In this essay, we aim to briefly revisit the religion of Abraham, namely tawhid.
We approach tawhid not only through religious definitions. Rather, it is more fundamental than belief: an order of being, an architecture of perception, and a mode of becoming. Tawhid cannot be comprehended simply by repeating the phrase "God is One."
Tawhid is a comprehensive reordering of one's relationship to the world, self, reason, fears, possessions, and death. In this sense, tawhid is an elevated, profound consciousness comprising innumerable principles. It does not fit the comfort of faith cherished by the religious mind, nor the ease of a metaphysically sanitized view claimed by the secular mind. This very quality gives tawhid its unsettling effect on both.
This is because it exposes the hidden accumulations and subtle forms of servitude present within each individual.
At the outset, it must be stated clearly: multiplicity is not the opposite of tawhid. Rather, what opposes tawhid is baseless accumulation and dispersion.
Tawhid does not deny multiplicity. Instead, it ensures that multiplicity remains connected to a unifying center or purpose. The contemporary mindset often equates multiplicity with freedom, whereas the traditional view regards it as a threat. Tawhid offers an overlooked perspective, disrupting multiplicity that lacks roots or purpose, resisting domination by chaos, and guiding the person toward genuine freedom, which emerges from staying connected to a central purpose rather than being lost amid countless options.
Thus, tawhid aligns with neither chaos nor domination. For this reason, it does not merely transform one's conception of God; it fundamentally challenges one's understanding of the self, reason, and authority.
This ensures that, while one may believe they have unified God, they do not multiply the self in vain; and while believing they have unified the self, they do not divide the world into idols.
An idol is not only an object of stone, wood, or sculpture; rather, it is anything to which a person ascribes meaning, ceases inquiry, and clings with reverence. The idols of modern humanity, in this sense, are as numerous as those of ancient times. Sometimes they are more sophisticated and invisible, perhaps even legitimized. At times, they may even appear more primitive.
Today, reason or human rationality may become an idol in many forms. Science, the state, the individual, and even freedom can be idolized. Few aspects of life escape this process. Yet tawhid, by asking "What have you made absolute?", provides the standard for testing such absolutes. It emerges as the highest, most general, unshakable principle. It stands against idols and anything that may be idolized.
The question "What have you made absolute?" unsettles the religious mind, which confuses habits with principles. It unsettles the secular mind by exposing sanctities behind claims of neutrality and testing cherished commitments. Thus, tawhid is not a simple affirmation but a process of dissolution, gradually dispersing false centers from the mind, heart, speech, and actions.
Letting go of false centers is hard because people fear lacking something stable to hold onto. But tawhid replaces false centers with a true inner center, which is the foundation within each person.
Like the Station of Abraham.
Moreover, the center here is a direction; it concerns where one turns one's face, what one considers ultimate, what would leave one bewildered if lost. It is a striving to return everything to its origin.
Tawhid takes away, one by one, the things from which a person would be shaken if deprived, until that person leans upon a ground from which they can stand even in loss. In this respect, tawhid is a discipline of purification, a consciousness of rising, a sharp sword of awareness.
The forefather of tawhid, as a proper name in ancient history, is the Prophet Abraham.
We turn to Abraham's narrative to discuss tawhid. In early history, Abraham marks a transformation of the center. His breaking of idols, casting them into the fire, migration (hijra), and sacrifice all demonstrate that tawhid is not merely theoretical. It is existential. In Abraham's narrative, these are manifestations of tawhid's consciousness. Within this scope, we will briefly discuss human consciousness of tawhid.
Let us begin.
First, let us start with a point often overlooked in recounting the story of Abraham. The breaking of idols was, before being a physical act, a mental dissolution. Before the idols fell to the ground, their authority had already been overthrown in Abraham's mind. No stone becomes sacred unless it is first legitimized in the human mind, just like every other form of idol.
Abraham's first struggle was not with the outside world but with the inner world, fitting the logic of ancient history. For ancient history unfolds inwardly first. Only afterward does its manifestation pour outward in surprising ways.
For this reason, before he ever touched the idols, Abraham had already annulled in his mind the very possibility that they could be gods. This annulment is the first true stage of tawhid, not merely ceasing to worship something, but more profoundly, rejecting from the root its claim to be worthy of worship. Human beings often continue to grant authority to what they imagine they no longer worship. Therefore, the first task is to examine the very essence of what claims to be a deity, as Abraham did.
