Alif lām mīm. That Book: these three letters constitute an allusion to the entirety of existence qua totality, because alif alludes to the essence of the one who is the first of existence, as has been mentioned; lām [alludes] to the active intellect, called Gabriel, who is the middle of existence receiving emanation from the principle [of existence] and overflowing upon the end [of existence]; mīm [alludes] to Muḥammad who is the last of existence with whom the cycle [of existence] comes full circle and [its last] is joined to its first, which is why he [Muḥammad] is the seal. He said, ‘Verily time has come full circle back to its form on the day when God created the heavens and the earth’. According to one of the [pious] predecessors, ‘The lām is made up of two alifs’, in other words, analogous to the Essence together with its attribute of knowledge, which together constitute two of the three divine realms we have alluded to. It is thus one of God’s Names, for each Name is made up of the Essence together with some [particular] attribute. As for mīm, this is an allusion to the Essence together with all of the attributes and the acts that have been veiled therein in the Muḥammadan form, which is God’s Greatest Name, so that none knows this [Name] except the one who knows it. Do you not know how mīm, which is the form of the Essence, is veiled by It? Mīm has a yāʾ and the yāʾ has an alif. The mysterious aspect of the letters of the alphabet is that there is no letter that does not contain an alif. This [explanation] is similar to the statement that the meaning [of these letters] constitutes an oath by God, the Knowing, the Wise. For Gabriel is the locus of manifestation of knowledge and is thus His Name the Knowing, while Muḥammad is the locus of manifestation of wisdom and is thus His Name the Wise. From this becomes manifest the meaning of the statement, ‘In every one of His Names there are an infinite number of names. In the realm of wisdom, which is the realm of cause and effect, knowledge is not complete and is not perfected unless it is combined with the act whereupon it becomes a wisdom. Therefore submission [to God] (islām) does not result simply by saying ‘there is no god except God’, unless it is combined with ‘Muḥammad is the Messenger of God’. The meaning of this verse then is: alif lām mīm, that promised Book, in other words, the form of the all-comprehensive totality [of existence], suggested by the book of number mysticism (jafr), that subsumes everything promised to be with the Mahdī at the end of time.^{1This is one instance in which Kāshānī’s Shīʿism can be gleaned, since he refers to jafr and the coming of the messianic figure of the mahdī …[expand].} Only he will be able to read it as it really is. The [book of] number mysticism is the Tablet of Decree (lawḥ al-qaḍāʾ), which is the universal intellect (ʿaql al-kull), while the all-comprehensive is the Tablet of Determination (lawḥ al-qadar), which is the universal soul (nafs al-kull). The meaning then of the book of number mysticism and the all-comprehensive [totality] that contain everything that has been and that will be is like your saying sūrat al-Baqara and sūrat al-Naml.

[That Book] in it there is no doubt, upon verification of its truth. The implied sense of this statement is: by the Truth that is the totality qua totality because it is the clarification of that book whose coming the tongues of prophets and their scriptures have promised, as Jesus, peace be upon him, said: ‘We bring you the revelation. But as for the interpretation, the Mahdī will bring it at the end of time’. The apodosis of the oath is omitted because it is indicated by that book, just as it is omitted in several instances in the Qurʾān such as by the sun [Q. 91:1] and by those that wrest violently [Q. 79:1] and others. In other words [there is no doubt that] We shall indeed reveal that book promised in the Torah and the Gospel and it will be with Muḥammad, omitted because it is indicated by His words that Book. In other words, ‘that Book made known in the preceding knowledge promised in the Torah and the Gospel is the truth such that there can be no doubt concerning it’.

A guidance for those who guard themselves, that is, guidance in itself for those who guard against depravities and the veils that prevent acceptance of the truth in it. Know that people in terms of [their status at] the end will be of seven kinds, for they are either fortunate or wretched. God says, some of them will be wretched, and [some] fortunate [Q. 11:105]. The wretched ones will be ‘those of the left [hand]’, while the fortunate ones will either be ‘those of the right [hand]’ or ‘those foremost, the ones brought near’ [cf. Q. 56:8-11]. God says, and you will be three kinds…[to the end of] the verse [Q. 56:7]. As for those of the left [hand], they will either be the banished ones ‘for whom the Word has proved true’, and these are the people of the darkness and the universal veil that has been sealed upon their hearts from pre-eternity, as God says: and We have indeed urged unto Hell many of the jinn and mankind…[to the end of] the verse [Q. 7:179]. In the ḥadīth of the Lord: ‘These I have created for the Fire and I am not concerned for them’. As for the hypocrites who had been prepared originally, receptive of illumination in accordance with [their] innate disposition (fiṭra) and the [first] creation [cf. Q. 56:62]; but their hearts have been veiled by the engulfing [cf. 83:14] that has been acquired by [their] acquisition of vices and the committing of acts of disobedience and the pursuit of bestial and predatorial acts, as well as [their] engaging in devilish plots, such that these corrupt miens and dark traits have become deep-rooted in their souls and have piled up upon their inner-hearts so that they are full of doubt, perplexed, wandering lost, their works have failed [cf. Q. 2:217] and their heads hang low [cf. Q. 32:12]. They will suffer a more severe chastisement and their state will be worse than the former group because of the incompatibility between the grip of their [original] preparedness and their [subsequent corrupted] state; both of these groups are the people of this world. As for those of the right [hand], they are either: the people of bounty and reward who have believed and performed righteous deeds for the sake of [attaining] Paradise, hoping for it and satisfied with it, and who ‘find all that they did present’ [cf. Q. 18:49] commensurate with their varying degrees [of merit]: all shall have degrees [of requital] according to what they have done [Q. 6:132]. Among these [last] are the people of mercy who remain upon the security of their souls and the purity of their hearts, who will take up their degrees of Paradise in accordance with their [individual] preparedness through the bounty of their Lord, not on account of their perfections as legacy of their works. Or they [those of the right hand] are the people of pardon, who have ‘mixed a righteous deed with another that was bad’ [cf. Q. 9:102], and these [people] are [also] divided into two groups:

1) those who are immediately pardoned on account of the strength of their belief and that their bad deeds are not deeply rooted, because they did not engage in them often, and as a consequence of their repentance of these [deeds]: for such God will replace their evil deeds with good deeds [Q. 25:70];

2) those who will be chastised for a time commensurate with the extent to which acts of disobedience have become entrenched in them, until they are rid of the filth that they have earned and are saved, being the people of [God’s] justice and requital: and those among these who have transgressed shall also be smitten by the evils of what they have earned [Q. 39:51]. But the [divine] mercy shall overtake them.

All three [of these groups] are the people of the Hereafter. As for the foremost (sābiqūn), they are either the lovers (muḥibbūn) or the beloved (maḥbūbūn). The loving are those who have struggled in the way of God a struggle worthy of Him [cf. Q. 22:78] and have turned penitently to Him a turning worthy of Him and whom He then guides to His ways. The beloved are the people of [His] pre-eternal providence whom He has elected and guided to a straight path. Both types are the people of God. The Qurʾān thus is not a guide for the first group from among the wretched because of their refraining from receiving guidance on account of their non-preparedness; nor [is it a guide] for the second group because of the disappearance of their preparedness, and their transfiguration (maskh) and their total obliteration (ṭams) in their corrupt beliefs. These then are the people who will abide in the Fire, except what God wills. It [the Qurʾān] thus remains a guide for the other five [groups] subsumed by ‘the God-fearing’.^{1This refers to verse 2, above, al-muttaqūn, the God-fearing. The rendering of the term as ‘those who guard themselves’, above, is necessitated by Kāshānī’s explanatory gloss and the flexibility of the Arabic.}

The beloved needs the guidance of the Book after his [initial] attraction (jadhb) and his arrival at the wayfaring to God on account of His saying to His beloved [Muḥammad]: Thus [it is] that We may strengthen your inner-heart with it [Q. 25:32]; and His saying [to him]: And all that We relate to you of the accounts of the messengers that with which We might strengthen your inner-heart [Q. 11:120].

The lover, however, needs this [guidance] before the arrival and the attraction and afterwards in order to wayfare to God and in God. Therefore, the ‘God-fearing’ [mentioned] in this instance are the ones who are prepared, those who have remained upon their original innate disposition and have avoided the [heart-]engulfing idolatry and doubt because of the purity of their hearts and the integrity of their souls and the endurance of their primordial light, and have thus not broken God’s covenant. Such fear of God (taqwā) precedes faith (īmān) but [also] contains other stages that come after it, as will be mentioned, if God wills.

[those] who believe in the Unseen, and maintain the prayer: that is, [they believe] in what is absent to them in terms of the faith of following authority (taqlīdī), or that [faith] of the verification of knowledge. For faith is in two parts, that of following authority and that of verification. That of verification is [itself] divided into two, [verification] by reasoning (istidlāl) or by unveiling (kashfī), both of which [are] either [of the type that] stand at the limit of knowledge and of the unseen, or [of the type that] do not stand there. The former is to know [something] for certain, what is called the knowledge of certainty (ʿilm al-yaqīn); the second is either of the eye, namely, the witnessing (mushāhada) called the eye of certainty (ʿayn al-yaqīn), or of the reality, namely, the vision of self-disclosure, called the reality of certainty (ḥaqq al-yaqīn). The last two types do not belong to [the category of] belief in the Unseen. For belief in the Unseen requires works of the heart, namely, [self-]purification (tazkiya), which is the purification of the heart against becoming inclined to the exterior bodily fortunes that distract [one] from attaining abiding happiness. For happiness is of three kinds: that of the heart, that of the body and that which surrounds it. That [happiness] of the heart consists of gnostic sciences (maʿārif) and wisdoms, perfections of knowledge and practical perfections of character. As for [the happiness of] the body, this consists of physical well-being and strength, corporeal pleasures and natural passions. As for that [happiness] which surrounds [the body], this consists of wealth and means, just as the commander of the believers [ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib], peace be upon him: ‘Verily, ample wealth is a grace, but more excellent than ample wealth is the well-being of the body and a God-mindful heart’. It is necessary to guard against [concerning oneself with] these former two in order to obtain this desired last by means of renunciation and worship. For to perform prayers is to abandon the comforts of the body and to tire the physical limbs, [prayer] being the mother of all [acts of] worship which when it is forthcoming the remainder follow, truly prayer prohibits lewd acts and indecency [Q. 45:29], since it is a burden and a great hardship upon both body and soul; while to expend of [one’s] wealth [in charity] is to turn away from outward happiness beloved to the soul, what is called renunciation (zuhd). Indeed, [such] expenditure may be harder upon it than the expending of one’s spirit because of the hold that niggardliness exercises upon it. He [God] is not content with the [minimum] obligatory amount [of charity] and thus says:

and of what We have provided them expend, so that the heart might become accustomed to forsaking any excess wealth through [acts of] generosity and munificence and the expending of wealth in voluntary ways by means of virtuous acts, gifts and charity, saving himself thereby from the avarice of his own soul [cf. Q. 59:9]. [Here] ‘expending’ is specifically qualified as [required] ‘partially’ through the partitive [particle] min (‘of’) lest that person should fall into the vice of squandering by expending the [entire] necessary amount and be deprived of the merit of [acts of] generosity which is one of the ways of assuming the character traits of God;

and who believe in what has been revealed to you; and what was revealed before you, that is to say, the faith of verification that comprehends the three divisions [of faith], required for the works of the heart which constitute the adornment (taḥliya) and that is when the heart acquires perspicacity through the wisdoms and gnostic sciences revealed in the divine scriptures and [through] knowledge concerning the states [of creatures] in the final return (maʿād) and the matters of the Hereafter and the realities of holy knowledge, which is why He says: and of the Hereafter, they are certain. The people of the Hereafter are the ones who have not traversed the limit of purification and have not arrived at the [stage of] adornment which is the legacy (mīrāth) of that [traverse], on the basis of his [the imam ʿAlī’s] saying, peace be upon him: ‘Whoso acts in accordance with what he has been taught, God grants (warratha)^{1The use of the verb here is intended to echo the ‘legacy’ of that stage beyond purification.} him the knowledge of what he knows not’. The people of God, those of certainty, who comprehend [that legacy], they are all upon guidance from their Lord, [being] either [guided] to Him, or to His abode, the abode of safety (salāma), merit, reward and gentleness (luṭf): these are none other than the people of prosperity (falāḥ), [prosperous] by [having escaped] punishment or veiling, which is why He says

Those, namely, the ones enjoying the above-mentioned attributes relating to purification and adornment, are upon guidance from their Lord; those are the ones that will prosper, because of these [attributes]. Thus alladhīna yuʾminūna (‘who believe’) is the subject, the second alladhīna yuʾminūna is coordinated to it and ūlāʾika (‘those are the ones’) constitutes the predicate; but if it were construed as an adjectival qualification (ṣifa) of al-muttaqīn (‘the God-fearing’) [of verse 2], then what is meant is that they are the ones whose God-consciousness after the guidance [given to them] is perfect; this is [grammatically] feasible on the basis of [the feasibility] of referring to a thing by that to which it is about to allude.

[From] As for the disbelievers, to where He says mighty [alike it is for them whether you have warned them or have not warned them, they do not believe.

God has set a seal on their hearts, and on their hearing; and on their eyes is a covering; and for them there will be a mighty chastisement], [all of this] refers to the foremost group of the wretched ones who are subject to the overwhelming divine power (qahr ilāhī) for whom no warning is of any use and who have no means to being saved from the Fire: ‘those are the ones against whom the word of your Lord was fulfilled: that they shall not believe’ [cf. Q. 10:33] and thus was the word of your Lord fulfilled against those who disbelieve: that they shall be the inhabitants of the Fire [Q. 40:6] all paths shall be closed to them and the gates [of hell] shall be sealed shut upon them. For the heart is the divine waymark of the senses, the locus of inspiration from which they are veiled by its [the heart’s] being sealed; while the hearing and the sight are the human waymarks of the senses, the pure ones which constitute the two gates of understanding and the capacity to take heed. These [wretched ones] are thus denied the use of these two [waymarks] because meaning is unable to penetrate from them into the heart. Thus they have no access inwardly to the unveiling knowledge of experiential taste, nor outwardly to taught and acquired knowledge and so they are interned in the prisons of darkness: how mighty therefore is their chastisement!

