Religious Fundamentals

Tawhid, shirk and nifaq are three of the most used words in Islamic discourse and three of the least precisely understood. People apply them loosely, to each other, in arguments where nobody involved could define them. This short treatise by Shaykh-ul-Islam Muhammad bin Abdul-Wahhab defines them.

Why It Was Written

The concern behind the book is stated plainly: in a time when atheism and abandonment of the religion are widespread, Muslims need to return to Islam itself in order to protect their monotheistic creed and their values from the man-made philosophies pressing on them from every side. Those philosophies do not usually announce themselves. They arrive as reasonable assumptions and settle into a Muslim's thinking without ever being examined.

The defense the Shaykh proposes is not argument-by-argument rebuttal but clarity at the foundations — knowing exactly what monotheism requires, exactly what breaks it, and exactly what hypocrisy consists of, so that a deviation is recognized for what it is when it appears.

The Three Terms

• Tawhid — the Oneness of Allah, and what it obliges in belief, worship and daily conduct
• Shirk — associating partners with Allah, in its open forms and its hidden ones, with the reasons it is treated as the gravest of sins
• Nifaq — hypocrisy, both the kind that removes a person from Islam and the kind that afflicts believers, along with the signs the texts identify

Each is established from the Qur'an and the authentic Sunnah rather than from the author's reasoning — the method that runs through all of this Shaykh's writing.

Who It Is For

A first book on creed for beginners, and a short revision for those who have studied more. Its length is a real advantage: these three definitions are the ones that need to be secure before anything else is built on them, and a reader will finish this in a sitting. Suitable for new Muslim classes, study circles and da'wah distribution.

Related Reading

• Kitab At-Tauhid — the same author's foundational work on Tawheed, at length
• Concise Collection on Creed and Tauhid — this treatise together with three other creed works, pocket size
• The Many Shades of Shirk — the forms of shirk examined in detail