A mental idol is more resistant than a physical one. It hides as "reason," "tradition," "wisdom," or even "truth." In Abraham's time, the idols were stars, the moon, the sun, and stones. None of these objects inherently carried divinity. Today, concepts, ideologies, and identities become idols in the same way. They fill an inner space but lack true divinity.
The mechanism remains the same. People tend to ascribe sacredness to whatever seems stable, creates order, and soothes fear. Abraham was decisive here. He was not deceived by the splendor of celestial bodies. Instead, he questioned the point within himself that gave them meaning, going beyond the reverence offered to them.
Abraham's reasoning through the star, moon, and sun was not trial and error, nor a romantic search. It was testing the mind's sanctities and foundations.
Abraham did not sanctify what he saw; he questioned whether it deserved sanctification.
This stance is a form of inquiry from which both the religious and the secular mind commonly flee. The religious mind often fears testing the sacred; the secular mind, while claiming to have no sacred in the religious sense, escapes inquiry by producing unexamined absolutes of its own. Yet for Abraham, the forefather of tawhid, and for the community that follows him, what is required is to halt both fear of testing and flight from questioning by asking: "What do I rely upon?", and to remember Abraham there, at the very least.
For Abraham and those who follow his path, called the Millat (or community) of Abraham, this results in complete freedom from anything false.
Those who do not belong to Abraham's Millat experience emptiness after demolishing mental idols. Losing familiar centers, they imagine drifting aimlessly. Fear and anxiety arise, turning diagnosis and destruction of idols into extraordinary events. Abraham passed through this threshold of disorientation yet endured it, never retreating from his inner boiling.
His well-known statement, "I do not love those that set," is nothing other than a deeply reflective expression of this stance. It is the articulation of that inner boiling, the gaze, and the gnosis of one who burns within.
For love here signifies attachment. Abraham realized that what one binds oneself to must not be transient, and he gave voice to the boiling call of tawhid within him through this sentence. What appears outwardly in this expression has nothing to do with rationality.
If examined closely, this realization is in fact the beginning of a process that isolates the human being and drives them toward helplessness, suddenly so, for it entails both the collapse of inner supports and a severing from what the majority cling to. It is the cutting of tawhid itself, inwardly and outwardly.
In this respect, tawhid is not the religion of crowds, but the path of those who dare to stand alone, both inwardly and outwardly.
Thus, Abraham's breaking of mental idols is a rebellion, but not merely a rebellion; it is also a purification. He did not reject the world; rather, he removed the world from the status of divinity at the very moment tawhid manifested in him as the True Name. In doing so, he opened the Way beyond.
This is unrelated to rationality. Yet Abraham did not become an enemy of reason; he liberated relative reason from claiming absoluteness, encompassing rationality rather than denying it. Likewise, he did not reject tradition; rather, he opened it to questioning, including its most foundational principles. For this reason, the Abrahamic stance is neither romantic mysticism nor dry rationalism, nor a timid attempt at persuasion. It is the honesty of a search for center, a boiling fire, an upright stance, imbued with wisdom and prophethood.
It must further be stated that when mental idols are destroyed, the first great resistance a person faces is the sense of belonging. Belonging is often concerned not with truth, but with security; knowing where one comes from and feeling where one belongs temporarily soothes existential fear. The meaning of Abraham's relationship with his father lies here. This was no ordinary generational conflict; it became one of the harshest trials of tawhid, a paradigmatic moment in ancient history.
For the father here is not merely a biological figure; he represents tradition, authority, transmitted knowledge, and inherited meanings accepted without question. Thus, in the question Abraham directs to his father, there is in fact a question addressed to his entire age:
"Why do you attach yourselves to that which neither hears nor sees nor benefits you?"
Through his father, Abraham posed this question to his people.
This question was not aimed at the love present there; it was directed at the blindness that had taken root and become habitual, a complaint against blindness, an act of mercy, and a rebellion. Yet it must be noted that Abraham's stance toward his father contains no disrespect; nor does it hold absolute hostility toward his people. It appeared as nothing more than a change of priority, an invitation to question what is essential and ultimate. This distinction is often missed. For people, either sanctify tradition or reject it entirely. Abraham's stance lies outside this binary. He rejected the father not because he was "wrong," but because he was not "ultimate", even at the cost of being cast out by his people. For the True Name of tawhid does not bow before anything that is not ultimate.
In this respect, Abraham's conflict with his father was not personal; it was the first social manifestation of tawhid. Here, tawhid demands that even what one loves not be placed at the center if it does not truly belong there.
