{"id":22158,"date":"2009-05-05T02:12:22","date_gmt":"2009-05-05T02:12:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ikim.gov.my\/new-wp\/?p=22158"},"modified":"2009-05-05T02:12:22","modified_gmt":"2009-05-05T02:12:22","slug":"tadbir-in-the-quran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ikim.gov.my\/en\/tadbir-in-the-quran\/","title":{"rendered":"Tadbir in the Quran"},"content":{"rendered":"
We have had some occasions before (see\u00a0IKIM Views<\/em>of 28 October 2008 and 23 December 2008) to briefly argue that the term tadbir is one of the major Arabic terms meaning administration, management, or governance.This has also been duly recognized by a number of studies carried out in modern times, such as, Muhammad al-Buraey in his\u00a0Administrative Development: an Islamic Perspective<\/em>\u00a0(London: KPI, 1985); Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud in his Malay work,\u00a0Penjelasan Budaya Ilmu<\/em>\u00a0(Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP), 1991); Yassine Essid in his in-depth study of the origins of the Islamic Economic Thought, aptly titled A\u00a0Critique of the Origins of Islamic Economic Thought<\/em>\u00a0(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995); and most recently, Scott Kugle in his Introduction to The Book of Illumination (Louisville: Fons Vitae, 2005), his translation of\u00a0Kitab al-Tanwir<\/em>\u00a0fi Isqat al-Tadbir<\/em>, a work by Ibn \u2018Ata’illah al-Iskandari, the great Muslim scholar of late thirteenth-century Cairo.<\/p>\n

Although the term\u00a0tadbir<\/em>\u00a0itself is not used in the Qur’an, the present tense of its verbal form,\u00a0yudabbir<\/em>, is repeated four times (Yunus<\/em>\u00a0(10): 3 and 31;\u00a0al-Ra\u2018d<\/em>\u00a0(13): 2; and\u00a0al-Sajadah<\/em>\u00a0(32): 5).<\/p>\n

In all of such occasions, the verb is accompanied by the term\u00a0al-amr<\/em>\u00a0and refers to a particular type of Divine Act.<\/p>\n

We therefore read\u00a0yudabbir al-amr<\/em>\u00a0whose meaning, for want of an exact English equivalent, is “He (that is, Allah) governs the affairs.”<\/p>\n

The word\u00a0amr<\/em>\u00a0in Arabic, apart from connoting “a command or a decree,” may also mean “an affair, an entity, an event, or a state.”<\/p>\n

Both meanings, though apparently distinct, are indeed closely related, at least insofar as the Islamic cosmological scheme is concerned.<\/p>\n

For God commands, and at His creative Behest, things come into being and events take place.<\/p>\n

The expression\u00a0yudabbir al-amr\u00a0<\/em>in the aforementioned cases is also mentioned alongside the facts of creation, whether celestial or terrestrial.<\/p>\n

Among the Arabic terms used for the act of creating in those instances is\u00a0khalaqa<\/em>\u00a0whose infinitive, khalq, may mean either “to create something in a form which has no precedence” or “to predetermine, to ordain, or to give measure (al-taqdir<\/em>).”<\/p>\n

One may therefore infer, on justified grounds, that not only does Allah bring all the creatures and events into existence according to a comprehensive design predetermined in His Perfect Knowledge, but He also generously sustains and governs all of them.<\/p>\n

The erudite theologian, jurist and commentator of the Qur’an, Imam Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 604 A.H.), in commenting on one of those four Qur’anic verses, said: “Yudabbir al-amr<\/em>\u00a0(literally “Allah governs the affairs”) means that Allah decrees and foreordains according to the requirement of wisdom and He also does that which is done by one whose act is always appropriate and who attends to the ends and outcomes of affairs such that nothing unbecoming would ever come into existence.”<\/p>\n

Similarly, the traditionist-theologian Imam al-Bayhaqi\u00a0Kitab al-I’tiqad wa al-Hidayah ila Sabil al-Rashad<\/em>, explains that Allah as The Governor is both omniscient-including His knowing the end and outcome of each and every thing-and omnipotent, involving His deciding in accordance with His Knowledge and His acting just as He decides.<\/p>\n

In fact, Shah Waliyullah (1703-1762), the well-known Muslim scholar of Delhi, in his famous work,\u00a0Hujjat Allah al-Balighah<\/em>, argued that with regard to the bringing into being of the world, tadbir is the last in the order of the three intimately-related Divine Attributes; the other two Attributes being ibda\u2018 followed by\u00a0khalq<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Such being the case, one quite often comes across renowned luminaries—like the famous Ibn \u2018Ata’illah al-Iskandari (d. 1309) in his Kitab al-Hikam as well as Kitab\u00a0al-Tanwir fi Isqat al-Tadbir<\/em>—admonishing people to be confident in, as well as preferring, Divine Governance in all matters, and to not be deluded by the apparent sufficiency of one’s own governance.<\/p>\n

The Divine Governance of the entire cosmos is indeed His Pattern of Recurrent Acts (Sunnatullah<\/em>), which is all-inclusive, appearing partly in the modes of Cause-Effect correlation and of the rise and decline of nations and civilizations in the theatre of history, holding sway not only over the physical domain but also over the ethico-spiritual realm, regulating not only socio-political life but also individual and family lives.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We have had some occasions before (see\u00a0IKIM Viewsof 28 October 2008 and 23 December 2008) to briefly argue that the term tadbir is one of the major Arabic terms meaning administration, management, or governance.This has also been duly recognized by a number of studies carried out in modern times, such as, Muhammad al-Buraey in his\u00a0Administrative…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_analytify_skip_tracking":false,"_wpzoom_pinterest_image_url":"","_wpzoom_pinterest_hidden_image":"0","_wpzoom_pinterest_description":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[220],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-star","category-220","description-off"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ikim.gov.my\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ikim.gov.my\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ikim.gov.my\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ikim.gov.my\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ikim.gov.my\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ikim.gov.my\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ikim.gov.my\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ikim.gov.my\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ikim.gov.my\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}