And some people there are who say, ‘We believe, these being the second group of the wretched who are deprived of [true] belief even as they claim [to have] it when they say ‘we believe’ in God, because the locus of belief is the heart and not the tongue: [as in the case of where] the bedouins say, ‘We believe’. Say: ‘You do not believe; but rather say, “We have submitted”, for faith has not yet entered into your hearts [Q. 49:14]. The meaning of their statement ‘we believe in God and [in] the Last Day’, is that they are claiming possession of the two [branches of] knowledge, that of God’s oneness and that of the final return (maʿād), both of which constitute the principles of religion and its foundation. In other words, [they are saying] ‘we are not like the polytheists who are veiled from the Truth nor like the People of the Scripture who are barred from [true knowledge of] religion and the final return – for, the teachings of the People of the Scripture concerning the final return does not accord with the truth. Know that to disbelieve is to be veiled and where one is veiled from the truth, as in the case of the polytheists, or from religion, as in the case of the People of the Scripture; and the one who is veiled from the truth is necessarily veiled from religion the very means by which one arrives at the truth. But the one who is veiled from religion may not necessarily be veiled from the truth. These, however, claim to be free of both veils at once. Thus they are shown to be liars by having their selves deprived of faith. In other words, so long as they are such they cannot be believers; [but they are not believers.]

[They would deceive God and the believers; and only themselves they deceive; and they are not aware.] Deception (mukhādaʿa) is the act of deceit from two parties. It is to manifest good [intentions] while concealing evil [ones]. To deceive God is to deceive His Messenger, on account of God’s saying whoever obeys the Messenger, verily obeys God [Q. 4:80] and His saying and you threw not when you threw but God threw [Q. 8:17]; and because he [the Prophet] is His beloved. A ḥadīth has it that: ‘And My servant does not cease to approach me through supererogatory acts until I love him. And when I love him, I become his hearing with which he hears and his sight with which he sees and his tongue with which he speaks and his hand with which he strikes and his foot with which he walks’.^{1Stephen Hirtenstein and Martin Notcutt. Divine Sayings: 101 Hadith Qudsi: the Mishkāt al-Anwār of Muḥyiddīn Ibn ʿArabī (Oxford: Anqa Publishing, 2004), ‘Eleventh Hadith (91)’, 70.}

Their deceit of God and the believers is their outward display of belief and love while concealing disbelief and enmity; while God’s and the believers’ deception of these [aforementioned] is keeping the peace [with them] and applying the rules of Islam in their case by deeming their blood illicit and giving protection to their possessions and otherwise, while what lies in store for them is a painful chastisement, an evil end and a terrible outcome, as well as their degradation in this world on account of their being exposed by God’s informing them [the believers, of this reality] and the revelation about their status. However, the difference between the two acts of deception is that theirs [the disbelievers’] only succeeds in destroying their souls, filling them with anguish, leaving them with nothing but the evil consequence of their deeds and punishment, multiplying for them the darkness, disbelief and hypocrisy and bringing together the reasons for the perishing, banishment and wretchedness of these [souls]; whereas, [their] being deceived by God affects to the ultimate degree and brings them the most severe destruction, as where God says And they schemed, and God schemed, and God is the best of schemers [Q. 3:54]. As a result of being extremely engrossed in this ignorance of theirs, they do not sense this manifest matter [at all].

In their hearts is a sickness, in other words, doubt and hypocrisy. The use of the indefinite form of maraḍ (sickness) and the adverbial clause is an indication of the fact that [such a] sickness has befallen them and has established itself and taken root in these [hearts of theirs, as we have mentioned in the above structure, for otherwise He would have said: ‘Their hearts are sick or [that they are] dead’; and God has increased them in sickness, that is, [with] another [sickness]: [God increases their] spite, envy and rancour by exalting the word of religion and the granting of assistance to the Messenger and the believers. All despicable acts are sicknesses of the heart as they are cause of its weakening and the evil of its private actions and its ruin in the final issue. He distinguishes between the two chastisements by [stipulating] pain for the hypocrites and an awesome [chastisement] for disbelievers, because the chastisement for those who have been banished from pre-eternity is greater. Thus they do not experience the intensity of its painfulness because of the impurity of their hearts’ perception, similar to the state of a dead or hemiplegic or numbed limb [that senses nothing] when it undergoes severing or cauterisation and other kinds of pain. As for the hypocrites, they sense the extreme pain because of their established preparedness [for belief] at the outset and the permanence of their [faculties of] perception. Inevitably then their chastisement is painful, caused as it is by the chronic sickness that occurs [in their hearts], namely, mendacity and its [evil] concomitants.

and there awaits them a painful chastisement because they used to lie.

When it is said to them, ‘Do not work corruption on earth’, they say, ‘We are only putting things right’.

Truly, they are the agents of corruption, but they perceive not.

When it is said to them, ‘Believe as the people believe’, they say, ‘Shall we believe as fools believe?’ Truly, they are the foolish ones, but they know not.

And when they are warned against working corruption on earth, that is, towards the nether aspect, which is that of the souls and their relevant welfare, [corruption] in the way of the sullying of the souls, the incitement of evil, wars, enmity and hatred between people, they deny [all of this] and go to the utmost extreme to prove that they are putting things right for what concerns their souls. For they see that the welfare [of the souls] lies in the acquisition of livelihood and the means to make such [a livelihood] forthcoming, as well as in the organisation of [one’s] this-worldly affairs specifically for the sake of their souls, absorbed as they are by the love of this world and ensconced as they are in the pleasures of the flesh, veiling themselves with what is [only] partially beneficial and finding in the senses sanctuary from comprehensive and all-encompassing benefits and [from] the pleasures of the intellect. It is in this way that their wants are facilitated and their demands are made forthcoming, all the while unaware of their acts of corruption that can be perceived through the senses. When they are summoned to true faith, such as that of the poor among the Muslims and the destitute who are stripped of everything, they deem them fools [cf. Q. 2:13] for their abandoning of the vanities of this world and their rejection of its enjoyments, pleasures and good things given the sincerity of their renunciation [of such things]. Their ultimate concerns and the utmost sought by their intellects, [intellects that are] captive in the shackles of desire and tarnished by delusions, it is these very pleasures that lead to their demise: They know [merely] an outward aspect of the life of this world, but they, of the Hereafter, they are oblivious [Q. 30:7]. They are unaware that the ultimate in folly is to choose what is transient and despicable over the remainder that is more noble. The reason for one verse ending with [reference to] perception, while the other with [lack of] knowledge, is that the effect of their deception on their souls and of their working of corruption on earth is as clear as something that is perceptible to the senses. As for the preponderance given to the bliss of the Hereafter over the bliss of this world, which is required to distinguish between folly and wisdom, that is something that can be deduced purely by reason.

When they meet those who believe: a literal quotation of their hypocrisy that is a concomitant of the presence of two [kinds of] preparedness within them, a primordial luminous one that is weak, vanquished and close to being extinguished, and by which they correspond to the believers; and an acquired dark one that is strong and vanquishing by which they are in harmony with the disbelievers. For if they did not possess a minimum of light they would not be able to mix with and befriend believers in the first place as is the case with others like the disbelievers, because of the self-evident mutual incompatibility between light and darkness in all aspects. [The word] shayṭān is constructed to the paradigm fayʿāl from [the infinitive] al-shuṭūn which means ‘to go far away’, their devils being profoundly removed [from the divine], banished, while their leaders have attained the utmost degree of hypocrisy. Their mocking of the believers is proof of the weakness of the light aspect within them and the strength of the dark aspect, for the one who belittles something is one for whom that thing is slight, of little weight or worth. Thus they belittle those luminous individuals because of the littleness of light within them, since it is [only] by light that the value of light can be known. Given the preponderance of darkness within them, they resort to the disbelievers and become friendly with them.

[they say, ‘We believe’; but when they go apart to their devils they say, ‘We are with you; we were only mocking’.]

God [Himself] mocks them, that is, He belittles them because from the aspect in which they find themselves their relationship to the Divine Presence is slight and weak, and so in the same measure that the Divine aspect is diminished in them, they become more firmly attached to their souls, whereas for the believers the more that their ego-centric (nafsānī) make-up is diminished the more that they find themselves by God’s side: what a difference between the two [states]! reinforcing them, in their bestial and predatorial darknesses, which are satanic and ego-centric attributes, by setting up [for them] the substrata and causes [of these resultant attributes], namely their passions, sensual delights, property and livelihood in this world, all of which they have chosen on account of their caprice in their state of bewilderment, in their insolence, bewildered (yaʿmahūn): ʿamah is blindness of the heart, while their insolence is their transgressing of the [divinely stipulated] limit which they are supposed to respect. That limit is the breast (ṣadr), that is, the aspect of the heart that is adjacent to the soul (nafs), whereas the inner heart (fuʾād) is that aspect [of the heart] that is adjacent to the spirit (rūḥ), and so it sits in the middle [between the two] with aspects towards both of these: to adhere to that limit is to worship by [adhering to] the commands of God, exalted be He, and [to] His prohibitions, simultaneously turning to Him in order to seek illumination so that this aspect may be illumined and thereby the soul is illuminated. To adhere to the other limit is to receive gnosis, sciences, realities, wisdoms and divine prescriptions so that these might become etched upon the breast and the soul be adorned thereby. Insolence is to be engrossed in the ego-centric, bestial, predatorial and satanic attributes that overcome the heart, blackening it and blinding it, and sullying the spirit [as a result].

Those are they who have bought in exchange for guidance error, that is, darkness and being veiled from the path of truth, namely, religion, or from the truth [itself], for error is dispersed in the face of guidance through the original light of preparedness; so their commerce brings no profit [for them], because their capital derives from the world of light and subsistence so that they might acquire by this [capital] what resembles it in the way of effusive, perfecting light through the sciences, deeds, wisdoms, gnosis, character traits and virtuous dispositions becoming thereby rich in reality, deserving of proximity, dignity, exaltation and esteem before God, but they have not profited by acquiring [all of] that; [nor are they guided] and thus the original guidance that had been their commodity and capital is lost by the disappearance of their preparedness and the sullying of their hearts by the rust that necessarily leads to eternal veiling and deprivation and so their loss is an eternal one without beginning or end.

Their likeness, that is, to describe them in terms of their hypocrisy is like describing the one seeking to kindle [a fire] and the resultant light which no sooner than it illumines things nearby around him his fire subsides, leaving him bewildered. For the light of their preparedness can be compared to a kindled fire and its illumining of things around them is their being guided to what is in their best interest in terms of their livelihood in the here and now, as opposed to what is in their best interest in terms of the final return that is [seemingly] far away for them, and [their being guided to] companionship of the believers and being in accord with them outwardly; its [his fire’s] being extinguished swiftly is the dying out of their light of preparedness and the rapid evanescence of what they had been content with of their world and its imminent termination; [is as the likeness of one who kindled a fire, and when it illumined all about him]

God took away their light, of preparedness by reinforcing them in insolence, leaving them veiled from success, in the darknesses of the soul’s attributes [and left them in darkness]; unable to see, with the eye of the heart the way out, nor what might benefit them in the way of spiritual knowledge, like the one whose fire is extinguished while he is wandering about between his work and his means of subsistence;

deaf, dumb, blind, in reality because of their hearts being veiled from the light of the intellect by which they hear the truth, utter it and see it. Outwardly, because of their not being beneficial, given that the paths from those sense to the heart are blocked and given the locus of the veil, the light of the heart does not reach them so that they might have preserved their benefits; nor do its perceptions touch the heart so that they might understand and take heed; they shall not return, to God because of the two barriers set upon their hearts, [the two barriers] mentioned in His statement and We have set before them a barrier and behind them a barrier [Q. 36:9]. The use of the simile lies in depicting what is intellectual in tangible form that it might find visible expression in the souls of the common folk. He then likens them to a people who are struck by rain amidst darkness, thunder and lightning: rain is the descent of the divine revelation and the arrival of [divine] mercy as assistance to them through the blessedness of the companionship of the believers and the remainder of their preparedness that might benefit their hearts even minimally; and [the rain] is also the materialisation for them of outward graces consistent with their wishes outwardly. The darknesses are the ego-centric attributes and the imaginal and illusory doubts and the satanic whisperings that bewilder them and fill them with anxiety. Thunder is the divine fulmination and the overwhelmingly powerful threat [of chastisement] mentioned in the Qurʾān, its verses and the aurally and visually received reports, that which frightens them and results in the smallest breaking of their insolent hearts and a defeat of their rejecting souls. Lightning is the luminous flashes and the spiritual alerts upon hearing the promise [of reward] and being reminded of the favours and blessings that which entices them and gives them hope [of salvation] and thus profits them with a small yearning and sways them to [hope for] the granting [of their supplications].

Or as a cloudburst out of the heaven in which is darkness, and thunder, and lightning —

The meaning of they put their fingers in their ears against the thunderclaps, cautious of death: they are distracted from understanding by diversions and play and from listening to the verses that mention the threat [of chastisement], lest this succeeds [in admonishing them] by severing them from the pleasures of the natural world and [preoccupying them] with the burdensome thoughts about the Hereafter. For to desist from the pleasures of the senses is for them to die. But God is all-powerful against them and will cut them off from those pleasures to which they have become accustomed by means of natural death, the power of One who encompasses a thing so that nothing of it can escape Him [and God encompasses the disbelievers].

Yet their caution is of no avail [to them].

The lightning, namely, the luminous flash, well-nigh snatches away their sight, that is, their intellects veiled as they are by slumber from the light of guidance and unveiling, for the intellect is the eye of the heart; whensoever it gives them light, they walk in it, that is, they rise [in status] and come closer to accepting the truth and guidance; and when the darkness is over them, they stop, that is, they remain fixed in their [state of] bewilderment in that darkness of theirs; had God willed, He would have taken away their hearing and their sight, He would have obliterated their understanding and intellect and effaced the light of their preparedness as in the case of the former group, and so they are not even affected upon hearing the revelation in the first place. Truly, God has power over all things, [be it] an externally existent thing, necessary or contingent, as well as a mentally existent thing, contingent or impossible. For a non-thing is purely a non-existent, neither in the mind nor externally [sc. in the created universe]; but His power specifically relates to that which is contingent and not to what is necessary or what is impossible, this [is clear] by rational proof. This concludes the discussion of the seven categories in undifferentiated form and a separation between the two groups of wretched ones. The mention of the first group is brief and kept to a minimum because discussion of them is of no use and is fully gleaned from the mention of the second group. Thus the criticism, reviling and censure entailed in the depiction of their status, as well as their being threatened and promised punishment and the condemnation of their conduct and their habits is on account of the possibility of their accepting guidance and the disappearance of the sickness that afflicts them and the kindling of the light of their innate dispositions by the aid of the divine granting of success, that perhaps such rebuke might break the strength of their obstinacy and that such scolding might extirpate the roots of their despicable acts so that their inner aspects might then be purified, their hearts illumined by the light of the will whereafter they follow the path of truth. Perhaps their friendly and gentle attitude towards the believers and their keeping company with them might incline them towards their [the believers’] good nature awakening some love and desire within them by which their hearts then soften to the remembrace of God [cf. Q. 39:23] and their souls become obedient to the commands of God, repenting thereafter and making amends, just as God, exalted be He, says: Verily the hypocrites will be in the lowest level of the Fire and you will never find a helper for them, save those who repent and make amends and hold fast to God and make their religion purely God’s; those are with the believers and God will certainly give the believers a great wage [Q. 4:145-6].