It must not be forgotten that the fragmentation of belonging is one of the most fragile points of the human being. People often fear loneliness more than they fear falsehood. Abraham's path passes through this fear. To stand against his father was, in truth, to create distance between himself and his roots. This distance was not a denial, but rather a purification. Tawhid does not demand that a person erase their past; it demands that they not absolutize it. This is a subtle purification, brought about by will.
As Abraham left his father, he risked becoming without family; yet, in truth, he would not remain so. For here, root ceased to mean lineage and became a matter of standing firm in the locus of truth. This standing draws nourishment not from the approval of the majority, but from the weight of truth itself.
For this reason, Abraham walked alone toward his Lord; for the One is reached only by becoming one, by no other means.
At this point, the crudely termed secular and religious minds of today meet in a common error; let this be stated:
The secular mind, in the name of freedom, dissolves belonging only to produce new dependencies; the religious mind, in the name of faith, freezes belonging and equates truth with tradition. Thus, both represent rigid states of consciousness. Abraham, as the True Name, closes both paths at their root. His stance was not the ease of saying "those before me were wrong," but the courage to say "those before me must also be tested." That courage is the ethical dimension of tawhid. For truth is not right because it is old, nor wrong because it is new. The measure is not time or what occurs within time, but locus. What has no proper locus is not worthy to be the measure of the human being.
It must further be said that Abraham's reasoning through the star, the moon, and the sun is often read superficially as a "cosmological search story." Yet this narrative establishes one of the most refined criteria of tawhid. The sky here is not a romantic field of contemplation, nor should it be reduced to classical cosmology; rather, it is an ontological laboratory in which the human being tests what they assume to be absolute.
Thus, when Abraham saw the star and called it "my Lord," this naming was a conscious trial, an ontological experiment.
The setting of the stars was not for Abraham merely a temporal phenomenon. Setting was read as a sign of insufficiency. What is to sustain a human being must not only shine, display power, or provide order; it must also possess the quality of not abandoning. The star sets, the moon disappears, the sun withdraws. Even in their classical magnificence, they are transient, destined to depart. Therefore, Abraham's words, "I do not love those that set," were not an aesthetic preference but a principle of being, a criterion that culminates in the purification of what is doomed to depart.
This scene is profoundly instructive for modern humanity. Today, too, people manufacture stars, moons, and suns, merely changing their names while being drawn in the same direction. Careers shine and fade; ideologies rise and collapse; relationships promise and exhaust. Each time, disappointment follows, yet the question is sought in the wrong place. The problem is not that the star sets, but that the star was enthroned as a god. This is Abraham's distinction. He did not deny setting; he turned setting into a measure. He did not blame the transient; he withdrew the absolutized meaning imposed upon it. This is the discipline of tawhid, taught to us through this ancient scene: why we must not love what sets, without denying its setting or denying its place within its own orbit.
It must also be expressed that the episode of the fire in Abraham's story has often been reduced to a miracle-centered narrative, thereby obscuring its deeper meaning within ancient history. Yet this too is an archetypal example.
For the fire into which Abraham was cast should not be confined to the realm of the extraordinary. It must be understood as a scene revealing the purifying nature of tawhid. Fire here is not merely a destructive force; it is a witness that reveals what is worthy of burning and what remains unburned. When Abraham was cast into the fire, there was not only a scene of oppression, but a threshold at which truth and falsehood separated. The fire could not burn the body that refused to bow before idols, nor did it burn it; for what was meant to burn was not the body, but whatever was enslaved to idolized meanings. In this sense, the fire stands not as punishment but as confirmation, ancient testimony in Abraham's favor.
The point to be noted is this: fire is the embodied form of human fear. People often retreat when it comes time to pay the price for what they claim to believe. Belief, as long as it remains within comfort, stays at the level of assertion. Fire turns assertion into trial. Abraham's tawhid passed through that trial, not content with saying "I am right," but advancing to the point of being ready to burn. Thus, the fire's failure to burn is not primarily about the miracle; it concerns the naturalness of that surrender. It is as though even the fire sought to befriend Abraham.
Let it be stated clearly: the fire's failure to burn does not mean tawhid suspends the world. Natural laws are not annulled; rather, the hierarchy of meaning is reordered. Fire does not lose its property of burning, but it loses the authority to annihilate a body in contact with truth. This subtle distinction is often missed. Tawhid does not deny the world; it prevents worldly powers from becoming absolute. Fire burns, but not everything. Power exists, but cannot rule over all. Abraham's emergence from the fire makes this limitation visible.
For modern humanity, this scene is profoundly instructive.
