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Tawhid[a] (Arabic: تَوْحِيد, romanized: tawḥīd, lit. 'oneness [of God]') is the concept of monotheism in Islam.[3] Tawhid is the religion's central and single most important concept, upon which a Muslim's entire religious adherence rests. It unequivocally holds that God is indivisibly one (ahad) and single (wahid).[4][5]
Tawhid constitutes the foremost article of the Muslim profession of submission.[6] The first part of the Islamic declaration of faith (shahada) is the declaration of belief in the oneness of God.[4] To attribute divinity to anything or anyone else, is considered shirk—an unpardonable sin according to the Quran, unless repented afterwards.[7][8] Muslims believe that the entirety of the Islamic teaching rests on the principle of tawhid.[9]
From an Islamic standpoint, there is an uncompromising nondualism at the heart of the Islamic beliefs (aqida) which is seen as distinguishing Islam from other major religions.[10]
The Quran teaches the existence of a single and absolute truth that transcends the world—a unique, independent and indivisible being who is independent of the entire creation.[11] God, according to Islam, is a universal God, rather than a local, tribal, or parochial one, and is an absolute who integrates all affirmative values.[7]
Islamic intellectual history can be understood as a gradual unfolding of the manner in which successive generations of believers have understood the meaning and implications of professing tawhid. Islamic scholars have different approaches toward understanding it. Islamic scholastic theology, jurisprudence, philosophy, Sufism, and even the Islamic understanding of natural sciences to some degree, all seek to explain at some level the principle of tawhid.[12]
The classical definition of tawhid was limited to declaring or preferring belief in one God and the unity of God.[13] Although the monotheistic definition has persisted into modern Arabic, it is now more generally used to connote "unification, union, combination, fusion; standardization, regularization; consolidation, amalgamation, merger".[14]
Chapter 112 of the Quran, titled al-Ikhlas, reads:
Say, "He is Allah—One;
Allah—the Sustainer.
He has never had offspring, nor was He born.
And there is none comparable to Him."[15]
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