O people [worship your Lord Who created you and those that were before you, so that you may be fearful], having concluded His mention of the fortunate and the damned, He calls them to [declaration of] the Oneness of God. The first stage of [declaring] the Oneness of God, is to declare the unity of [His] acts, which is why servanthood is tied to lordship, that they might feel the intimacy when they see the graces [given to them] and love Him, like when He said: ‘I made creatures and sought their love through the graces [that I grant them]’. They then thank Him for these, for worship is gratitude and is only forthcoming in return for graces. He singles out His lordship for them so that they might single out their worship for Him. He seeks to lift the first of the three veils which are the veils of the acts, the attributes and [the veil of His] essence by means of the presentation of the self-disclosure of the acts because creatures in terms of the three [veils] are all, as engendered things, veiled from the truth absolutely. Thus the origin of their configuration (inshāʾ) and the configuration of their existence is dependent upon in terms of principles, causes and conditions, is the same as that of their mothers and fathers before them.

[He Who assigned to you the earth for a couch and heaven for an edifice; and sent down from the heaven water, wherewith He brought forth fruits for your provision] He has assigned the earth to them for a couch so that it might be their resting place and their domicile, and He has assigned [to them] the heaven for an edifice so that it might shelter them, and He has sent down water from the heaven and therewith brought forth plants from the earth so that this might be provision for them [drawing them thereby] to Himself, that they might beware of attributing the act to other than Him and thus rise above associating acts [with any other than Him] when they witness that these are all from God. That is why He mentions what results from these anteceding [graces] using [the coordinating particle] fāʾ, saying: so set not up compeers to God, while you know, what we have mentioned in the way of things given, as though He were saying that He was the one who has performed these acts and so worship can only be truly for Him and should not be assigned to any other than Him. Do not therefore set up a compeer to Him by attributing the act to this [compeer] that this [latter] would then deserve to be worshipped by you and that you then worship this [compeer] even as you are aware of [the transgression involved in] that. Their worship should only be for the Maker. Their Lord is the one who discloses Himself in the form of maker, since every servant only worships what he knows and he can only know God in the measure that he finds divinity in himself. They can only find the Doer, freely chosen [by them] and so they worship Him. The ultimate goal of such worship is to arrive at Paradise, which is the perfection of the world of acts. God has made smooth the earths of their souls and constructed upon them the heavens of their spirits, sending down from these heavens the water of the science of declaring the unity of [His] acts, therewith bringing forth from that earth the plants of submission as well as works, acts of obedience, and virtuous character traits so that from these He might provide for their hearts the fruits of certainty, as well as the states and the stations such as patience, gratitude and reliance. Having established [His] Oneness, this is used as proof to established the prophethood [of Muḥammad] so that [one’s] islām becomes sound thereby, since it cannot be sound except through the two testimonies. For merely declaring [God’s] Oneness is to become veiled from the level of differentiation by the union which is pure compulsion that leads to heresy and indifference [to the Law], while mere attribution of the act and the saying to the Messenger is to be veiled by the level of differentiation from the union, that which is pure destiny that leads to magianism and dualism, whereas islām is a path between the two combining our words ‘there is no god but God’ and our words ‘Muḥammad is the Messenger of God’ and belief in it as a locus of [divine] self-manifestation for His acts, exalted be He. For the acts of creatures compared to the acts of the Truth are as the body to the spirit. Just as the source of the act is the spirit but cannot be completed except by the body, so too the Originator of the act is [God] the Truth and cannot become manifest through creatures. The mission [of Muḥammad] is necessary because creatures by virtue of their being veiled and distant from the Truth are unable to receive gnosis from their Lord [without it]. There must necessarily be an intermediary who through his Truth-witnessing spirit is in harmony with the Divine Presence and through his creature-familiar soul [is in harmony] with the rank of humankind, so that his heart is able to receive from his spirit lordly words which he casts unto his holy soul so that creatures accept [these] from him on account of the harmonised link [to both the divine and the human].Thus He says:

And if you are in doubt concerning what We have revealed, that is, [doubt concerning] Our revelation to Muḥammad and thus doubt the truthfulness of his prophethood, then weigh up your human forces and summon your analogy-strong minds, veiled [as they are] from the light of guidance, and your thoughts, skilful [as they are] in putting together speech and arranging meanings, being as you are of your own, children of your species: would you be able to produce a sūra, that is, a segment of speech like it? [to Our servant, then bring a sūra like it; and call your witnesses besides God] if you are truthful, in attributing it to Muḥammad.

And if you do not, then be pliant, submit, believe and abandon obstinacy that will eventually lead you to the Fire. The requisite, that is either faith or submission, has been omitted, while the concomitant, which is to guard against the Fire, has replaced it, so that the proof that denial necessarily leads to entering the Fire and the eventuality of chastisement for them is stronger. As for His saying and you will not, is a parenthetical statement informing [them] of the unseen in the knowledge that the intellects of those who are veiled are barred from such [knowledge]; [then fear the Fire] what is meant by the Fire is their being consumed by the upheaval of their souls and the evil of their natures, [natures] which are turned away from the spiritual holy spirit and the breeze of the tasting of the Compassionate, and deprived from the pleasure of the coolness of certainty and the safety of the abode of permanence, severed [as their natures are] by the habits of the senses and corporeal pleasures, prohibited by what they have become addicted and accustomed to, while there remain [within them] the yearning for that [spirit] and the rapture [felt for it], [but] the deeply rooted conditions of attachment to the lower affairs in them and their love of earthly bodies are the causes of the igniting of their fires, which is why He says: whose fuel is men, and stones, that is, the silent sensory lower matters to which they are attached out of love so that the forms of these [matters] have become deeply-rooted in their souls while their souls have become imprisoned by having inclined to these very [forms]. As the Messenger, peace and blessings be upon him, said: ‘Every person is gathered [at the resurrection] with the one that he loves, so that if one of you loved a stone he will be gathered with it’. How can it be otherwise when his own form has fixed itself within him through love so that the form of his heart has become his own form. Know that the [intensity of the] heat of the fire follows from its [arche-]typal form that constitutes its spirituality and its kingdom, for otherwise it would be equal in its specific qualities to all bodies; that spirituality are sparks of the fire of God’s overwhelming supra-sensory power after its descent into several ranks, such as its descent into the rank of the soul upon the upheaval of rage, for the upheaval of rage might have the effect of consuming the character traits in a way that not even fire might have on firewood. Hence it can be known that not every thing that receives heat has to be hot. For if physical fire results from spiritual fire, then its pain must undoubtedly be stronger and longer lasting from the other fire. How can it be otherwise when every physical capacity which is finite is lesser than any spiritual capacity. Because of this signification it is said that the fire of Hell was washed with water 70 times before it was sent down to this world so that it can be made use of; prepared for the disbelievers, who are veiled from religion severed as they are from their wants.

And give good tidings to those who believe, in the Maker and who have performed deeds that make them good for Paradise in accordance with their knowledge of the unity of [God’s] acts, [give them good tidings] that they shall have what they want and desire over and above what they imagined and longed for, because of the indefinite form of ‘Gardens’. Gardens underneath which rivers run are the most splendid and delightful that a place can be and the most pleasurable and sweetest that a desired thing can be for the people of this world, for these [gardens] for their souls are of the same kind as the gardens of this world but purer than them, commensurate with the physicality of the final return, which is real as you shall see;

[and perform righteous deeds, that theirs shall be Gardens underneath which rivers run]

whensoever they are provided with fruits therefrom, they shall say, ‘This is what we were provided with before’, in this world as they are familiar with them; and they shall be given it, [this] provision, in perfect semblance, being stations for their hearts, such as [the station of] reliance, for example, and the lushest gardens of the world of the Holy every rank of which produces rivers of knowledge that profit the wayfarers and benefit the malady of those spiritually thirsty who are yearning, while the fruits are the wisdoms and the gnostic sciences. As for their saying This is what we were provided with before, this is an allusion to the fact that such sciences and wisdoms are fixed for the heart in its state of disengagement, but become veiled from it when it is preoccupied with matters of the physical world upon its attachement to it, forgetting them as a result and only remembering them upon its being disengaged from its vestments. For the Prophet said: ‘Wisdom is the believer’s ultimate goal’; [and there for them shall be spouses purified]: [these are] spouses for their souls, black-eyed houris pure of any lewdness and untouched, and for their hearts [the spouses are] the holy souls pure of the blemishes of physical nature and the impurity of the elements, but there is no Paradise for their spirits because these are veiled from the witnessing; [therein they shall abide].

God is not ashamed, He is not prohibited by what would [normally] prohibit the one who experiences shame, to strike a similitude even of a gnat, or anything above it, for in the eyes of God the disbeliever is lowlier than a gnat and this world [lowlier] than its wings, as stated by the ḥadīth.

[as for the believers, they know] it is the truth from their Lord, because of the interrelationship between the thing struck as similitude and the one for whom the similitude has been struck; [but as for disbelievers, they say, ‘What did God desire by this for a similitude?’ Thereby He leads many astray and thereby He guides many];

and thereby He leads none astray except the wicked, those who have departed from the station of the heart to the station of the soul and from obedience to the Compassionate to obedience of Satan, being the second group among the wretched ones and not the first group, for they are in error with regard the same matter in any case neither because of it [the similitude[ or because of any other reason. Their being led into error thereby [i.e. by the similitude struck] is caused by their wickedness in reality, since the fact that the ruling follows from the description gives the impression of it [the description] being the cause, and that is their increasing obstinacy, their denial, their spitefulness and the overpowering of their hearts by the attributes of their souls upon the mention of the Qurʾān, increasing their distance and [increasing them] in darkness upon darkness.

Those such as break the covenant of God after its solemn binding: this is what is alluded to in His statement: And when your Lord took from the Children of Adam, from their loins, their seed and made them testify against themselves, ‘Am I not your Lord?’, they said, ‘Yea, indeed …’ [Q. 7:172]. It is mentioned in a ḥadīth that God, exalted be He, stroked Adam’s back with His hand and brought forth his seed from him like particles, [to the end of] the ḥadīth. God’s hand is the holiest intellect and the first spirit which is the spirit of the world that is referred to as the right-hand of the Compassionate; Adam is the universal reasoning soul^{1Humans are endowed with the faculty of speech (nuṭq) by means of which they are able to reason, hence to be rational (ʿaql).} which is itself the heart of the world; His stroking of his back constitutes the effect of the intellect upon it [the soul] and its illuminating of it by His light through the spiritual joining; His bringing forth of his seed from him constitutes the bringing into existence of the individual partial souls that had been inside it in potentiality and bringing them out in actuality; God’s covenant with them where He says, ‘Am I not your Lord?’, is the depositing of the knowledge of [His] Oneness in their essences; the binding of that covenant is the propping up of the proofs of His Oneness in their intellects and His obligating them to that knowledge, making it a binding aspect of their essences, so that upon their disengagement from the attributes of the soul and the coverings of the body such [knowledge] would [immediately] become clear to them and the most manifest and obvious of things would be disclosed to them, namely, their having been made to testify against themselves, since such knowledge would at that instance become necessary. Their response to that [question] with ‘Yea, indeed’, constitutes their essential acceptance of that [truth]. Their breaking of that covenant is their total engrossment in the carnal pleasures and the trappings of the physical world and their enslavement by their desires and lusts such that they become veiled by these from [the knowledge of] God’s Oneness and His worship. [and such as cut what God has commanded should be joined]: their ‘cutting of what God has commanded should be joined’ is their turning away from the joining with the Holy Spirit, the highest points of origin [of motion] and the heavenly spirits who are the High Council [cf. Q. 37:8] and the inhabitants of the Divine Presence from among those of the realm of the Divine attributes (jabarūt) and the angelic realm (malakūt) who keep company with them in essence and in attribute, being the ones whose nearness they should in reality seek and their manifest ties of kinship which they have been commanded to cement in reality, [turning away instead] by orienting themselves towards the lower world and by their love of dark and corrupted substances and their adoration of and their being smitten by vile and transient matters, which is why the Prophet said: ‘Verily God loves exalted and noble matters and dislikes inanities, for the viler the thing demanded by the soul the further it is from the noble world:

‘People in love with things come in all shapes and sizes, but those most excused [for such love] are those who have none’.

[and such as do corruption in the land — they shall be the losers] The explanation of ‘doing corruption in the land’ has already been given; as for the ‘great loss’ [of the losers], that is the forsaking of the permanent luminous substance in exchange for the transient dark [substance].

How do you disbelieve in God, that is, in which state are you veiled from Him, when your state is that of, when you were dead, drops of sperm in the loins of your forefathers, and He gave you life, in other words, why do you not see the proof of the Creator in [His] creation, then He shall make you dead, through natural death, then He shall give you life, through resurrection, for the former is known by means of the witnessing while the latter [is known] by deduction from the original creation, then to Him you shall be returned!, for requital, or [it means] that He makes you dead [separated] from your souls through voluntary death which is annihilation in the Oneness, whereafter He gives you life through true life which is subsistence after annihilation through that existence which is the bestowal of the Truth, after which you are returned to Him for the witnessing (mushāhada), if the unity is the unity of [His] attributes, or for the presential vision (shuhūd), if the unity is the unity of His Essence.^{1Chittick: “If shuhūd can be distinguished from mushāhada, it may be in the sense that shuhūd is used more generally, as a synonym for seeing and vision on any level of existence, whereas mushāhada is more often used as a synonym for unveiling” (1989: 227).}

He it is Who created for you all that is in the earth, in other words, the lower aspect which is the world of the elements in its entirety since it constitutes the origin points of your creation and the substrata of your existence and subsistence; then He presided over [the heaven], that is, He turned evenly to the upper aspect – thumma (‘then’) is used to indicate a separation between the two aspects and the two moments of existentiation, the originational (ibdāʿī) and the creational (takwīnī), and not a lapse between the two time periods, so that the creation of the earth necessarily precedes that of the heavens; [and He levelled them seven heavens and He has knowledge of all things]: He then proportioned them as seven heavens according to what the generality thinks, for the eighth and the ninth [heavens] are [respectively] the seat (kursī) and the throne (ʿarsh) in their manifest dimension. In reality the lower aspect is the corporeal world, like the body and its limbs given its inferior rank in relation to the spiritual world which is the upper aspect referred to by the expression ‘heaven’; thumma is used to indicate a separation between [the act of] creation and the command; ‘and He levelled them seven heavens’ is an allusion to the ranks of the world of spiritual beings: the first is the angelic earthly realm and the forces of the soul and the jinn; the second is the world of the soul; the third is the world of the heart; the fourth is the world of the intellect; the fifth is the world of the mysteries; the sixth is the world of the spirit while the seventh is the world of concealment, which is the spiritual mystery distinct from the mystery of the heart. It is to this that the Commander of the Believers [ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib], peace be upon him, alluded when he said: ‘Ask me about the paths of the heavens, for I know them better than the paths of the earth’. Its paths are the states and the stations such as renunciation, reliance, satisfaction and the like. Know that the intellect when referred to by the term wisdom is the spirit in the terminology of the Sufis. And what we have referred to as the intellect in the terminology of the Sufis is the rational faculty that belongs to the speaking soul according to the philosophers. That is why the Sufis say that the intellect is the polished part of the heart illumined by the light of the spirit, while the heart is the speaking soul. Remember this lest [your] understanding become confused by the different terms [used].

