There Is No God but God

The tahlil is the utterance of the first clause of the Islamic testimony of faith, the declaration that there is no god but God, used on its own as dhikr, the remembrance of God. It is the most fundamental formula of Islam, the affirmation of the divine unity (tawhid) that stands at the heart of the faith, and its repetition is among the most common acts of devotion, counted on the fingers or on a string of beads (tasbih), spoken in moments of gratitude, difficulty and dying.

In Sufi practice it is a central formula of the collective and individual dhikr by which practitioners seek to keep God continually in mind, sometimes recited rhythmically and with the breath, so that the affirmation of God's oneness becomes the sustained occupation of the heart. Simple, universal and weighty, the tahlil condenses the whole confession of Islam into a single line held to be the best of remembrances.