Consider today's fires, symbolic fires, though perhaps no less fierce than Abraham's. They are not physical; yet inwardly they scorch. Today, fire takes the form of exclusion, discrediting, isolation, and fear of loss.
A person may claim to know the truth, yet retreat when approaching the fire. The Abrahamic stance is not to retreat. For here, the matter is not merely courage, it is fidelity to the Absolute.
When a person binds themselves to the Absolute, fire ceases to terrify; it becomes, in every sense, only a trial.
Fire does not annihilate the human being; it simplifies them. It burns excess; it cannot touch the essence. The essence remains.
It must also be said that Abraham's migration (hijra) is another archetype within ancient history. In his narrative, Hijra is often read as a geographical movement. Yet hijra is a necessary ontological relocation compelled by tawhid. Abraham did not merely move from one city to another; he passed from one order of meaning to another ground of meaning.
For once, tawhid has destroyed old centers; it does not permit a person to remain in the same place. If the center has changed, the place must change as well. Otherwise, one attempts to carry new truth within old habits, at the very least for this reason.
Hijra, therefore, is not an escape but a demand for coherence.
The critical point here is that Abraham's migration was not a journey planned toward a secure future. He set out not because he knew where he was going, but because he knew what he was leaving behind. This distinction is vital. Most people leave old ties in the promise of a new life; Abraham opened himself to a new life precisely by leaving old ties. That is the essence of hijra.
For tawhid does not tell a person, "You will find peace there"; rather, it says, "You cannot remain here."
Thus, hijra is not a promise but a necessity, the refusal to stay where truth and being cannot coexist, the effort to make the inner locus and the outer place one.
Hijra is also the second great trial of belonging.
After the bond with the father is severed, society, the city, and order are left behind as well. This departure is not an ordinary search for freedom; it is a loneliness whose cost is high. Abraham accepts this loneliness. Tawhid is not an occupation conducted in crowds. When a person changes their center, they often find no one behind them. At this point, tawhid teaches that the truth rarely arrives with the majority; it first singularizes the human being. This singularity is not arrogance. But when the crowd disperses, one sees more clearly what one leans upon, returns more fully to oneself, and steps into one's own boiling inner world. That is the matter.
Modern mentality tends to read hijra as progress, advancement, the pursuit of opportunity. Yet the Abrahamic hijra is a simplicity that appears like regression. The known order is abandoned; an unknown path is chosen. Reason is not excluded, but neither is it absolutized. Reason says, "The place you go is not guaranteed." Tawhid replies, "The place you remain is certainly wrong." This tension is the inner tension of hijra. Walking toward the unknown, a person approaches not uncertainty but the center. The center is not found by maps, but by orientation. This is what must be understood.
Hijra, then, is the name of tawhid's relationship with space. When a person discovers truth somewhere, that truth demands a new arrangement of place. This new place cannot be shown on a map; yet it becomes visible in one's conduct, relationships, and choices. Abraham's hijra is therefore not merely a journey of the past; it represents a threshold that recurs in every age for those who take tawhid seriously.
When the inner locus demands the same uprightness in outer space, hijra occurs inwardly and outwardly. That is the matter.
Another archetypal event in the ancient moment of tawhid is sacrifice.
The episode of sacrifice in Abraham's story is the heaviest, the most misunderstood, and the one that produces the strongest reflex of defense. Let us touch on it briefly. Abraham was tested by being commanded to sacrifice his son, Ishmael.
We shall express this in a single sentence: laying Ishmael beneath the blade is the trial of the Self, cutting away what is of itself, by its own hand, offering what most one's own from one's own life.
Whatever a person cannot relinquish has become an idol. Sacrifice is the quietest destruction of that idol. Abraham's blade first turned toward himself. Thus, the sacrifice was completed not outwardly but in meaning. The aim was fulfilled. Ownership was dissolved from Abraham. The rest we leave to the reader.
Toward the end, it must be said that the trial of tawhid in the modern world is more complex and more insidious than the idols of ancient times. Today's idols are no longer stones erected in public squares; they are assumptions installed in minds, innocent concepts circulating on tongues, values rendered unquestionable, and many other things and systems besides. Modern humanity denies the worship of idols, yet has never ceased idol-making; only its forms have changed. For tawhid, the essential matter is not what the idol is, but whether the reflex of idolization continues. And modern humanity is immersed in that reflex to its depths.
