يٓا اَيُّهَا الْمُدَّثِّرُ قُمْ فَاَنْذِرْ وَرَبَّكَ فَـكَبِّرْ
“O you who are wrapped in a cloak, arise and warn! And magnify your Lord alone (rabbika fa-kabbir).” — One of the earliest commands of revelation is not a transfer of information but a training of posture: kabbir — magnify, proclaim His greatness.
It is not right to understand Allāhu akbar (God is greatest) as “God is the greatest when compared with all bodies, with everything we see and know.” A thing is compared with things of its own kind — and God has no kind. “God is the greatest among all the gods” does not sit properly either, for that reading presupposes a set of gods to enter the comparison.
Better by far is to remember that our perspective is local and to confess that we cannot see the truth from the global vantage point.
لَا تُدْرِكُهُ الْاَبْصَارُ وَهُوَ يُدْرِكُ الْاَبْصَارَ وَهُوَ اللَّطِيفُ الْخَبِيرُ
“No human vision can encompass Him, whereas He encompasses all human vision: for He alone is unfathomable, all-aware.” — The verse is two-directional: the failure of comprehension to reach Him and His encompassing of comprehension stand in the same sentence.
Allāhu akbar may be read thus: since God has no alternative in His essence, He is beyond, and greater than, the God within our perception. In this sense it is to accept Him as the known-unknown, in the spirit of “We have not known You as You deserve to be known, O Known One.”
“Mā ʿarafnāka ḥaqqa maʿrifatika yā Maʿrūf” — We have not known You as You deserve to be known, O Known One!
Know, O noble one! If you look upon Almighty God under the title of the known and the recognised, He becomes unknown and unacknowledged. For this “being known” is a customary familiarity, an imitative hearing; it is not an expression that can proclaim the reality. Moreover, the meaning that arrives at the understanding through that title cannot carry the absolute attributes together and cast them into the mind. It is merely a sort of title for contemplating the Most Holy Essence. But if Almighty God is regarded under the title of the known-unknown, the rays of His being known emerge to a degree.
In the Prayer, Every Takbīr Is a Rung
Projected onto our own world, on the other hand, the remembrance of God can be compared from several angles. In the Sixteenth Word, where he expounds the prayer, Bediüzzaman describes how by saying Allāhu akbar in the movements of the prayer we traverse degrees. And we do so by confessing that we stand among particulars — that our own perception remains at the local perspective; one ascends to the universal circles, to the global perspective, only by the confession that “He is greater than what we know of Him.”
It is as though repeatedly saying “Allāhu akbar, Allāhu akbar” in the movements of the prayer is a sign of traversing degrees and of spiritual progress, and of rising from the particulars to the universal circles; and it is a summary title for the perfections of His grandeur that lie beyond our knowledge. As if each “Allāhu akbar” signals the traversing of one rung of the ascent.
In this aspect the prayer is an ascension, and the servant's greatest, most important item of business at any given moment is to establish the prayer of the time he is in. One meaning of Allāhu akbar is therefore the remembrance of God is greater: that God be remembered, that He be made the agenda, is the greatest matter. It carries the sense that remembering God is a greater work than remembering anything else, and more important.
اُتْلُ مٓا اُوحِيَ اِلَيْكَ مِنَ الْكِتَابِ وَاَقِمِ الصَّلٰوةَ اِنَّ الصَّلٰوةَ تَنْهٰى عَنِ الْفَحْشٓاءِ وَالْمُنْكَرِ وَلَذِكْرُ اللّٰهِ اَكْبَرُ وَاللّٰهُ يَعْلَمُ مَا تَصْنَعُونَ
“Recite what has been revealed to you of the Book and establish the prayer. Truly the prayer restrains from indecency (faḥshāʾ) and wrong. And the remembrance of God is greater still (wa la-dhikru'llāhi akbar). And God knows what you do.” — That is: among a person's items of business, the remembrance of God must stand at the very top.
Within this understanding and this feeling, by means of the Allāhu akbars of the prayer we notice the worldly memories, images or inner voices that keep arriving, and by suggesting to ourselves “right now I must focus on God, for He is the most important and the only important thing,” we bring mind and heart to the awareness of standing in God's presence. This is at once a growth of the person in consciousness and awareness, and an exercise in not being pinned to the local perspective under the pressure of events and afflictions and the summons of sins and worldliness — an exercise in passing beyond matter to the global perspective.
Diving Deep in the Sea of Meaning
Realities do not lie where what we see is partitioned into objects by names. To name the many leaves of a tree one by one, to posit each as a separate entity, and thereby to lose sight of the tree's spirit of unity, cannot grasp reality. As one dives deeper into the sea of meaning, there remains a state in which names, classifications and objects slowly vanish, and what appears behind them are the nameless shared functions that produce and create them.
Yet some persons and things at the surface may still appear as individuals down in the depth. These are the persons and things that matter from the standpoint of divinity. First many things vanish and the name of their kind remains. If a thing stands at the level of representing its own kind, its kind is then seen through it.
And so, with the intention that the remembrance of God is greatest, one dives deep into that water saying Allāhu akbar, again and again. For while the greatness of God's remembrance is being recalled, nothing else retains its importance. Only His remembrance remains: only He is sought, only He is seen, known, heard. The one who seeks and the one sought, the one who sees and the one seen, become He.
As objects lose their weight, acts remain. Agent and object, place and time are no longer separate things; they become a property of that act, of that process. Allāhu akbar shines upon the tower of the word of unity.