Marginalization of the Creator and the Absence of Tawhid
The first and greatest foundation in Islam is Tawhid: firm belief in a personal God—Living, Sustainer, Creator, and Controller—All-Hearing, All-Seeing, possessing the most beautiful names and the highest attributes, in Whose hand lies the dominion of the heavens and the earth.
Buddhism, in its philosophical foundations, even if not a crude materialistic atheism in the modern Western sense, is a non-theistic religion. Nirvana does not recognize the human need for God to attain salvation, nor does it give weight to the existence of a Creator to be worshipped or invoked.
Rather, the law of karma operates as a blind, self-regulating system, and Nirvana is attained through purely individual effort.
Allah, the Exalted, says:
Say, "In whose hand is the realm of all things – and He protects while none can protect against Him – if you should know?They will say, "[All belongs] to AllŒh." Say, "Then how are you deluded?"(Al-Mu’minun 88–89)
“The absence of the Creator within the structure of Buddhist doctrine leaves a vast and unfillable gap. The moral law represented by karma loses its legislative authority. Islam grounds ethics and values in the will and wisdom of Allah, who defines the standards of good, evil, and absolute justice.
In contrast, Buddhism reduces ethics to a practical tool for escaping samsara and ending suffering, rendering the moral system devoid of the warmth of a relationship between the servant and his Lord, and distant from the concepts of hope, fear, and love.