Science, of course, is not the opposite of tawhid, but scientism is an idol. The state may be necessary for order, but absolutizing the state is a pure idol. Freedom may be the air a human breathes; yet surrendering to the lawlessness of freedom becomes a sweet idol. Tawhid does not reject these things, nor call for their denial; it calls them to limits, resisting their obstruction of the human being's essential freedom. For every power left without limit establishes domination over the human being. The examples can easily be multiplied.
One of modern humanity's greatest illusions is thinking that the sacred has been removed from life entirely. Yet the sacred tolerates no vacuum. When a person withdraws the sacred from God, it is transferred elsewhere. Career becomes sacred; a relative identity becomes sacred; anticipated success becomes sacred; even victimhood can become sacred. Tawhid is the consciousness that exposes and restrains these hidden excesses.
Often, when a person claims not to believe in God, they continue to demand from other things the security, meaning, and absoluteness they once attributed to God. That demand is precisely what tawhid addresses. Tawhid is concerned not with what you love, but with what you cannot rise again after losing.
In this context, it must be added that the most dangerous of modern idols is the idol of the self.
When a person places themselves at the center, they imagine they are becoming free; in truth, they are becoming isolated. To stand rightly at the center is possible only through tawhid. Tawhid frees the human being not only from being the servant of another but also from being the servant of oneself.
The Abrahamic stance is not a nostalgia for history, a prophetic legend, or a moral model confined to the past; rather, it is a living orientation, reconstituted in every age and tested anew in every individual. For the contemporary human being, Abraham must be not merely a figure, but a posture. This posture must be grounded in an inner architecture that prevents truth from being lost amid the world's noise. To be Abrahamic, then, is to recognize the false centers imposed by one's age without turning one's back on the age itself, and to refuse surrender to them. In other words, to be Abrahamic is to attain the clarity to diagnose the idols within the world without fleeing from it, and then to set out on the path.
The Abrahamic stance never renders a person passive; rather, it restrains them from haste, immaturity, and disloyalty.
It also means being willing to pay a price. Modern humanity has grown accustomed to loving the truth only so long as it incurs no cost. Yet Abraham's path demands a price at every stage, often in ways beyond the grasp of reason and imagination.
The loss of intellectual comfort, the fragmentation of belonging, loneliness, uncertainty, fear, and above all, the inner struggle of discerning one's true locus, these are not side effects of tawhid; they are its very content. When a person enters tawhid, they must relinquish the protection once offered by their former supports. Yet once they settle into tawhid, they realize that what they lost were in fact burdens.
One of the contemporary person's greatest fears is having nothing left to cling to. Abrahamic tawhid is precisely the trial that sets direction within that fear.
Abraham's path is the path of the inwardly thirsty; it is not something others can easily endure. That is why Abraham was tested repeatedly throughout his life. Tawhid is not a belief to be "won" once and placed on a shelf. With every new attachment, every new fear, every new claim of ownership, it is threatened anew, fought for anew, and walked anew toward freedom, with dignity.
A person is not safe after breaking idols once. For this reason, tawhid remains a trial until the end.
The ultimate form of tawhid is the continual interrogation of one's own center:
"What am I leaning on today? What would end me if I lost it? What am I absolutizing today?"
If these questions are not asked, tawhid remains only on the tongue. In Abraham's life, these questions never fell silent: after the star came the moon; after the moon, the sun; after the father, the society; after the fire, the migration; after the migration, the sacrifice, and more besides. Each station is a retest of the center established in the previous one. Each is fidelity.
But it must be warned: the greatest danger facing tawhid today is its reduction to a label of identity. When a person turns tawhid into a mere declaration of affiliation, they have turned it into an idol. Abrahamic tawhid is not a matter of belonging; it is singularization, the unity of those who become singular. It generates responsibility. It generates action and deed, both inwardly and outwardly. When temples are erected to the very idols Abraham shattered, within circles that loudly proclaim their oneness, the result is nothing but the exploitation and distortion of tawhid, in the mildest terms.
The path of Abraham is first an inward revolt, and in its essence outward as well; and the head bows only in the locus, before the Human Origin, while refusing to bow elsewhere.
Without seeking and finding the locus, without knowing it, without bowing within it, and without rising in revolt upon its basis, no real relation can be established with the ancient moment of Abraham.
Connection to Abraham's ancient moment is possible only by this path. Whoever enters it belongs to the Millet of Abraham. Whoever stands against it, whatever their condition or station, lacks true reason. And the end of every such unreason, in the measure of sacred history, is only ruin.
Peace be upon Abraham, and upon the sanctified One before whom the hands that shattered idols bowed.