Manifesting Tawhid

As Muslims, we are told time and time again that the foundational principle of our religion is tawhid. Too often, our engagement with this principle remains purely theoretical: we strive to understand and affirm within ourselves the reality that there is no god but Allah, and assume we have thereby reached the reality of tawhid. However, this is just the first step.

The true Islamic mission is not just to understand tawhid, but to embody it. It is to actively work towards manifesting wahdah – unity – within ourselves and the world around us.

The divine lens sees the entirety of the existential realm as a singular reality. The seeming multiplicities fade away, dwarfed by the singular thread that connects all of existence. Islam, this immaculately monotheistic religion, invites us to constantly witness unity within pluralities, singularity within multiplicities. The movements of the prophets as a singular mission: not separate voices, but one truth echoing across millennia. The efforts of the Ahlulbayt (a) until the Minor Occultation are seen as one continuous 250-year-long lifetime. In the legislative realm, the divine law (shariʿah) is understood to be in complete harmony with the structure of existence – the realm of creation (takwin) and the realm of command (tashrīʿ) form a singular reality.

There is an ontological singularity within the human being as well. The body and soul are extensions of a single existence: the soul its reality in the highest realms of creation, the body its manifestation on the lowest realm of this dunya.

It is only in the domain of the willful actions of human beings (and jinn) that true multiplicity can manifest – an aberration in the perfect harmony of the divine order. We can choose to turn away from the unifying thread of creation, to ascribe partners to God and fracture ourselves by detaching from divine unity. But we are existentially needy towards Allah:

يَـٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلنَّاسُ أَنتُمُ ٱلْفُقَرَآءُ إِلَى ٱللَّهِ ۖ وَٱللَّهُ هُوَ ٱلْغَنِىُّ ٱلْحَمِيدُ
O mankind! You are the ones who stand in need of Allah, and Allah—He is the All-sufficient, the All-laudable.

(al-Fatir 35:15)

So even in our rebellion, the thirst remains. No matter how secure the house, how loving the marriage, how full the bank account, how healthy the body… There lingers a hollowness that refuses to be filled. The soul was not made for these; it was made for Him. And until it achieves unity with the Divine, it will wander restless, parched, clutching at mirages.

We are all aching for this unity with the divine. But how do we get there?

The path to tawhid is one of self-expansion: moving beyond the false delineated borders of one’s ego towards encompassing more and more beyond oneself. From one to a couple. From a couple to a family. From a family to a community. From a community to the globe. From the globe to the whole of the cosmos, seen and unseen. This is the path of the insan kamil — the Perfect Human — whose heart contains worlds, yet whose center is Allah. It is the station of Rasul Allah, whose “I” was never separate from “we,” and whose “we” was never separate from He.

Only here does the Prophetic description of the ummah as one body come alive. When the arm is in pain, the leg does not need to be commanded to feel pain; the ache runs through them both. The leg does not see itself as a separate entity from the arm, but an extension of itself. They are all part of the same living whole, all joined together by means of their connection to a singular, higher reality: the human soul. So too the believer sees his brother: not as other, but as self. The believers are united because of the higher unifying reality that encompasses us all: our existential connection to Allah. In this light, the believer does not feel sorrow for his brother’s pain because he has been told to, but because the bomb that fell on his brother wounded him, too.

Hastening Unity

Allah, the all-Merciful and ever-Kind Lord, desires to push us towards this apex of humanity. He wants to help us convert our multiplicities into singularities, to taste of the pure spring of tawhid, such that we become lost in the divine light of His love. And so, sometimes, He orchestrates events that are golden opportunities to hasten this unification. And He knows that the fastest way to free us from the prison of ego is to place before us an enemy so vile that we cannot help but break our internal barriers and unite in resistance.

Take the event of Karbala.

In the time of Imam Hasan (a), evil wore a mask. Mu‘awiyah, cunning and calculating, concealed his tyranny in the language of piety and pragmatism. The lines between truth and falsehood blurred, and the people – confused, afraid, or indifferent – abandoned their Imam.

But when Yazid ascended the throne, that mask shattered. Crude and shameless, he ruled with open contempt for Islam. His evil reached a peak when he did the unthinkable: massacring the family of the Prophet (s) and parading their heads through the streets.

The fearless words of Zaynab (s) and the dignified resistance of Imam Sajjād (a) unveiled the truth. The people, awakened by the stark contrast between Yazid’s depravity and the divine light of the Ahlulbayt (a), began to unify in grief, in clarity, and in resistance.

This shift was not merely emotional. It transformed the political landscape of the Muslim world. Just one generation later, the Abbasids, the force that overthrew the Umayyads, rose on the back of a public demand for justice for the Prophet’s family. Though the Abbasids themselves proved to be brutal tyrants, their claim to legitimacy was built on reverence for the Ahlulbayt (a) – a reverence only possible because of the clarifying and unifying force of the tragedy of Karbala.

Today’s Awakening

The same divine pattern repeats today.