And when your Lord said to the angels: idh (‘when’) refers to an endless duration that is from pre-eternity to sempiternity; the ‘saying’ is the casting of the meaning of the connectedness of God’s will to the existentiation of Adam onto the holy essences of the realm of divine power, namely the angels brought near and the disengaged spirits and those [spirits] of the angelic realm constituting the heavenly souls. For everything that occurs in the world of engendered things has a form before becoming engendered in the world of the spirit which is the world of the pre-decree, followed by the world of the heart which is the heart of the world known as the Preserved Tablet, followed by the world of the soul, namely, the soul of the world that is the Tablet of ‘effacement and fixing’ [cf. Q. 13:39] expressed as the heaven of this world (samāʾ al-dunyā) in the revelation, as God says: And there is not a thing but that the stores thereof are with Us, and We do not send it down except in a known measure [Q. 15:21]. That then is His saying to the angels: ‘I am appointing on earth a vicegerent’: consider in yourself your state, for all that manifests itself upon your limbs, which constitute your engendered world and the world of your witnessing, in the way of words and deeds exists within your spirit which is hidden beyond your unseen and in the unseen of your unseen then in your soul which is the closest unseen to you and your heaven of this world before it becomes manifest upon your limbs; ‘to appoint’ is more general than origination and engenderment. He did not say ‘I am creating’ because man is a composite of both worlds. A viceregent that will assume My character traits and My descriptions and execute My command and rule My creatures and manage their affair, keeping their laws in check, summoning them to obedience of Me. The disapproval of the angels when they said: ‘What, will You appoint therein one who will do corruption therein and shed blood, and their intimation of the priority that they enjoy by saying: while we glorify You with praise and sanctify You?’, is their being veiled from the manifestation of the inner meaning of divinity and the lordly descriptions in him [sc. Adam], which are among the specific qualities of the social condition and the composition that subsumes both worlds and restricts what is in both engendered things, and it is their knowledge of the fact that there will ensue bestial acts, such as the working of corruption in the earth, and [acts of] predation expressed in the ‘shedding of blood’, both of which are specific qualities of the power of passion and anger whose existence is necessary given the attachment of the spirit to the body; and [their knowledge] that the purity of their essences and the sanctity of their souls [makes them] above such [acts]. For every class of the holy angels has an insight into what [class] is below them and into their souls, but no insight into what [class] is above them. They are aware that since the upper luminous spirit is attached to the lower dark body there must be an intermediary that corresponds to the spirit on the one hand and to the body on the other, and that is the soul, the refuge for all evil and the source of all corruption; but they are not aware of the fact that the all-comprehensiveness of humankind attracts the divine light, itself a mystery. [He said,] ‘Assuredly, I know what you know not’. The difference between glorification (tasbīḥ) and sanctification (taqdīs) is that to glorify is to exalt [God] above the association of partner and incapacity and deficiency, while to sanctify is to exalt [God] above any attachment to locus or submission to receptivity or the blemishes of possibility as well as multiplicity of His Essence and attributes, or that any of His perfections should be [merely] potential [as opposed to actual]. Thus sanctification is more specific [than glorification], for every thing that is sanctified is [necessarily] glorified, but not every glorified thing is [necessarily] sanctified. For the angels brought near who are the disengaged spirits by their very disengagement [from substrata] and their not being veiled from the light of their Lord and their overpowering of those below them by their effusion of light upon them and their effect upon others and because all of their perfections are actual, they are the sanctifiers. The other heavenly and earthly angels are glorifiers on account of the simplicity of their essences and the specific qualities of their acts and their perfections.

And He taught Adam the names, all of them, that is, He cast upon his heart the specific qualities of things, [the qualities] by which they, their benefits and their harmfulness, can be known. Then He presented them, that is, He presented those named things, to the angels, through their witnessing of the human structure and their accompaniment of Adam in the revelation. The meaning of His words: and He said, ‘Now tell Me the names of these if you speak truly’, [is] His will that they be revitalised by some of the objects of man’s knowledge, as required by the human composition and the conveying of the objects of his senses and his diverse knowledge, temporally originated in him through the specificity of [his] composition and his social condition, to their essences after not having been [there], since their knowledge ensues from his knowledge and that is the sense in which they are dumbfounded [by God] and the connection between that and His will is reflected in the command given to Adam to ‘tell’, since all of the human faculties and the angels that are in His presence are revitalised by what in a different locus they would not be revitalised; that is the meaning of Adam’s telling them [of the names].

As for the meaning of: They said, ‘Glory be to You! We know not except what You have taught us. Surely You are the Knower, Wise’, [that is] the testimony of their being through evidence and of the tongues of their state that they fall short of the human perfections and their inability to outdo them; and [testimony] of God’s being above an act that would entail corruption in general and their awareness of their inability to rise to their levels by the acquisition of knowledge, since their perfections go hand in hand with their being and that His knowledge, exalted be He, is above their knowledge, for He is the absolute Knower and the Wise that does only what ought to be done, which is why He says:

He said, ‘Adam, tell them their names’, and He did not say ‘teach them’ because acquired knowledge that entails [spiritual] ascension is of the specific qualities of the all-comprehensiveness of humankind. Thus each [quality] accepts only what accords with its nature of that genus of perceptibles and not any other. Just as, for example, vision [exists in humans] because of the many visible things, so it does not increase knowledge or level and accepts only what belongs to the genus of visibles even if these be manifold. Such is the state of every inner faculty. [And when he had told them their names He said] As for the meaning of: ‘Did I not tell [you that I know the Unseen in the heavens and the earth?] [that is] an affirmation by Him concerning the natures of the angels, that He, exalted be He, knows what they know not of the Unseen in the heavens and the earth, that which is the mystery of spiritual knowledge and [divine] love, deposited in man whose knowledge God has taken unto Himself.

And I know what you reveal, of what you know regarding the corrupt acts of man, and what you were hiding, in the way of your deeming your essences preferable to his on account of their purity and sanctity.

And when We said to the angels, ‘Prostrate yourselves to Adam: their prostrating to Adam represents their pliancy and their submissiveness to him and their being rendered obedient to him and at his disposal; so they prostrated themselves, except Iblīs, he refused and disdained: Iblīs is the illusory power because it does not belong to the [class of] purely earthly angels that are veiled from the ability to perceive meanings by perceiving forms so that it would [like these angels] yield to the overwhelming power of God out of obedience to His command; nor does it belong to the [class of] heavenly rational [angels] so that it would [like these] become aware of the noble status of Adam and in harmony with his intellect and thus yield out of love seeking divine approval. He [Iblīs] was of the jinn, that is, from among those of the lower angelic realm and the earthly power. He was reared and raised behind the backs of the heavenly angels because of his capacity to perceive meanings of particulars and his ascension to the horizon of reason; that is why compared to the intellect in man, he [Iblīs] was like the animals that are incapable of speech. His refusal is his non-submission to reason and his refraining from accepting its wisdoms; his disdain is his attempt to be superior to that which was created from clay and to the heavenly and earthly angels by not adhering to the limits of his ability to perceive those meanings of particulars that are attached to the impressions of the senses; [his disdain is also] his transgressing his condition by delving into rational meanings and universal rules; and so he became one of the disbelievers, who are pre-eternally veiled from the lights of the intellect and the coupled [lights] in addition to the light of unity.

And We said, ‘Adam, dwell and your partner in the Garden, his partner is the soul and is named Ḥawwāʾ (Eve) because of her constant clinging to the body of darkness, since life (ḥayāt) is the colour that is preponderantly black, while the heart is named Adam because of its attachment to the body though not constantly, for adama is a tanned colour, that is, the colour which is close to black. Were it not for his attachment, he would not have been named Adam. The ‘Garden’ in which the two [Adam and Eve] were commanded to remain is the heaven of the world of spirits that is the holy garden. In other words, [the command to them is] ‘Remain in the heaven of the spirit’; and eat thereof easefully where you desire, that is, embrace and walk amply across it to receive the meanings, knowledge and wisdoms in it, that are the nourishments of the heart and the spiritual fruits, as amply as you wish, and in any direction, level, state or station that you desire. For it is everlasting, unceasing and unprohibited; [but do not come near this tree] lest you be evildoers (ẓālimīn)’, who place light in the place of darkness which is not its place, and who diminish the light of their preparedness and their share of the world of light; for [the meaning of] ẓulm is traditionally understood as [meaning] to place something where it does not belong; lexically [it means] to take away from an obligatory right or share.

Then Satan caused them to slip therefrom, that is, He led them to slip from their station in Paradise into the abyss^{1The word mahwā in Arabic can also signify ‘the object of one’s desire’ and this significance should be borne in mind given the association made above with ‘nature’.} of nature by seducing [them] with carnal pleasures and [the prospect of] their permanence for them; and brought them out of what they were in, of bliss and everlasting ease. It is said that while they were gazing around in the Garden a peacock surprised them appearing before them on the walls of the Garden. Eve drew close to it and Adam followed, whereupon Satan whispered to them from behind the wall. It is also said that he used a serpent that was scaling the [walls of the] Garden by holding onto its tail in order to climb into the Garden. The former [report] indicates that he used the passions as a means [to seduce them] from outside the Garden; the latter [an indication] of his use of anger, while his scaling the wall of the Garden is an indication that anger is closer to the spiritual horizon and the space occupied by the heart than passion; and We said, ‘Go down, that is, We compelled them to go down to the lower aspect, which is the corporeal world; some of you an enemy to the other, a circumstantial qualification of [their] state,^{2The expression ḥāl is a grammatical term in Arabic but of course a reference to their spiritual state (ḥāl) upon their expulsion from Paradise.} binding to that [descent], for the descent to this world, which is the lower aspect, requires that whatever is demanded in it be of a partial nature, given the confines of matter, restricted and unable to support more than one sharing in it, so that whenever one person acquires it, another is deprived of it and denied it. Thus enmity and hatred afflicts them [in this world] in contrast to universal demands. The plural form of address [some of you] is used because the address is directed to the [human] species, since the root always subsumes its branches; and in the earth, that is, in this aspect, a dwelling, a settling, shall be yours, and enjoyment for a while’, that is, until their disengagement [from matter] upon voluntary death^{3Cf. Chittick 1989:295. According to Ibn ʿArabī [….]} or the termination of their share through natural death and the arrival of the resurrection, be it the minor or the major one.

Thereafter Adam received certain words from his Lord, that is, he received from the direction of his Lord lights and states (aṭwār), that is, degrees (marātib) from the angelic realm and the realm of the divine attributes, and disengaged spirits, since every disengaged thing is a word as it is comes from the world of the command, in the same way that Jesus was called a Word. Or [it means] that he received from Him spiritual knowledge, sciences and realities, and He relented to him, He accepted his return to Him through his disengagement from the natural garments and his entry into the community of the lights of the spiritual world (malakūt) and his assumption of the descriptions of the holy perfections and the self-disclosure through real sciences. The basic sense of tāba ʿalayhi (‘He relented to him’) is He cast upon him the repentance and made him repentant. Upon my life! That is the repentance that is accepted [by God] and not the return that issues from his part; truly He is the Relenting, the One who is ever-accepting of the repentance of His servants, the Merciful, whose mercy has preceded His wrath so that He is merciful to His servant in the midst of His wrath, just as He turned His wrath against Adam the cause of his perfection and return to Him, distancing him so that he might draw closer to Him.

We said, ‘Go down from it all together: He repeats [mention of] this matter of the descent to demonstrate that it was He who wanted that, for were it not for His will Iblīs would not have been able to lead them astray. That is why He attributes the sending down to Himself unattached to the cause after having attributed their being brought out [of the Garden] to Satan. This [instance] is similar to where He says to His Prophet: And you threw not when you threw but God threw [Q. 8:17]. Thus he [Adam] comprehended the mystery of His decree and destiny, and He made clear the wisdom inherent in the sending down [of Adam and Eve] by following it up with His words: yet there shall come to you from Me guidance, and whoever follows My guidance, no fear shall befall them, neither shall they grieve. The use of the [coordinating particle] fāʾ is that were it not for the ‘going down’, they would not have been able to pursue the guidance, nor would the fortunate be distinguished from the damned, nor would reward and punishment have been forthcoming and the abode of recompense, in the way of the Garden and the Fire, would have become invalid, nay would not have come into existence. ‘Guidance’ is the Law, and whoever follows it will be secure from evil consequence and will not fear any punishment or annihilation and would have found solace in things other than the passions and the [carnal] pleasure, grieving not for what he will have missed of the ephemeral things of this world or its bliss, as the eye of his heart will have been adorned by the light of the pursuit [of guidance] and his being guided to what cannot be measured in terms of the pleasures of this world in the way of spiritual tastings and the mysterious openings and the witnessings of the heart and the rational sciences and the excitements of the soul.

As for the disbelievers, those veiled from religion as it corresponds to the pursuit of guidance, and He complements this with His statement: who deny Our signs, those shall be the inhabitants of the Fire, the Fire of privation, abiding therein’.

O Children of Israel, remember My favour wherewith I favoured you and that I have preferred you above all the worlds [Q. 2:47]^{1This part of the verse belongs to a later section, see Q. 2:47, but seems to have replaced and fulfil My covenant, and I shall fulfil your covenant; and have awe of Me which are the words that belong here.} [and fulfil My covenant, and I shall fulfil your covenant; and have awe of Me]. The Children of Israel are the people of the divine gentleness and the recipients of the favour of guidance and prophethood. He calls to them with gentleness and a reminder of the former favour and the bygone covenant taken from them in the Torah to affirm the unity of the acts after the pre-eternal covenant, which is the way with [one’s] beloved after [a period of] estrangement:

Were there not between us ties of kinship and bonds

As well as affection and brotherhood?

This [divine] call is specifically qualified by the affirmation of the unity of [His] attributes that is the lifting of the second veil. It is more specific than the first general call made to remind [them] of the favour of religion and the covenant and the [divine] self-disclosure through the attribute of favour-giver and guardian. The threat against the failure to respond [to this divine call] is made in terms of ‘awe’ (rahba), which is more specific than fear (khawf); for fear is [the reaction] to punishment, while awe is that to wrath and overwhelming power causing reluctance and becoming veiled from something; apprehension (khashya) is more specific than [awe] because it is specific to the veiling of the essence. God, exalted be He, says: They are apprehensive of their Lord and fear an awful punishment [Q. 13:21]; likewise ‘awe’ because it is connected to the greatness of the essence.

