One of the most foundational questions any person of faith must grapple with is: who is God, really? For Muslims, the answer begins not with a picture or a statue, but with a declaration — Laa ilaaha illallah — and a set of perfect, eternal attributes that place the Creator entirely beyond comparison with anything in His creation. Among those attributes is one that the Quran makes unmistakably clear in Ayatul Kursi, the greatest verse in the Book of Allah: He neither experiences tiredness nor does sleep overcome Him. This single attribute separates the Islamic understanding of the Divine from distortions that have crept into other religious traditions — distortions that, if left unchallenged, reduce the All-Mighty to something worryingly human.
When Scripture Describes a God Who Rests: The Islamic Response
Genesis 2:2, accepted by both Christians and Jews, states that “on the seventh day God finished His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day.” Islam categorically rejects this notion. If God can tire, He is finite. If He requires rest, He is dependent — and neither description befits the Lord of the Worlds. Similarly, Exodus 32:14 in the Torah portrays God as “repenting of the evil which He thought to do to His people,” suggesting the Creator of the universe apologised to His creation. From an Islamic perspective, this represents a profound corruption of the concept of God: attributing to Him the regret, fatigue, and limitation that belongs only to His creation. The Quran is unambiguous — “There is nothing at all like Him, and He is the All-Hearing, the All-Knowing” (Ash-Shura 42:11) — and every name and attribute of Allah must be understood through this principle.
“Allah, may He be glorified, has told us that He is All-Knowing, Powerful, All-Hearing, All-Seeing, Forgiving, Most Merciful, and other names and attributes. We understand the meaning of that, and we can differentiate between knowledge and power, between mercy and hearing and vision; we know that all the names agree in that they refer to the Essence of Allah. Even though they have different meanings, they are in agreement and are the same with regard to His Essence, different with regard to His Attributes.” — Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyah, Majmoo’ al-Fataawa, 3/59
Knowing Allah Through His Attributes — Not Through Form or Imagination
- When Allah describes Himself in the Quran as having “hands” or a “face,” Muslims affirm these attributes as stated — without denying them and without likening them to human hands or faces
- Just as “the hands of a clock” or “the face of a mountain” are understood in English without anyone imagining literal human features, divine attributes carry meanings appropriate to Allah alone
- Every mental image a person attempts to assign to Allah is constructed from sensory perception of creation — making any such image, by definition, a comparison with the created
- Muslims worship Allah through His attributes: invoking al-Rahman (the Most Merciful), al-Qadir (the All-Powerful), al-Hayy (the Ever-Living) — without needing to assign Him a physical form
- The claim that “a piece of Allah’s spirit” resides within every human being is a theological deviation — Allah is entirely distinct from His creation, not diffused through it
- Allah’s names are not limited to ninety-nine; He has names He kept solely within His own knowledge in the realm of the unseen, as established in authentic hadith and affirmed by Ibn al-Qayyim and Ibn Katheer
“The beautiful names of Allah are not limited and are innumerable. Allah, may He be glorified and exalted, has names and attributes that He has kept to Himself in the knowledge of the unseen with Him. They are not known to any Angel who is close to Him or any Prophet who was sent.” — Ibn al-Qayyim, Badaa’i’ al-Fawaa’id, 1/174–176
Ultimately, the Islamic understanding of Allah’s names and attributes is not merely an intellectual exercise — it is the very foundation of sincere ibadah and sound spirituality. When a believer truly internalises that Allah never sleeps, they understand with certainty that no prayer offered at 3am goes unheard. When they know He neither tires nor forgets, they find genuine peace in surrendering their affairs to Him without anxiety. The scholars of Ahl as-Sunnah wa’l-Jama’ah have preserved this creed across centuries precisely because it matters: a distorted understanding of God produces a distorted relationship with Him. For every Muslim seeking clarity of faith, purpose, and guidance in a world full of noise, returning to Ayatul Kursi and sitting with its meaning is an act of spiritual healing — because it reconnects the heart to a God who is watching, fully awake, fully present, and unlike anything the mind can conceive.
