Resolution On Being Faithful Muslims and Loyal Americans

Anthropomorphic Depictions of God: The Concept of God in Judaic, Christian and Islamic Traditions – Representing the Unrepresentable

New Book by Dr. Zulfiqar A. Shah

Zulfiqar Ali Shah’s "Anthropomorphic Depictions of God: The Concept of God in Judaic, Christian and Islamic Traditions – Representing the Unrepresentable" is an honest assessment of one of the most perplexing shadows of monotheism as it has expressed itself in the history of the three Abrahamic faiths. The author painstakingly examines the anthropomorphic depictions of God in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scriptural traditions. He correctly notes that at the textual level the Qur’an is the most consistently and severely anti-anthropomorphic, upholding a more rigorous notion of divine transcendence. Beyond the historical value of this book as an exegetical work of comparative religion, it can be read as an important theological composition. The tension between a God who is wholly other and thus resistant to any human characterization, on one hand, and the basic psychological need on the part of human beings to portray God anthropomorphically, on the other hand, continues to be at the heart of religious faith and devotion. God may be without image, but in the absence of image it is hard to imagine how to worship God. In that respect, if monotheism is to persist as a vibrant force, there must always be an idolatrous element expressed in the anthropomorphic representation of the deity. And yet precisely because this is so, we must always refine our beliefs so that we are not ensnared in representing the unrepresentable and imaging the imageless by the fabrication of images that, literally speaking, are false. Rather than expanding the analogical imagination in envisioning transcendence, the spiritual demand of the hour, the epochal duty, is the need to overcome it. Zulfiqar Ali Shah’s book has contributed significantly to this conversation.

Elliot R Wolfson
Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies
New York University