Allah is eternal

Allah is eternal

اللَّهُ لَا إِلَهَ إِلَّا هُوَ الْحَيُّ الْقَيُّومُ

(The Qur'an 3.2)

"Allah is the eternal being," Shree Chaitanya Mahaprabhu continued.

(Chaitanya-charitamrita, Madhya-lila, 18.191)

Here, Shree Chaitanya emphasizes two aspects of Allah:

1) Allah is eternal and

2) Allah is a being.

Allah is the Supreme Being. The living entities are conscious beings, but Allah is the Supreme Being amongst all beings. He is the Supreme Conscious Being amongst all conscious beings and He is Supreme Eternal amongst all eternal beings.

Thus Mahaprabhu explains that Allah is eternal. Eternity is a distinctive characteristic of the spiritual world, in contrast to the material world, which is temporary. In the material world everything has a beginning and an end. Every living entity takes birth and dies. Conversely, the spiritual world has neither a beginning nor an end. The word eternal means beginningless and endless. Therefore, Allah was never born and will never die. He is beginningless and endless. Never was there a time in the annals of history when Allah did not exist. His existence is eternal. He has no beginning and has no end.

So in the sura "Al-Baqarah", or "The Cow" there is a statement about the eternity of Allah:

Allahu la ilaha illa hu / al-Hayyul Qayyum: "Allah! There is no God but He, - the Living, the Eternal." (2.255)

It is clearly explained here that Allah is the living or the alive one which means that He is a Being who is alive rather than a thing which is not alive or abstract. That Allah is alive is the symptom of a Being.

Ustad Abdullah Yusuf Ali comments:

"The attributes of Allah are different from anything we know in our present world. He lives, but His life is self-subsisting and eternal. It does not depend upon other beings and is not limited to time and space. The attribute of Qayyum includes not only the idea of "Self-subsisting" but also the idea of "Keeping up and maintaining all life"." (9, p. 114)

Furthermore in the sura "Al-Ikhlas", or "Purity" it is mentioned:

Allahu Samad

Lam yalid wa - lam yulad:

"Allah, the Eternal, Absolute.

He begets not, nor was He begotten." (112.2-3)

Ustad Abdullah Yusuf Ali writes in his commentary:

"Samad is difficult to translate by one word. I have used two, "Eternal" and "Absolute". The latter implies: 1) that absolute existence can only be predicated of Him; all other existence is temporal or conditional; 2) that He is dependent on no person or things, but all persons or things are dependent on Him." (9, p. 2028)

There is another verse in the sura "Al-Imran", or "The Family of 'Imran":

Allahu . . . Huwal Qayyum: "Allah! . . . He is the Eternal." (3.2)

Thus in the Holy Qur'an Allah is called Qayyum, the Eternal. Eternal means no beginning and no end. Allah is an ever-existing Being. There is no time when He did not exist and His existence will never come to end. Allah is Lam yulad, He was not begotten. He is never born and never dies. He is eternal and indestructible, and He continues to live after the destruction of this temporary material world. Allah is eternal, full of knowledge and bliss. He existed in the past, exists in the present and will exist in the future. Allah has not come into being, does not come into being and will not come into being since He is ever-existing. He is unborn, eternal, ever-existing and primeval, that is to say, there is no trace in history of His coming into being. He therefore has no past, present or future. Among all eternal beings, Allah is the supreme eternal primeval One. He has no beginning and no end. He has no origin, for He Himself is the origin of everything. He has no cause, for He Himself is the cause of all causes. There is no particular date at which God was born. Nor can anyone trace out the history of God's appearance because He is beginningless. He existed before the material creation. The nature of the Lord is eternal, blissful and full of knowledge. Allah is immortal, imperishable and eternal, and is the constitutional position of ultimate happiness. He is the original eternal enjoyer amongst all other enjoyers, and is the eternal friend of the living entities. He existed prior to the creation and He is transcendental to the material nature.