And believe in what I have revealed, of the Qurʾān to My beloved of the unity of [My] attributes, confirming that which is with you, in the Torah of the unity of [My] acts, and be not the first to disbelieve in it, that is, the first to be veiled therefrom, veiled as you are by your belief. And do not sell, that is, do not exchange, My signs, those indicating the self-disclosures of My essence and attributes, such as the sūrat al-ikhlāṣ [Q. 112] and the kursī-verse [Q. 2:255] and the like, for a small price, that is, for the paradise of your soul because of your habituation to the sensory pleasures and the reward of deeds through the affirmation of the unity of acts. If you [are wont to] guard against association [of others with Me], then guard against the assault of My overwhelming power, majesty and veil by seeking My approval and not affirming an attribute to any other than Me; [and fear Me].

And do not obscure the truth with falsehood, that is to say, and do not mix His fixed attributes, such as His knowledge, power and will with falsehood, [falsehood] such as the attributes of your souls when manifested as attributes, and your failure to distinguish between the motives and incoming thoughts of these and the motives of [God] the Truth and His mind. [and do not conceal the truth] Do not suppress them by means of the veil of the attributes of the soul and its concealing of these upon its manifestation; while you have knowledge, of the science of the unity of the acts, for the source of an act is the attribute, so just as you do not attribute the act to any other than Him, so do not affirm an attribute to any other than Him.

And establish prayer, and pay the alms, seeking My approval instead of anticipating My reward: this is corroborated by His statement, and bow with those that bow, since the act of bowing is submission and obedience to the object of that act; it is the sign of satisfaction which is the legacy of the self-disclosure of the attributes. The purpose [of that] is to say: be satisfied with what I decree when you inspect My attributes. The orientation upon the performance of the act is the indication that reward and recompense is being sought on account of the soul being independent with its form. Prostration which is the ultimate submission is the sign of being annihilated in the unity upon the self-disclosure of the Essence.

Will you bid others to piety, which is the beautiful act that results in purity of the heart and wholesomeness of the soul whose illumination is thereby increased; and forget yourselves: will you not act in accordance with that by which you rise from the station of the self-disclosure of the acts to the self-disclosure of the attributes? while you recite the Book, of your primordial nature that commands you to follow Muḥammad in his religion, the one that will lead you to the path of God’s unity? Do you not understand?, a rhetorically powerful rebuke and a provocation of their fanaticism.

Seek help, ask for assistance and aid from the One who has the power, since you have no power over your own acts, in [exercising] patience, over the acts that are done to you that you hate, your constraint and your intentions so that you might arrive at the station of satisfaction, and [performing] prayer, which is when the heart is present to receive the self-disclosures of the attributes. For indeed it, indeed self-examination, that is, the presence of the heart, is grievous, burdensome and heavy, except for the humble, whose hearts are broken and pliant enough to receive the lights of the subtle self-disclosures and the take-over of the assaults the self-disclosures of the overwhelming [divine] power, those who are certain that they are in the presence of their Lord, that is, the presence of the attributes indicated by the Lord in the state of His encounter;

[who reckon that they shall meet their Lord], and that to Him they are returning, upon the annihilation of their attributes and their effacement by His attributes.

[O Children of Israel, remember My favour wherewith I favoured you, and that I have preferred you above all the worlds]

The address is repeated in order to communicate that the One who guided them first and was gentle to them and favoured them over the two veiled worlds of their time by guiding them to the lifting of the first veil, is One who guides them a second time. So just as He did not desire any evil for them at the time of the first guidance, likewise at the time of the second guidance He only desires good for them;

and fear the day when, that is, when the attribute of [divine] overwhelming power discloses itself, no soul for another shall give satisfaction, none shall avail [another], because no one will have that power, and no intercession shall be accepted from it, because there will be no intercession or assistance, since they shall all be deprived of attributes and acts, as [the poet] says: ‘Nor do you see the lizard slip into its burrow then’; nor any compensation be taken, that is, [no] ransom, since no one will have any possessions, neither shall they be helped, because no one other than Him, exalted be He, will have power and [the power to] provide assistance.

And when We delivered you from the folk of Pharaoh: its exoteric aspect and its explanation is as it appears, reminding [them] of the favours to incite love [on their part], while its esoteric aspect and interpretation [is]: And when We delivered you from the folk of Pharaoh, the [evil-]commanding soul (al-nafs al-ammāra) that is veiled by its own egoism thinks itself superior to the Master of Existence; Egypt is the city of the body which, together with its faculties of estimation, imagination, evacuation, wrath, passion and the spiritual powers, namely the sons of God’s close friend, Jacob, have enslaved the spirit, the natural powers of the body in the form of the external senses, as well as the vegetative powers; who were visiting you with evil chastisement, charging you with difficult hardships, toil and heavy labour when you [attempt to] secure goods and and store them away eagerly and expectantly, and [when] you organise your sources of nourishment and clothing and other things for which the eager among the children of this world toil; enslaving you by making you think of and concern yourselves [only] with the supervision of such [matters], while they are concerned in securing their pleasures, which [in fact] is [their] chastisement, since these [pleasures] prevent you from your [own] pleasures, slaughtering your sons, namely, those spiritual powers, [severing them] from the speculative rational [faculties] and the practical rational [faculties], the two that constitute the two eyes of the heart, the speculative right one and the practical left one, as well [slaughtering your] understanding which is the hearing [faculty] of the heart, and the mystery that is the heart of the heart and reflection and remembrance; and sparing your women, the above-mentioned natural powers, by preventing the former group from acts specific to subjugation and seizure, veiling it from the life and support of the light of the spirit; and by enabling and giving stability to the second group over its acts; and therein, [in that] deliverance, for you was a tremendous trial, a tremendous favour, from your Lord, namely the grace of being able to inspect the attributes of His majesty and beauty; or [it means] in that chastisement there is for you a tremendous affliction, namely, the affliction of being veiled, of privation and removal, for a trial, which is a test, ensues from these. God, exalted be He, says: And We tried them with good things and evil things [Q. 7:168].

And when We divided, by your presence (wujūd), [for you] the sea, that is, the black clamouring sea that is the corporeal substratum when it was parted by your presence as the earth is parted by [rising] plants; and We delivered you, by disengaging you therefrom, and drowned Pharaoh’s folk, namely, [drowning] the ego-centric power in it by forcing it to cling to it and its destruction on account of its corruption, while you were [beholding], witnessing that. Accordingly one can interpret the Children of Israel at the beginning of the address as [representing] those spiritual powers; the favour by which He favoured them as the guidance [He gave them] to the acceptance of the lights effusing upon these [powers] from the world of the spirit and [to] the reception of the gnostic sciences and wisdoms and their fulfilment of the covenant and their projecting forth of what is centred in these [powers] in accordance with the initial preparedness in the way of the proofs of unity and the universal meanings that lie dormant within them through purification and the performance of acts specific to these. His fulfilment of the covenant with them is the effusion of the light of perfection upon these [powers] when they give what is due to the light of preparedness by way of purification and employing what they possess in the way of meanings. If you are to be in awe of something, then be in awe of the veiling [from you] of My lights upon the disappearance of your preparedness; and believe, that is to say, and accept what is effused upon you by Me in the way of luminous radiations and auspicious thoughts form the Unseen as verification [from Me] of the light of primordial nature [contained] within your preparedness. And do not be among the foremost rank of those veiled from the acceptance of these [from Me] by orienting yourselves towards the lower aspect. And do not exchange these for the pleasures of the soul and what it seeks. And do not muddle the truth of the spiritual sciences and the holy lights with the false demands of the senses and the attributes of the soul, suppressing those lights and sciences by allowing these to manifest themselves upon you. And establish and maintain your orientation towards the Presence of the Spirit and towards the fulfilment of Its command. And pay the alms [due] upon those things known to you, which are your wealth, by perusing them and composing them so that you might secure thereby the reward of the results and the concomitants [of such knowledge]. And expend these [alms] upon the poor in your presence, [these poor] being the natural corporeal powers so that these [latter] can survive on them and acquire through them virtuous character traits and beautiful dispositions. Teach these to the children of your species so that they might reach perfection thereby. Bow and submit to the acceptance of intelligible commands, spiritual lights and the acts of the heart: Will you bid others to piety and forget yourselves … [Q. 2:44], [that is to say], will you direct the faculties below you through [imposing on them] beautiful devotions and virtuous manners to rise to your station and to assume your manners but forget to edify your souls in the presence of God with the manners of the spiritual folk, to practise self-examination, to illumine yourselves by the lights of the spirit at the station of witnessing and to rise to His station upon being annihilated in the Unity; [all this] while you recite from the Book of intelligibles sent down from the Lord of the spirit by means of the angel of the intellect to the Prophet of the heart. Will you not understand by means of the intellect that is disengaged from the blemishes of caprice (hawā) and illusion (wahm). And seek assistance through patience against what manifests itself upon you and comes [upon you] as a result of the sway of the lights of the authority of the Spirit and its stipulations and the overwhelming power of the self-disclosures of the Greatness and [by] the presence of the Truth. And verily the seeking of such assistance is burdensome except to the humble, the satisfied, who submit to the obedience of the commands of the heart and the spirit, those who are certain that they are in His Presence and upon His encounter and that they are returning to Him by the acceptance of His lights. Their being favoured over the worlds is the honour they enjoy over all the faculties that man possesses.

And when We appointed for Moses, after concluding his struggle against Pharaoh’s folk and destroying them, forty nights, during which he will devote himself exclusively to Us so that the natural coverings that had veiled his heart from the nature of light would be lifted during the forty [days] in which his body was being created out of the fetal form and while he was veiled as a result of this formation from [his] primordial nature — as reported in a ḥadīth: ‘He fermented the clay from which Adam was made in His hand for forty mornings’ — [and] from his heart’s aspect, and so that the wisdom of the Torah should emerge from his heart and manifest itself upon his tongue; then you took to yourselves [the Calf after him], the calf of the deficient animal soul as a god after his separating himself from you and his absence from you; and you were evildoers, assigning worship where it does not belong.

Then We pardoned you after that, your grotesque deed and vile transgression, through your repentance upon Moses’s return to you, [so that you might be thankful] so that you might be grateful for the grace of My pardon by visualising that grace as coming from the Gracious One and [so that you might] prepare to accept the self-disclosure of the attribute of Grace. According to another interpretation [it means]: ‘And We appointed for Moses the heart upon his becoming attached to the body and veiled from his people, the spiritual powers, for the forty nights during which his corporeal structure was being created; then you took to worshipping the calf of the animal soul, [Moses] as the infant, after his absence in the state of childhood; then We pardoned you after that, worship by the real maturation [of Moses] and the self-manifestation of the light of the heart upon your disengagement, so that you might be thankful for the grace of My granting you success in [attaining] that disengagement and My preparing [for you] of the means for your perfection by your following of the path of My attributes.

And when We gave to Moses [the Scripture and the Criterion, so that you might be guided], [when We gave Moses] the heart, the Book of intelligibles, wisdoms and gnostic sciences and the criterion that distinguishes between truth and falsehood, so that you might be guided by the light of Its guidance. If taken according to the first sense [the statement] does not need interpretation.

[And when Moses said to his people, ‘My people,] you have done wrong against yourselves, you have diminished its due and its share of the reward and the mentioned self-disclosures, [by your taking the [golden] calf]. Now turn to your Creator, by lifting the first veil, as evidenced by the mention of Him as al-Bāriʾ, and slay one another’s soul, by the sword of spiritual discipline (riyāḍa) and by denying it [your soul] its shares and the acts that are specifically its, for the purpose of freeing yourselves [from it] and suppressing its caprices, which are the very spirit by which it lives. [If taken] according to the second [sense], the heart inspired the faculties that you diminished what is your due by making the soul the object of your worship, so return to your Creator by the light of His guidance and by means of spiritual discipline prevent your souls from what you are voracious for, by severing them from the life that is temporally originated in them on account of their being overpowered by caprice, so that you might live again in your original life and your repentance be accepted. [That, will be better for you in your Creator’s sight’; He will turn to you [relenting]; truly He is the Relenting, the Merciful.]

And when you said, ‘O Moses, we will not believe, on account of your guidance to the real faith until you reach the station of witnessing and eyewitness [you till we see God openly’]; and the thunderbolt, of death, took you, which is annihilation in the self-disclosure of the Essence, while you were beholding, [while] you were observing and witnessing.

Then We raised you up, with real life and subsistence after annihilation, after you were dead, so that you might be thankful, so that you might be grateful for the grace of unity and arrival by means of wayfaring to God.

And We made the clouds overshadow you, the clouds of the self-disclosure of the attributes, being the veils of the sun of the universally-consuming Essence, and We sent down upon you [manna and quails], in the way of states and tasting stations that combine sweetness with the purging of the depravities of the soul’s character traits, such as reliance, satisfaction and the solace of wisdoms, gnosis and real knowledge, gathered upon you by the winds of mercy and the divine breaths in the wilderness of the attributes as you wayfare in it. ‘Eat [of the good things We have provided for you’], that is, consume and receive these good things. And they did not wrong Us, they did not diminish what is due to Us or Our attributes by their veiling of themselves under the attributes of their souls; [but themselves they wronged]: they were diminishing what is due to their souls by their privation and loss. That is [the sense] of both interpretations. Even though the address is [expressed in] general [terms], it is specific to the 70 chosen ones.

And when We said, ‘Enter this city, that is, the lush garden of the sanctified spirit which is the station of the witnessing, [and eat freely therein wherever you will,] and enter it at the gate, of satisfaction, as cited by the ḥadīth — satisfaction with God’s decree is the greatest gate to God — prostrating, bent down, submissive to what rushes upon you of the self-disclosures of the descriptions, the acts and the bearing [?]. As for His saying: and say, ‘exoneration’, that is, ask that God exonerate the sins of your attributes, character traits and acts, and We shall forgive you your transgressions, your variegations and the sins issuing from your states, and We shall give more to those who are virtuous’, that is the witnessers — on account of his [the Prophet’s] statement: ‘Virtuousness is to worship God as though you could see Him; [We shall increase them in] the reward of their virtuousness, which is the unveiling of the Essence, or their virtuousness by wayfaring towards God.

Then the evildoers substituted a saying other than that which had been said to them, that is, they demanded to be described by the attributes of the soul desiring its share instead of demanding to be described by the attributes of God and desiring spiritual shares, as is reported of them [that they would say]: ḥinṭan samqāthā, which means, ‘we seek the nourishment of the soul’; so We sent down upon the evildoers, specifically, wrath [from the heaven for their wickedness], chastisement, straits, constraint and darkness by the imprisonment of the soul and in captivity with the shackles of desire, and through veiling within the bonds of caprice, and in privation and degradement through love of lower matter and its transformation and evanescence by the overwhelming power of the spirit heaven, and [by] the withholding of gentleness and rest from them on account of their wickedness, that is, their seceding from obedience of the heart to obedience of the soul. We have left out the second interpretation because it is very close to this one.

