“Yet people have taken instead of Him, other deities; those that create nothing but are themselves created; who do not have the power to hurt or benefit even themselves; who have no power over death, nor over life, nor over the resurrection of the dead.”
(Al- Qur’ān – 25:3)
This ayat of the Qur’ān tells us about the false deities whom the ignorant have taken as such instead of One God. It asserts that these deities cannot create anything but ‘are themselves created’. Those who ‘are themselves created’ embrace all God’s creatures – the angels, the jinn, the Prophets, the saints, the sun and the moon and the planets, and the trees, rivers and animals, all that were set up as deities by human beings despite the fact that they were only God’s creatures. At the same time, they also embrace those deities that were contrived by human beings, namely pieces of stone and wood.
The essence of this Divine discourse here is that God sent down Al-Furqan (or the Criterion) on His servant so that he might invite people to the Truth (which they had forsaken because of their heedlessness and in some cases obstinacy) and to warn them against the evil consequences of the folly into which they had fallen – the folly of setting up deities beside the One True God. God also revealed the Criterion to the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be to him) gradually so that he might make the true distinct from the false, the sound distinct from the counterfeit.