The Zionist project of ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians has been ongoing for decades. The evil has been indefensible since its inception, but there have been those who have staunchly defended it, turning a blind eye. Now, however, the pictures of children starving to death have made the moral depravity so obvious that people can no longer turn away. Criticism of the Zionist entity has become mainstream in an unprecedented manner.

From the slaughter of children in Gaza, to the starvation of Yemen, to the indiscriminate killings in Lebanon, to the bombing of Tehran – the mask, always flimsy, is now fully gone. People of conscience see this evil for what it is, and they are drawn together from the shared experience of pain and horror at what the Zionist entity has unleashed upon the world.

Unity upon the Foundation of Hate and Love

Hatred for such evil draws together all who have goodness in their hearts. It quickens the coming together, but the unity remains superficial. If it is only hatred for a common enemy that unites us, our togetherness lasts only so long as the common experience of oppression remains. It is love for one another and for lofty human values that allows this unity to bloom, giving it true depth and longevity.

This methodology of unity has been exemplified time and time again in the Qu’ranic ethos. The first declaration of Islam, the kalimah, begins with لا اله (la ilaha) – a rejection of all other gods – before establishing the divinity of Allah alone by asserting الا الله (illAllah). It is the rejection of all other Gods that quickens unity, while the assertion of God’s divinity gives substance and stability to that initial unification.

In the last verse of Surah al-Fath, Allah (swt) says:

مُّحَمَّدٌۭ رَّسُولُ ٱللَّهِ ۚ وَٱلَّذِينَ مَعَهُۥٓ أَشِدَّآءُ عَلَى ٱلْكُفَّارِ رُحَمَآءُ بَيْنَهُمْ
Muhammad is the Apostle of Allah; and those who are with him are severe against the faithless and merciful amongst themselves.

(al-Fath 48:29)

Those who are truly with the Prophet (s) are first described by their aversion to the disbelievers and then to the bonds of love and mercy amongst themselves. It is rejection of evil that paves way for the flourishing of goodness.

By this divine calculus, the war on Iran, though devastating, was a blessing, granting the Iranians the tawfiq to draw closer to the living reality of tawhid. Even those opposed to the Revolution found themselves compelled to stand shoulder to shoulder with their revolutionary compatriots, realizing that survival hung upon unity before a barbaric enemy. Such unity is no small gift — it is an immense blessing, and not one that Allah grants to every people. The enemy’s ambush doesn’t always unite; sometimes, it divides, scattering hearts into suspicion and blame. This, indeed, was the outcome the Zionist entity naively sought. Yet, by Allah’s will, it was not so. The Iranians have largely succeeded in nearing the reality of tawhid in the aftermath of the aggression on their soil

Their challenge now is to carry forward this unity and benefit from its light even as the immediate threat fades.

Our Share of this Tawhidi Movement

But what about us? Whether we realize it or not, we have a deep, existential ache for this same unity with each other and with Allah. Will we remain spectators to the beautiful manifestation of tawhid we are witnessing in Iran, content to admire it from afar? Or can we also benefit from this tawhid-granting phenomenon, this divine opportunity to manifest true wahdah within our lives?  

If the bombs over Tehran can unite even bitter political opponents in defense of a shared future, can we who live far from the frontlines not find ways to unite in the smaller tests Allah places in our own lives? For unity to be manifested outwardly, it must first be nurtured internally. The strength to stand against God’s enemy is the same strength that resists the whispers of Shaytan as he calls to turn from the pole of tawḥīd and bow to the false gods within. He schemes to divide us from the unity of worshipping God alone, creating within us a deep schism, a level of shirk as we accept masters other than Him.

This internal fracture, this multiplicity within, soon ripples outwards. It appears in our relationships: between husband and wife, parent and child, neighbour and neighbour. Every fracture in the ummah begins as a fracture within a single soul, spreading into the web of human interaction. Every bitterness that poisons a community begins as an unchecked grudge between two individuals. And every unity that changes the world begins with two believers choosing to love one another for the sake of Allah, and to hate the falsehood that seeks to divide them.

We may not face airstrikes, but we face the more subtle artillery of the nafs: pride, stubbornness, envy, suspicion. To reject these is part of our la ilaha – our refusal of the false gods within. To love one another for the sake of the truth is a manifestation of our illAllah – our affirmation of the One.

This is the soil in which the seeds of global unity must first take root.

If we long to stand in solidarity with the people of Iran, of Palestine, of every land resisting oppression, let us begin by waging resistance against the forces of division in our own hearts and homes. Let us deny lowly impulses, heal old wounds, replace suspicion with sincere counsel, and build circles of trust that can widen from the dinner table to the masjid, from the masjid to the street, from the street to the ummah.

Unity is not a banner we raise only when war comes; it is a state we cultivate daily, so that when the tests arrive – and rest assured, they will come – we will already be one body: acutely feeling each other’s wounds and ready to act as one.

To walk toward the station of the insan kamil – the one who encompasses all of existence – is to let unity dissolve the prison of the self, until the love that binds us is not just the love of a people for each other, but the love of existence itself for its Creator. And that is the victory only hastened, never crushed, by the bombs of the enemy.