And when Moses sought water, sought the sending down of the rains of knowledge, wisdoms and meanings from the heaven of the spirit, [for his people,] We said, We commanded him to strike the staff of the soul on which he supported himself in his attachment to the body and his remaining fixed on the earth reflecting upon the rock of the brain, which is the foundation point of the intellect: [‘Strike with your staff the rock,] and there exploded from it twelve fountains, of the waters of knowledge according to the number of human emotions, which are the five outer senses, the five inner ones as well as the considerative rational and practical [ones]: that is why the Prophet said: ‘Whoever loses a sense, then verily he has lost knowledge’; each people came to know their drinking-place, that is to say, the people of every [kind of] science [came to know] the source of that science, such as the artisans, the scholars working from the source that is the practical intellect; the wise and the gnostics [from the source that is] the considerative [intellect]; the tanners from the science of seeing colours; the music makers from the science of sounds and so on. According to the second interpretation: We commanded Moses, the heart, to strike the staff of the soul upon the rock of the brain and there exploded from it twelve fountains, which are the mentioned emotions each of which is specific to one of the twelve mentioned powers, namely, the tribes of Jacob, the spirit. Each one came to know its drinking-place. ‘Eat and drink of that which God has provided, that is, profit from what God has provided you in the way of knowledge, action, states and stations; and do not be degenerate in the earth, seeking corruption’, do not go to excess in corruption out of ignorance.

[And when you said,] ‘Moses, we will not endure one sort of food, that is, spiritual nourishment in the way of science, gnosis and widsom; pray to your Lord for us, [that He may bring forth for us of what the earth produces — green herbs, cucumbers, garlic, lentils, onions’; He said, ‘Would you exchange what is better with what is lowlier?’] Pray to your Lord that provide for us generously and grant us dispensation with regard to what the earth of our souls produces in the way of vile passions, base pleasures and cold amusements and [with regard to] all that comprehends the shares of the soul and its chastisement.

‘Go down to a city, the city of the body, you shall have, therein, what you demanded’; And abasement, the concomitant of the pursuit of passions and the eager desire to acquire possessions, and wretchedness, that is, constant need and constant abiding in the lower aspect [were cast upon them]; and they incurred, they deserved, God’s wrath, distance and banishment, that was because, of their veiling themselves from God’s signs and His self-disclosures: the remainder is manifest [enough]. According to the second sense, [because of] their slaying of the prophets of the hearts without any established motive against them that would require such [a response], nay by their sheer falsehood in disobeying the commands of the hearts and the intellects and their animosity towards the manifestation [of these commands] they used to disbelieve the signs of God and slay prophets without right; that was because they disobeyed, and they were transgressors.

Surely those who believe, out of traditional faith, and [and those of Jewry] the exotericists and [the Christians] the esotericists and those [Sabaeans] who worshipped the angels of the intellects through their being veiled by intelligibles and [those who worshipped] the planets of the ego-centric powers through their being veiled by illusory and imaginative things; whoever, from among them, believes, out of real faith, in God and the Last Day, being certain of the knowledge of Unity and the Resurrection, and performs righteous deeds, that make them good for the encounter with God and the attainment of felicity at the final return — their wage is, their reward shall be the abiding spiritual [reward], with their Lord, in the way of the Gardens of the attributes and the acts, and no fear shall befall them, from the penalties of their acts, neither shall they grieve, because of any passing of the self-disclosures of the attributes. The sentence is a parenthetical one within the address to the Children of Israel.

And when We made a covenant with you, that is, your former covenant or [your] next one, taken from them in the Torah or [taken from them] on the basis of rational proofs, to affirm the Unity of the acts and the attributes, and We raised above you the Mount, the mountain of the brain to enable [you] to understand and accept meanings, and We said: ‘Take, that is, accept, forcefully what We have given you, of the Torah or [of] the Distinguishing Book of the Intellect, [accept it] with earnestness, and remember what is in it, heed what the wisdoms, gnoses, sciences and [divine] laws, so that you might preserve yourselves’, so that perhaps you might guard against [succumbing to] associating [others with God], ignorance and wickedness.

Then you turned away, you refrained, thereafter, by turning towards the lower aspect, and but for God’s bounty, in guiding the intellect, and His mercy towards you, through the light of insight and [the light of] the Law, you would have been among the losers.

And verily you know [that there were those among you who transgressed the Sabbath]: know that if mankind were neglected, abandoned and left to their own natures, they would have delved into and ensconced themselves in carnal pleasures and coverings of darkness because of their voracious appetite for and their being accustomed to these since infancy and childhood, until finally their preparednesses would disappear and they descend from the level of humanity and are transfigured, as God has said: Those whom God has cursed and with whom He is wroth, and some of whom He has turned into apes and swine [Q. 5:60]. But if they are guarded and kept in check by means of rational and divine rules as well as wisdoms, manners, admonitions containing the promise of reward and the threat of punishment, they can progress and be illuminated. As the poet says:

Such is the soul: if neglected it clings to vileness, but if dispatched towards virtues it is resplendent.

That is why devotions have been instituted and [why] they are obligated to repeat them at specified times, in order to remove from them thereby the filth of [human] natures that accumulates during moments of forgetfulness and in the darkness of distractions that appear at times of engaging in pleasures and committing of lustful acts, so that then their inner being might become illumined by the light of the Presence and their hearts be revitalised in orienting themselves towards [God] the Truth instead of falling and stumbling into the abyss of the capricious soul; and that it might find rest in the refreshment of the spirit and the love of the Oneness from the estrangement of caprice and attachment of multiplicity, as he [the Prophet] said: ‘Between the [obligatory] prayer and the next there is expiation for the minor sins committed as long as the grave sins are avoided’. Do you not see that he commanded them [believers] to perform the purificatory wash when in a state of greater impurity from indulging in lustful acts; ablutions when in a state of minor impurity; and upon engaging in the activities of this world during the hours of daylight and night [he commanded them] the five [ritual] prayers that remove the filth of the five senses that accumulates in the soul as a result. For each is [commanded] that which corresponds to it and that is why in the face of the estrangement of being separated througout the week and the darkness of being solely concerned relentlessly with [their daily] activities and means of livelihood as well as [their] corporeal garments and ego-centric pleasures, one day has been assigned for congregational worship when the orientation is towards the shedding of the estrangement of separation by the intimacy of the coming together so that there occurs love and intimacy between them and the darkness of being distracted by the affairs of this world and the turning away from the Truth disappear by the light of worship and the turning towards [God] and they become illumined.

[And We made it an exemplary punishment for all the former times and for the latter, and an admonition to such as who fear.]

Thus for the Jews was assigned the first day of the week on account of their being the people of the origin and the manifest, and for the Christians the following [day] as they are the people of the final return, the spiritual and the hidden who relative to us come after the origin and the manifest; while for the Muslims [was assigned] the last [day of the week] which is Friday because at the end of time they would be the people of the sealing [final] prophethood and the all-comprehensive universal unity. If Saturday is taken to be the last day, according to what has been transmitted, that it is the seventh [day], then in relation to God the Truth, that is because it constitutes the world of the senses to which was made the call of the Jews, being the last of the worlds; then the world of the intellect to which was made the call of the Christians is the first [of these worlds], while Friday is the day of union and the sealing: whoever does not take into account these conventions and observances in the first place the light of his preparedness disappears and is transfigured in the way that the people of the Sabbath were transfigured because of the interdiction concerning fishing [symbolising], that is, the securing and acquisition of ego-centric shares on the Saturday. They connived regarding it by creating a pool on the seashore in which the fish would be trapped [on the Saturday] and they would fish them out on Sunday. In other words, throughout the days of the week they would store up from the waters of the sea of primordial matter (hayūla) physical mass in the pools of their homes gathering thereby a variety of foods and drinks, pleasures and distractions so that there accumulated for them ego-centric shares on the day of the Sabbath what sufficed them for the remaining days of the week during which they would be free to engage in livelihoods, artisanship and trades, as is the custom of the Jews and certain cunning Muslims to this day in some communities, so that most of their wicked dealings take place therein. That was their practice with regard to the Sabbath and this proves that all of their moments of presence are directed towards the concerns of this world and the pursuit of the shares of the soul and desire. You see this today: a Muslim’s physical form may be engaged in prayer in a mosque while his heart is in the middle of a transaction in the marketplace, so much so that some of them say: ‘my accounts register is my prayer’, in other words, as soon as I am finished with my this-worldly activities [ready] for prayer my heart begins to peruse my transactions, what I owe others and what others owe me. That necessarily results in a sliding down from the upper human world to the nether animal horizon, being the import of His words: and We said to them, ‘Be apes, in other words, similar to human beings in form without being [humans] as such, despised!’, removed and banished. Transfiguration in fact is undeniably true in this world and in the Hereafter. Several verses and reports mention it, such as His statement, exalted be He: And some of whom He has turned into apes and swine [Q. 5:60]. It has been reported from him [the Prophet] that he said, ‘Transfiguration is of 13 kinds …’, and proceeded to enumerate them and illustrated their [evil] deeds, their acts of disobedience and the reasons for their transfiguration. In sum, when the characteristic of a given animal predominates in a person and becomes deeply embedded in him so that it erases his preparedness and takes control of his natural disposition and becomes his essential form, like the water that issues from a sulphur spring, his nature becomes the nature of that animal, his soul the soul of that [animal] and so his spirit upon separation [from the body at death] is joined to a body that corresponds to his character whereupon his character becomes his [actual] form, but God knows best.

And when Moses said to his people, ‘God commands you to sacrifice a cow’, that is the animal soul, the sacrifice of which constitutes the suppression of its capricious nature, which is its lifeblood, and its being prevented from acts specific to her, by means of the knife blade of spiritual discipline; they said, ‘Do you take us in mockery?’, scorning us and thinking little of us so that we might obey you and become disposed to you, as was the case with Pharaoh: Thus did he persuade his people and they obeyed him [Q. 43:54]. He said, ‘I take refuge with God lest I should be one of the ignorant’: to scorn, to mock and to seek hegemony over [people] is are the acts of the ignorant.

They said, ‘Pray to your Lord for us, that He may make clear to us what she may be’, that is, ask your Lord for us, ‘What is it?’ He said, ‘He says she is a cow neither old, in other words, neither of old age such that its preparedness has disappeared and it is engrained in its convictions with its voraciousness for its habits, as with the Sufi after who after the age of 40 becomes [spiritually] ‘cold’; nor virgin, a youth, whose preparedness falls short of what is [spiritually] required of her and who finds it difficult to bear spiritual discipline, subjugated as she is by the natural powers and her own power; middling, halfway, between that, mentioned; [so do what you have been commanded’].

[They said, ‘Pray to your Lord for us, that He make clear to us what her colour may be’. He said, ‘He says she shall be a cow] golden, because the colour of the body is black, lacking as it is in luminosity in the first place; the colour of the vegetative soul is green because of the manifestation in it of luminosity, while the prevalence of black in it is on account of its inability to perceive; the colour of the heart is white because of its being disengaged from the body, its perceptive capability and the perfection of its luminosity. Necessarily then the colour of the animal soul in speechless animals is red because of the composite nature of the luminosity of its perception and the blackness of its attachment to the body, since ‘red’ is a colour between white and black and is composed of them both, albeit the black predominates; it [the soul] is yellow in human beings because the luminosity of its perception predominates by its adjacency to the heart, for yellow is red coloured by white; bright in colour, due to the purity of its preparedness and the radiance of the beam of the heart’s light upon it; gladdening to beholders’, because of the strength of its preparedness and its radiance. The ‘beholders’ are the perfect individuals who look upon preparednesses because of their obligatory love for the prepared who are able to see and their tasting in their presence.

[They said, ‘Pray to your Lord for us, that He make clear to us what she may be;] the cows are all alike to us, because of the multiplicity of cows with such descriptions, that is, the multipicity of the kinds of prepared individuals; but not every prepared one is a seeker, for, as they say, not every nature accepts and not every accepting one is a seeker and not every seeker is patient and not every patient one is a finder; and if God wills, we shall then be guided’, to the sacrifice of this cow. Their saying ‘if God wills’ is evidence of their preparedness, knowing as they do that affairs are [always] dependent upon the will of God and facilitated by His granting of success; that is why the Messenger of God said, ‘Had they not made it conditional [upon God’s will], they would not have found her for all eternity’.

[He said, ‘He says she shall be a cow] not broken, made submissive and pliant to the command of the Law, to plough the earth, the earth of preparedness with righteous deeds and acts of worship, or to water the tillage, the tillage of gnoses and wisdoms that reside therein potentially by exhausting the waters of acquired sciences and piercing reflections, since a cow of this kind does not need to be sacrificed; one handed over, its owners had left it to graze without being shepherded by exotericisms (rusūm), habits, laws and manners; with no blemish on her’, that is, it does not have any convictions or dogma engrained in it for not being suitable for sacrifice. [They said, ‘Now] you have brought the truth’, firm [truth] illustrating the prepared one who yearns and seeks perfection] and so they sacrificed her, even though they very nearly did not, because of their many questions, exaggerations and probing in the search and scrutiny of her state, and [because of] their superfluous talk in the attempt to seek clarification regarding her, all of which proves how the soul refuses to submit quickly and refrain from spiritual discipline and the prevalence upon it of curiosity: their difficulty in [finding] what they sought and their procrastination regarding it is because of that. That is why the Messenger of God said: ‘Had they seized the nearest cow and sacrificed them it would have sufficed them, but they made it more difficult and so God made it more difficult for them. In other words, had they not been so obstrusive in seeking her out and asking [about her] what they sought would not have been so difficult for them on account of the strength of their acceptance and their will: the one who is compliant is easy to lead. The Prophet forbade excessive questioning, saying ‘Verily too much questioning destroyed those before you’. God, exalted be He, says: do not ask about things, which if disclosed to you, would trouble you [Q. 5:101]. The story of this is that a calf with that description was born to an old man from among the Children of Israel who had an infant son. He brought it to his old wife and told her that it would be this infant’s and that she should let it graze freely until he comes of age, that perhaps it might be of benefit to him. When this incident took place and the Children of Israel had been seeking out the cow for forty years, the old woman heard about it and informed her son, who had now grown up, about what his father had said. So he went to the field and found her there and took it. They then began to bargain with him over her, but the old woman forbade him from selling her until they paid her weight in gold: the old man represents the spirit, the old woman corporeal nature, his infant son the intellect which issues from the spirit; the slaughtered young man is the heart. The old man of the spirit handed over the calf of the soul to the old woman of nature so that it would graze in the grazing field of natural pleasures until such time as it had grown, that perhaps the infant of the intellect might profit from it upon coming of age by the extraction of intelligibles from their sensory forms and the use of reflection that constitutes one of its faculties in the acquisition of rational sciences, which is what he [the young man] brought from the grazing field. The forty-year endeavour of the Children of Israel is an allusion to the journeying to God with deeds, manners and the adoption of the character traits until the time for the true coming of age and the disengagement of the heart arrives, as God says: when he is mature and reaches forty years [Q. 46:15]. Their bargaining over her [the cow] is an allusion to the quest of the spiritual powers that are illumined by the light of the guidance of the Law and [by] the will, and the extraction of these [spiritual powers] from an intellect blemished by illusion and the enslavement of these [powers] by the intellect by means of analogical intelligibles and the subjugation of these through reflective processes, and their being veiled from the light of the guidance of the Law by means of rational analogies and their not being adorned by matters of the Law: that is what necessarily caused their officious questioning, their delaying and procrastination in fulfilling [God’s demand]. The old woman’s prohibition [to her son] is nature’s resistance to comply with the Law and the intellect’s conforming to that [resistance], since the intellect takes the side of nature far more into consideration than it does the Law when it comes to one’s best interests in terms of [securing one’s] livelihood, with the improved lifestyle, empowerment and enrichment that it brings for it. Selling the cow for the equivalent of her weight in gold is an allusion to its being adorned, after its sacrifice and skinning, with the beneficial sciences of the Law, the intellectual moral [sciences] and the secondary stipulations of religion so that her form is subsumed by these [sciences], [the form] which conforms to the intellect and nature and benefits both of these when they employ her for the purpose of securing the welfare of livelihood, natural desiderata and the intellectual and practical pursuits sanctioned by the Law as being wholesome, as well as what is permissible behaviour and various kinds of dispensations for all forms of enjoyment once perfection and complete wayfaring have been achieved.

