives everything. Anyone who likens Him to His creatures, for example one who supposes that lowest heaven, or that He will appear to the people of paradise like a moon, and so forth, he is as one who does not believe in Allah and is ignorant of the true nature of Allah. Who is above all deficiency. Yet everything we imagine will be a creature like ourselves. As Imam Baqir (A.S) said:

He is far greater than the explanation of the wise, and far beyond the research of discriminative knowledge (ilm daqiq).

Similarly, one who believes that He will be seen by His creatures on the Day of Judgement is an unbeliever, even though he does not liken Allah to anyone in appearance. Such pretenders have merely accepted the letter of the Qur'an and the hadith without using their intelligence Indeed, they have chosen to ignore their intelligence for they have not taken note of the use of figures of speech which the nature of language necessitates. Thus they have misunderstood the true meaning of the Qur'an and the hadith.