The Doubt: If Tawhid Were Required, the Scholars Would Have Said So

Perhaps the most intellectually structured objection raised against the call to pure tawhid is this: if what you are describing were truly obligatory, surely the great scholars of Islam — the imams of fiqh, the masters of hadith, the theologians of the classical tradition — would have emphasized it clearly and condemned its opposite. Since we see mosques and scholarly institutions across the Muslim world where the practices you criticize are common, and since respected scholars have not uniformly condemned them, perhaps the call to strict tawhid is an extreme position held by a minority, not the mainstream of Islamic scholarship.

This objection must be addressed on several levels. The first and most important response is simply factual: the scholars have said so. The obligation of tawhid al-uluhiyyah and the prohibition of directing worship to anyone besides Allah is not a marginal opinion. It is found in the works of every major school of Islamic law and theology. The four imams — Abu Hanifah, Malik, al-Shafi'i, and Ahmad ibn Hanbal — all taught the obligation of tawhid and warned against shirk. Their students and the later generations of scholars elaborated on these warnings. The condemnation of calling upon the dead, making vows to shrines, and seeking help from the deceased appears explicitly in the works of Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn al-Qayyim, al-Izz ibn Abd al-Salam, and many others who predated Ibn Abd al-Wahhab by centuries.

The issue, then, is not that scholars have been silent. It is that not everyone has read what the scholars have actually written, or has had access to it, or has been in a community where these teachings were transmitted clearly. The absence of knowledge in a particular community does not mean the knowledge does not exist in the Islamic tradition.

The second response addresses the matter of ignorance as an excuse. This is a genuinely nuanced issue in fiqh. Scholars distinguish between different types of ignorance and different types of sins. When it comes to the fundamentals of tawhid — matters that are so essential to Islam that every Muslim is expected to know them — ignorance is a lesser excuse than it might be for subsidiary matters of fiqh. This is not to rush to harsh judgments about individuals. It is to recognize that the remedy for ignorance is education, not the conclusion that what was ignored must therefore be acceptable.

The Companions of the Prophet, peace be upon him, were the first generation of this Ummah, and they were meticulous in teaching tawhid. Wherever they traveled — to Iraq, to Egypt, to Persia, to the Levant — they taught La ilaha illa Allah and explained what it meant in practice. They did not merely teach five pillars and leave the people to mix worship of Allah with veneration of tombs. The entire effort of the early Muslim community was to establish pure tawhid in the hearts and practices of those who entered Islam.

The third response concerns the obligation of knowledge itself. Islam requires every Muslim to learn the basics of their religion. Not knowing what La ilaha illa Allah means is a gap in obligatory knowledge, not evidence that the meaning does not matter. A person who claims the testimony without knowing what it demands is like someone who signs a contract without reading it. The signature is recorded, but the person has not fulfilled what was required.

Finally, the sincere student of knowledge should seek out what the scholars have actually written rather than assuming their silence. The tradition is rich with careful scholarship on tawhid. Reading it carefully, rather than relying on local custom or inherited practice, is the path back to clarity.