And when you killed a living soul, and disputed thereon, an allusion to the elucidation of the reason behind the command to sacrifice a cow, which is that a rich old man from among the Children of Israel had a son, a young man, and he was killed by two of his paternal cousins, or others as well, who coveted the inheritance he would have received from his father. They dumped him on the road somewhere between [the dwelling-places of] the [twelve] tribes of the Children of Israel and each denied his murder. The command then came to sacrifice a cow and strike him with parts of her to bring him back to life so that he might inform [them] of his murderer. The young man then is the heart and the son of the spirit who was rich through the wealth of gnoses and wisdoms; his murder was a denial to him of his true life and the removal from him of true love which was his life after being captured by the two faculties of lust and wrath, namely, his two cousins — the animal soul or the totality of its powers. For the spirit and the soul are brothers by virtue of their effusion and birth from the same father, the active intellect, referred to as the Holy Spirit, [if understood] by analogy with what the ḥadīth states: ‘Be kind to your aunt, the date-palm, for it was created from the surplus of Adam’s clay’. The animal soul is the aunt of the perfect vegetative soul, if this [latter] is taken to be the aunt of the human soul. They slew him because they coveted the use of the rational meanings and wisdoms — that which constituted his inheritance from his father — to actualise their demands, their perfections and their pleasures by all manner of tricks, strategem and the concocting of ideas. They dumped him on the roads of spiritual and natural powers between where they lie. Their denial to one another of his murder was [the attempt] to transfer every faculty that produces corruption and sin to the other, and [to transfer] righteousness and innocence to itself, because of the mutual struggling and contending [of these powers] with regard to their acts and their pleasures, and [because of] the fact that each of these is veiled behind what suits it and [veiled] from what suits another, as well its deeming its own as righteous while that of its counterpart as corrupt; and God disclosed what you were hiding, of the light of the heart and its life by your capture of it.

So We said, ‘Smite him with part of it’, with its tail or its tongue, according to what is recounted in the story, so that he might come back to life and inform you of the [identity of his] killer. The smiting [of him] with the tail is alludes to rendering the soul dead while keeping alive its weakest and last faculties and that aspect [of it] that adjoins the vegetative soul and constitutes a link with it, such as the sense of touch, for example, and all of the external senses, namely, its [the cow’s] tail. The smiting [of the dead man] with the tongue alludes to the rectification of its character traits and its faculties, while keeping alive its [faculty of] reflection, namely, its tongue. Both of these [smitings] represent two paths: [the first is] the path of spiritual discipline and the mortification of wrath and lust, as is the way of the Sufi, [a path] which is more befitting of those powerful criminal souls of conquest and transgression’ [the second is] the path of securing and rectifying character traits, which is the way of the scholars and the sages and which is more befitting of those weak souls and those that are pure and easily-led. They smote him and he rose, the blood gushing forth from his veins, and he informed them of [the identity of] his killers, in other words, he became alive subsisting through true life while the traces of the killing were on him because of his attachment to the body and his being polluted by his demands according to necessity. And he came to know the state of the corporeal powers in preventing him from perceiving and their veiling of him from his light. Thus God brings to life the dead, in other words, in the manner of that tremendous bringing back to life does God bring to life those who are dead through their ignorance of true practical life; and He shows you [His signs], His proofs and the signs of His attributes, so that you might understand.

Then your hearts became hardened [thereafter], in other words, after the duration became prolonged and the languor of the extent of the interval with one variegation (talwīn) after another and one attitude after another, your hearts became hardened because of the frequency with which you pursue [this-worldly] matters, corporeal pleasures and being surrounded by ego-centric attributes; and they are like stones, that are unaffected by the engravings of knowledge, or, something, even yet harder, than that, such as iron, for example. He then illustrates how stones are more malleable than these [hearts of theirs], since the state of these [stones] are limited to [one of] the three aspects mentioned. This means that hearts are of four [kinds]: a heart that is illumined by the divine light, obliterated by it, ploughing deep into the sea of knowledge, ensconced in it, so that there gushes forth from it rivers of knowledge, whoever drinks from them lives forever, as is the case with the hearts of the people of God, the foremost [towards God], and this is what is alluded to in His statement: for there are stones from which rivers come gushing; [or] a heart that drank from knowledge, learnt and absorbed [it] and people profited from it, as is the case with the hearts of the scholars deeply-rooted in knowledge, and this is what is alluded to in His statement: and others split so that water issues from them; [or] a heart that is humble, pliant, submits and is obedient, as is the case with the hearts of [God’s] servants and pious renouncers from among the Muslims, and this is what is alluded to in His statement: and others come down in fear of God; . The lowest of its states is that it comes down in fear of God, that is to say, to obey what God has commanded in the way of inclining to the centre compliantly. There then remains that heart which is not affected at all by knowledge and has not been made more pliant by fear, rejecting guidance, arrogant, filled with caprice, and rebellious, such that there is no substance that resembles it, since all [substances] receive what God has commanded: consider how even iron can be made malleable when required. The Prophet said: ‘The similitude of the guidance and knowledge with which God has sent me is as the abundant rain that falls on a land, of which one part is wholesome and receives the water and produces plentiful herbage and grass, while another part is subservient, retains the water by which God makes the people profit so that they drink, water and sow; another part on which it falls is a plain that does neither retains water nor produces herbage: that is the similitude of the one who acquires an understanding of religion, learns and acts [by it], and the similitude of the one who does nothing of the sort, rejecting the guidance of God that I have been sent with. Thus did he [the Prophet] illustrate the last three [kinds of] hearts, while the first of the four is the Muḥammadan heart. And God is not heedless of what you do: a threat for those with hardened hearts, meaning that God is looking [over them] and veils them from His light and abandons them in their darknesses. The verses that you recite constitute the exoteric aspect of this [interpretation given]; however, [symbolic] interpretation is more appropriate.^{1An emendation to the Arabic of most printed editions is proposed here, since as it stands the Arabic makes little sense and there seems to be a typographical error. Read: wa’l-āyāt allatī tatlūhā ẓāhiruhu wa’l-taʾwīl awlā (note the transfer of the misplaced definite article in the last two words). This is supported by the fact that Kāshānī has devoted a few passages to the symbolic interpretation of the nature of ‘stones’ as described by God in an exoteric sense: thus according to Kāshānī, the only way to really understand the Qurʾānic passage is to apply intepretation (al-taʾwīl awlā).}

Are you then so eager [that they should believe you], that they should affirm [His] Oneness by affirming the Unity of the attributes [just] because you have been guided, seeing there is a party of them [that heard God’s word, and then tampered with it], [a party them] that accepted God’s attributes then distorted these by attributing them to themselves, after they had comprehended it, that is, [after] they had acted in accordance with the affirming of the unity of the attributes and what they discovered through eyewitness, even though they knew, that those attributes belonged to God, but their souls claimed these for themselves in an [impious] act of partnership [with God] when, at the point of their overwhelming of the heart, the intellect is heedless, and that is because their affirmation of the Oneness is not by any natural disposition or [spiritual] state but out of knowledge: so woe to those who write the Scripture with their hands [Q. 2:79], in other words, woe to the one in whom there subsists the remains of the attributes of the soul while he is unaware of them, or he is aware but then resorts to trickery or does not pay attention to them, so that he does and says through his own soul and its attributes and then imputes it to God in order to earn a share of the shares of the soul, nay indeed, he specifies that statement or deed and its attribution to God as a complete share for it [his soul]: but what a sin [this is] greater than which there is no [other] sin! The first three verses can be interpreted in another sense, based on correspondence (taṭbīq),^{1This method of interpretation, of finding correspondences between Qurʾānic narrative and spiritual psychology is Kāshānī’s principal hermeneutical approach, one which he applies consistently and persistently throughout his commentary; see Sands 2006, 77.} so that one reads: Are you then so eager, O spiritual powers that these ego-centric powers should believe obediently because of your guidance, even as a party of them, such as [the faculties of] estimation and imagination, hear the words of God, that is to say, they seize the meanings that issue forth from God onto the heart and distort them by means of recounting [them] ^{2Cf. Chittick 1989, 268 on ḥikāya.} and many transferals and making these [meanings] partial and assigning them the laws pertaining to particulars, as in the context of dreams or incidents,^{3‘Incidents’ constitute true dreams or visions, which in the case of the Prophet heralded his prophethood (cf. Chittick 1989, 404 n.24).} and that, after they had understood these [words of God], that is to say, [after] they had perceived them in their state, even as they were aware of the distortion of these [words] as they are transferred into concomitants, similars and contraries.

But when they encounter you upon directing themselves to you and receiving your objects of perception at the moment of your presence and when these [meanings] stand by your side or are ascending, they yield and accept the truth. [And when they meet those who believe, they say, ‘We believe’]

but when they go in private one to another, at moments of forgetfulness they prevent one another from casting [onto others] what God has disclosed to them in the way of objects of perception that may be sensory, imaginal or estimative, so that they might compose therefrom arguments and dispute with them thereby in the Spiritual Presence before their Lord; [they say: ‘Do you speak to them of what God has disclosed to you, so that they may thereby dispute with you before your Lord? Have you no understanding?’].

Know they not that God knows what they keep secret, from you of their objects of perception, and what they proclaim, so that He apprises you of this and assists you [to victory] over them?

And there are some of them, namely, the non-perceiving natural powers and the external senses [that are illiterate], not knowing the Scripture, the Book of intelligible meanings, but only as desires, of their pleasures and lusts, uncertain of how the consequences of these will be sealed or their harmfulness for the path of perfection, nay indeed they conjecture that these will profit them and are good for them; [and mere conjectures].

[So woe to those who write the Scripture with their hands then say, ‘This is from God’ that they may sell it for a small price. So woe to them for what their hands have written, and woe to them for their earnings.]

And they say, ‘the Fire shall not touch us, to the end [of the verse: save a number of days’. Say: ‘Have you taken with God a covenant? God will not fail in His covenant, or say you against God what you do not know?] They believed that the duration of punishment was commensurate with the duration in which the sin was being committed, not knowing that if the sin constituted a corrupt belief fixed within the soul and a condition deeply-rooted in it so that it becomes a natural disposition, a form of its essence, then it [the sin] becomes a cause for eternal punishment, which is the very meaning of His statement:

[Not so; whoever earns evil and] is encompassed by his transgression, that is, it has complete mastery of him absorbing him as black absorbs [the form of] a dress; were it otherwise, obedience would not have been a cause also for eternal reward [— those are the inhabitants of the Fire, therein abiding].

[And those who believe and perform righteous deeds — those are the inhabitants of Paradise, therein abiding].

And when We made a covenant with the Children of Israel, We made a covenant with them concerning the affirmation of [Our] Oneness, the requirement of which is the observing of the Lordly Presence and the witnessing of its self-disclosures in their loci, as well as the fulfilment of what is due to it in accordance with what is manifested of its descriptions. The first to bear the manifestation and vestiges of the lordly attributes outwardly and in the world of the witnessing are the parents on account of their being the source of lineage, their rearing and their affection, all of which are the vestiges of the Existentiator, the Merciful Lord within them for that [child]. For, goodness towards them must follow from the worship of God in accordance with the manifestation of that [goodness] within them as loci [of that manifestation]; then come the near of kin because of the manifestation of mutual kindness and divine mercy within them in relation to that [child]; then come the orphans because of the fact that His guardianship and preservation is singled out for them above all others, since He is the Guardian of those who have none; then come the needy because of the fact that He takes upon Himself to look after them and provide for them without any intermediary other than Him; then come all other people because of the mutual mercifulness between them that which is the shadow of [the Divine] Mercifulness [on earth]. Thus the goodness enjoined in this verse, in all of its degrees and various levels of merit, is the specification of worship for God coupled with the witnessing of His attributes in their loci of manifestation and the fulfilment of what is due to the self-disclosures and rulings of these [attributes].

[‘You shall not worship any other than God; and to be good to parents, and the near of kin; and to orphans, and to the needy; and speak well to men; and observe prayer and pay the alms’, then you turned away; all but a few of you, rejecting]

And when We made a covenant with you: ‘Do not shed your own blood, by desiring the abodes and attributes of the soul and by inclining towards its caprices and natures, while abandoning your true life and the specific qualities of your acts for the sake of securing its goals and pleasures; neither expel your selves, your essences since the essence is represented by the self, from your habitations’, that is, from your spiritual abodes and the holy gardens. Then you confirmed it, by accepting that [covenant], and you bore witness, to it through your initial states of preparedness and your primordial intellects.

