Second Chapter
Concerning Proofs of the Divine Unity
[The traveller who had been sent to the world in order to attain faith, who journeyed through the whole cosmos in his mind in order to ask all things concerning his Creator, to seek his Sustainer in every place and find his God, with the utmost certainty, at the point of Necessary Existence — this traveller said to his intellect: “Come, let us depart on a new journey in order to behold the proofs of the unity of our Necessarily Existent Creator.”
They set out together. At the First Stopping-Place, they saw four sacred truths prevailing over the whole cosmos, truths that self-evidently necessitated the unity of God.]
The absorption of each class of men in a mode of worship dictated by their innate dispositions; the species of worship engaged in by other animate beings, as well as inanimate beings, through the performance of their essential functions; the way in which all material and immaterial bounties and gifts in the cosmos become means inciting men to worship and thanks, to praise and gratitude; the fashion in which all the manifestations of the Unseen and epiphanies of the spirit, revelation and inspiration, unanimously proclaim the exclusive fitness of one God to receive worship — all of this, in most evidential fashion, proves the reality and dominance of a single and absolute Divinity. If the truth of such a Divinty exists, it can in no way accept partnership. For those who respond to Divinity —that is, the fitness to be worshipped— with thanks and worship, are the conscious and animate fruits on the highest branches of the tree of the cosmos. If others were able to gratify and place under their obligation those conscious beings in such fashion as to make them turn away from and forget their true object of worship —Who may, indeed, be swiftly forgotten, because of his invisibility— this would be in such utter contradiction to the essence of Divinty and its sacred purposes that it could in no way be allowed. It is for this reason that the Qur’an so repeat