What is the difference between monism and monotheism

The sole possessor of all power, God has created man to live for a specific period of time, during which he is sent into the world to be tested. It is this concept of the Creator as totally distinct from the creature, which sets the Semitic religions apart from the Aryan.

The philosophy of Islam is explicitly that of monotheism. It is true that the Sufi system has incorporated monistic concepts. This is in actual fact a deviation from the original Islam, and is held by the majority of Islamic scholars to be an incorrect interpretation, not truly representative of Islam. Other presentations of Islam also figure in the books produced in the later period of Islam. But all of these, based as they are on personal interpretations, do not have the status of sacred books.

The mainstay of Islam is its monotheism — tawheed — belief in the oneness of God in the complete sense of the word. God is One. He has no partner. He created all things and has complete control over the universe. We should serve Him and submit to Him alone. Though He cannot be seen, He is so close to us that He hears and answers us when we call upon him. The distinctive aspect of this monotheism is that no intermediary link exists between the Creator and the creature.

By remembering Him, any individual at any point in time may, quite independently, establish contact with God. There is no need for any go-between. Indeed belief in an intermediary link with God is alien to the Islamic religious system.

Called shirk associating others with God it is deemed to be an unpardonable offence. God is not a kind of working hypothesis on which to found a religious system.

On the contrary, God in Islam is a Personality. He has a real and independent existence. He is alive and self-sustaining, self-perpetuating. He has knowledge. He takes decisions, rewards and punishes. Monolatry is distinguished from monotheism, which asserts the existence of only one god, and henotheism, a religious system in which the believer worships one god without denying that others may worship different gods with equal validity.

The most popular form of monism is probably physicalism, the idea that only physical stuff exists. There is no such thing as a soul or an abstract object independent of physicality. There is also neutral monism, which holds that there is only one kind of substance, but makes no claims as to its nature. Pantheism is the belief that everything composes an all-encompassing, immanent God, or that the universe or nature is identical with divinity.

Pantheists thus do not believe in a personal or anthropomorphic god, but believe that interpretations of the term differ. The religious dualism of Christianity between good and evil is not a perfect dualism as God good will inevitably destroy Satan evil.