the teachings of Islam. According to the scriptures, the world was created
by the will of God and was also sustained by God. Man too was created and
sustained by this same God. Only God was the Eternal Reality. Everything
else was ephemeral.Thus the concept of
wahdat ul wajud,
which had become
popular among the Sufis, had no basis in the Qur’an and the
hadith
. In fact
the Qur’an says: ‘And call not, besides Allah, on another god. There is no
God but Him. Everything (that exists) will perish except Himself.’ (28:88)
From this position ShaykhAhmad Sirhindi criticized this theory of
wahdat
ul wajud
or ‘the oneness of being’ in which Ibn ‘Arabi proposed that God and
the world were one. Ahmad Sirhindi held this to be untrue: the world was
not one with God, but proceeded from God; the existence of God was real,
while the existence of the world was unreal and imaginary; the universe
was not God, but the Shadow of God.This concept which he called
wahdat
ash- shuhud
or‘the unity/oneness of witnessing’, the Shaykh felt, was entirely
in consonance with the unity of God or
tawhid
, which was the cornerstone
of Islam. In Islam, God is One and Indivisible, an Absolute Whole. The
Creator and the created are separate. The world exists and it is other than
God. He explains his concept by a simile: “The presence of the world is like
the presence of the image of an object in a mirror.Thus the presence of the
image is not the existence of the object. The object is real, but the image is
unreal.The existence of the image is a shadow existence (
Wujud Zilli
) totally
separate from the real existence (
Wujud Asli
) of the object. In this way the
existence of the world is a shadow existence, separate from the real existence
of God.”
Wahdat ash-shuhud
alsomeans‘unity of vision’, that is to say, the experience
of union or oneness is related to vision rather than reality. This addressed
the experience of the Sufis of ‘becoming one with God.’The experience of
union, said Ahmad Sirhindi, did not mean that man became one with God.
In reality, the servant shall remain the servant forever. After explaining