Then there you are those very [ones], [those] who have fallen from the primordial nature and who are veiled from the original light of preparedness, killing yourselves, as a result of your succumbing to temptation and pursuit of caprice, and expelling a party of you from their habitations, their original eternal domiciles by tempting them, misguiding them and inciting them to the commission of acts of disobedience and the pursuit of caprice, conspiring against them, assisting one another against them, in sin, by committing lewd acts and acts of disobedience so that they might see you and follow suit, and enmity, and overbearingness against people so that your insolence might pass on to them, and in your binding them to the despicable acts of the bestial and predatorial faculties and your inciting them to such [acts] and your adorning these for them, as is the custom of the heretics among the Muslims of those who permit the impermissible and allege that they affirm the Oneness of God; and if they come to you as captives, shackled by the consequences of acts they have committed and the disgrace of their vile acts, you become regretful; and their intellect and the intellect of the offspring of their kind rebukes them for the shame and ignominy that has befallen them; you ransom them, with the words of wisdom, admonition and counsel that prove that the highest pleasures are the intellectual and spiritual ones; and that the consequence of following caprice and the soul and Satan is an evil one, and that to act like beasts and wild animals is reprehensible and base, so that they might then awaken by these [words] and rid themselves of the fetters of caprice for a little while, as we observe in the case of the foreign infidels who allege knowledge of God’s Oneness, gnosis and wisdom together with those who follow them in this day and age; [yet their expulsion was forbidden you].

What, do you believe in part of the Book, that is, the Book of the Intellect and the Law in word and [by your own] affirmation, so that you affirm It and believe in its truth, namely, that the pursuit of caprice and the soul is reprehensible and necessarily brings about perdition, destruction and loss; and disbelieve in part, in deed and in [your failure to] act by it, so that you do not refrain from what It has prohibited you, namely, your deeming permissible and wholesome the violation of what is sancrosanct and that which is forbidden? What then shall be the requital of those of you who do that, but degradation, disgrace and humiliation, in the life of this world; and on the Day of Resurrection, that is, upon separation, which is the minor resurrection, to be returned to the most terrible of chastisement, which is their chastisement through those dark miens that are deeply-embedded within their souls and their being consumed by the fires of these [miens], or [chastisement] by their being totally transfigured from their forms and the doubling of their affliction? And God is not heedless of what you do, of your deeds, for He has kept count of them and registered them within your souls and recorded them against you, as He says: The Day when God will raise them, He will then inform them of what they did. God has kept count of it, while they forgot it [Q. 58:6].

[Those are the ones who have purchased the life of this world at the price of the Hereafter — for them the punishment shall not be lightened, neither shall they be helped.]

And verily We gave Moses the Scripture, to where He says as though they did not know [Q. 2:101] …^{1Kāshānī’s commentary resumes at verse 101 further below.}

[and after him We sent successive messengers, and We gave Jesus son of Mary the clear proofs, and We confirmed him with the Holy Spirit, and whenever there came to you a messenger, with what your souls did not desire, you became arrogant; and some, you called liars, and some you slay?

And they say: ‘Our hearts are encased’. Nay, but God has cursed them for their unbelief; and little will they believe.

When there came to them a Book from God, confirming what was with them — and they formerly prayed for victory over the disbelievers; but when there came to them what they recognised, they disbelieved in it; and the curse of God is on the disbelievers.

Evil is that for which they sell their souls; that they disbelieve in that which God has revealed, grudging that God should reveal of His bounty to whomever He will of His servants; and they were laden with anger upon anger; and for the disbelievers there shall be a humiliating chastisement.

And when it was said to them, ‘Believe in what God has revealed’, they said, ‘We believe in what was revealed to us’, and they disbelieve in what is beyond that; yet it is the truth, confirming what is with them. Say: ‘Why then were you slaying the prophets of God formerly, if you were believers?’

And Moses came to you with clear proofs; then you took to yourselves the calf after him, and you were evildoers.

And when We made a covenant with you, and raised over you the Mount, ‘Take forcefully what We have given you, and listen’, they said, ‘We hear and disobey’; and they were made to drink the calf in their hearts on account of their unbelief. Say: ‘Evil is that which your belief enjoins on you, if you are believers’.

Say: ‘If the Abode of the Hereafter with God is purely yours, and not for other people, then long for death — if you speak truly’.

But they will never long for it, because of that which their own hands have sent before them. God knows the evildoers.

And you shall find them the people most covetous of life, and the idolaters; any one of them would love that he might be given life for a thousand years; yet, his being given life shall not budge him from the chastisement. God sees what they do.

Say: ‘Whoever is an enemy to Gabriel — he it was that brought it down upon your heart by the leave of God, confirming what was before it, a guidance, and good tidings for the believers.

Whoever is an enemy to God and His angels and His messengers, and Gabriel and Michael — then surely God is an enemy to the disbelievers’.

And We have revealed to you clear proofs; and none disbelieves in them except the wicked.

Why, whenever they make a covenant, does a party of them reject it? Nay, but most of them are disbelievers.

When there came to them a messenger from God, confirming what was with them, a party of them who were given the Scripture have cast away the Scripture of God behind their backs, as though they did not know.

This is manifest [in meaning] and can be known from what has already been [mentioned in previous verses]. The exoteric sense is that Gabriel is the active intellect, Michael is the spirit of the sixth celestial sphere, from his intellect emanates the universal vegetative soul charged with the provision of [God’s] servants; Isrāfīl is the spirit of the fourth celestial sphere, from his intellect emanates the universal animal soul that is in charge of the animals; ʿIzrāʾīl is the spirit of the seventh celestial sphere and he is in charge of all human spirits which he seizes by himself or through intermediaries who are his assistants whereupon he hands them over to God, exalted be He.

And they follow, that is, the Jews and the spiritual faculties follow, what the devils, the devils of mankind who are the evil disobedient powerful rebels and the devils of the jinn who are the illusions, images and imaginations that are veiled from the light of the spirit that disobeys the command of the intellect and rebels against obedience of the heart, used to relate in, the time of, Solomon’s kingdom: [Solomon] the prophet, or Solomon of the spirit, from the books and sciences of sorcery, claiming that this was the knowledge by which Solomon seized kingship and [by which] he subjugated to his service those jinn, humans and birds, as well as the science of trickery, magic, illusions, play-acting and sophistry. Solomon did not disbelieve, by attributing the effects [of such devices] to any other than God, since sorcery is disbelief and a veiling from the effect-creation of God by the attribution of effect to other than Him; but the devils disbelieved, they became veiled and were not aware that there is no Effect other than God; teaching the people sorcery; and that which was revealed to the two angels, namely, the speculative intellect and the practical [one] that incline to the soul, degenerates of the well of nature because of their orientation to it through the soul’s enticement of them to it, in Babylon, of the breast [— Hārūt and Mārūt], chastised the two of them by the narrowness of the place between the moistures of the substrata and the fumes of the fires of lust in the way of sciences and deeds in the form of trickery, cartomancy and talismans according to both interpretations. They taught not any man, without them saying, ‘We are but a temptation, a test and a trial from God of the power of luminosity and the subsistence of the spiritual [angelic] world within the two [angels], so that they might be alerted to their state by the light of the intellect; do not disbelieve’, by employing such science for corrupt purposes and [to commit] what is prohibited and attributing to it the effects. From them they learned how they might cause division between [a man and his wife], [between] the heart and the soul and between the spirit and the soul and the sullying of the heart; yet they did not harm any man thereby save by the leave of God, in other words, except if God willed that he be harmed after that act and does what He wishes so that this ends up being a further trial for the sorcerer and a respite to him in his disbelief and his being veiled since he considers that to be the effects of his sorcery [and not from God]; and they learned what harmed them, by increasing their [state of] being veiled and the intensity of deviation and caprice; and did not profit them, by the lifting of the veil upon their seeing that this was a trial from God and their seeking refuge with God so that He might protect them from its evil. And surely they knew well that whoever buys it, he shall have no share in the Hereafter, that is, [he shall have no] portion for his total concern with the soul and caprice, and his use of that to earn the [temporary] enjoyments and transient things of this world. [evil then would have been that they sold themselves for, if they had but known].

Yet if only they had believed, in seeing the acts as issuing from God, and been fearful, of associating others with God by attributing effects to other than Him, verily, a reward, everlasting and being, from God, from the spiritual lights and the opening bestowals and the states of the heart and the divine cognitions, would have been better, if they had but known.

O you who believe, do not say, ‘Observe us’; but say, ‘Regard us’, and give ear; and for disbelievers awaits a painful chastisement.

Those disbelievers of the People of the Scripture and the idolaters, do not wish that any good should be revealed to you from your Lord, but God singles out for His mercy, whom He will; God is of bounty abounding.

And whatever verse We abrogate, by invalidating its ruling but retaining it in form, or postpone, and take it away from your heart by removing its formulation and signification, or its formulation but not its signification, such as the stoning verse,^{1This is a case where a Qurʾānic revelation no longer forms part of the textus receptus, the redacted ʿUthmānic text, but whose ruling is still applied: see R. Peters, ‘zinā’, EI2, XI, 508 and Dmitry V. Frolov, ‘stoning’, EQ, V, 129.} We bring [in place] a better one, that is, [We bring in place of it] what is more beneficial than it in that context or is equivalent to it in terms of good or benefit. Know that the laws fixed in the Preserved Tablet are either specific or general: the specific are either specific to individuals or specific to a time-period. If it is then revealed to the heart of the Messenger, the one specific to individuals remains as long as those individuals remain, while the one that is specific to certain periods of time is abrogated and removed upon the passing of that period of time, be it brief as in the case of the abrogated verses of the Qurʾān, or lengthy as in the case of the aforesaid stipulations of the Law. None of that contradicts their being fixed in the Tablet since that is their status in it. As for the general ones, these remain for all time, such as human speech or his upright posture, for example; [or the like of it; do you not know that God has power over all things?]

Do you not know that to God belongs the kingdom of the heavens and the earth, that is to say, to Him belongs the kingdom of the heavens of the world of spirits and the earth of bodies, and He disposes of them by the hand of His power, nay indeed, by His totality, the hidden and the manifest of it, so that there remains no one other than Him to assist you [to victory] and to be your Guardian: [and that you have none, besides God, neither protector, nor helper?]

Or do you desire to demand of your Messenger, beforehand sensory religious pleasures and vile lusts of the soul, as was demanded of Moses aforetime? Whoever exchanges [belief for unbelief], light for darkness, has surely strayed from the even way.

[Many of the People of the Scripture long that they might make you disbelievers, after you have believed, from the envy of their own souls, after the truth has become clear to them; yet pardon and be forgiving till God brings His command; truly God has power over all things.

And perform the prayer, and pay the alms; whatever good you shall offer for your own souls, you shall find it with God; assuredly God sees what you do].

And they say, ‘None shall enter the Garden except those who are Jews or Christians’, that is to say, the Jews said that none shall enter the Garden promised to them in the covenant, that is, the exoteric Garden and the world of the kingdom, which is the Garden of the acts and the Garden of the soul, except those who were Jews; while the Christians said that none shall enter the Garden promised to them in [their] covenant, that is, the esoteric Garden and the world of the angelic realm, which is the Garden of the attributes and the Garden of the heart except those who were Christians, which is why Jesus, peace be upon him, said, when calling them to their Garden: ‘Whoever is not born again and his call is not directed towards the heaven, that is, the spiritual heaven, shall not probe the angelic realm of the heavens’. Such are their desires, that is, the utmost extent of their demands, at the limits of which they stopped, veiling themselves therewith from what is above them. Say, ‘Produce your proof, that is, the evidence that demonstrates all except you are denied entry into your Garden, if you speak truth’, concerning what you claim, nay, all evidence points to the contrary of what you claim.

Nay, but, whoever submits his purpose, that is, his essence as it exists with the totality of its concomitants and accidents, to God, through essential affirmation of the Oneness upon total effacement and annihilation in the Essence of God, being virtuous, that is, upright in his states through subsistence after annihilation, witnessing his Lord in his actions, returning from the essential witnessing to the station of virtue of attributes which is to witness the place of uprightness and worship through the Existence of the Truth and not through the ego-centric soul, his reward is with his Lord, namely, the Garden that you have mentioned but purer and more delightful because it is specific to the station [divine] withness (ʿindiyya),^{1On this concept, see Chittick 1989: 301-2.} that is, the witnessing which they have been veiled from, and no fear shall befall them, neither shall they grieve, that is, and more in addition to the Garden that will be yours and that is that they shall not fear the veiling of the essence and the subsistence of the soul that is the concomitant of the existence of what remains of them, and that they shall not grieve for what has eluded them because of their having stopped at the veil of the Garden of the acts and the attributes and the delighting in it and the resting therein and being there forever instead of the presential vision of the beauty of the Essence, for even if they abandon it out of yearning for the self-disclosure of the Essence, they shall still have it [that Garden], their lowest station being below the Garden of the Essence.

The Jews say, ‘The Christians have nothing’, because of their being veiled by their religion from their [the Jews’] religion; likewise say the Christians because of their being veiled by the esoteric aspect from the exoteric one, as the Jews are veiled from the esoteric aspect by the exoteric one, which is the situation today with the various schools of Islam; and the Christians say, ‘The Jews stand on nothing’; yet they recite the Scripture, which contains what would guide them to the removal of that veil and seeing the truth of every religion and [every] dogmatic school, for the truth of the people of that religion or school is not false since they adhere to those beliefs: otherwise what is the difference between them and those who have neither knowledge nor scripture, as is the case with the polytheists, for what these [latter] say is the same as what the former say, nay they [the polytheists] are less blameworthy since there is only the proof of the intellect against them, while the others have both the proofs of the intellect and those of the Law. [Thus, the ignorant say the like of what these say]; God shall decide between them regarding their differences, [He shall decide between them] with the truth concerning their differences, on the Day of, the event of the major, Resurrection, and the manifestation of the Essential Unity upon the emergence of the Messiah (al-Mahdī), peace be upon him. According to ḥadīth it is that God will disclose Himself to His servants in the form of their belief and they will know Him, whereupon He will transform Himself from that form to another form and they will not know Him: thereupon they will all be misguided and veiled, except what God wills; and He is the One whose Oneness is affirmed but who is not tied to the form of His belief.

And who is more unjust, that is, who receives less of what is due to him and is worse off in his share, than he who bars God’s places of worship, that is, the prostration places of God, namely, the hearts, in which He can be known and where the prostration is performed through essence-annihilation, so that His Name be not invoked in them, [His] special [Name] that is the Greatest Name for He only discloses Himself with that Name in the heart, this being the self-disclosure of the Essence with the totality of the attributes; or It is that Name of His that is specified by every one of these [attributes], in other words, the perfection that befits the preparedness which It entails; and strives to ruin them?, to sully them with cold fanaticism and with the triumph and mastery of desires over them and the prevention of the folk of these [mosques] who possess the preparedness above such [desires] by means of confusion and turmoil and the incitement of seditions that are the concomitants of the mutual attraction between the faculties of the soul and satanic motives and illusions; such men might never enter them, save in fear, [nor] arrive at them, [save in fear], in other words, [save] broken by the self-disclosure of the Truth in them; for them in this world there is degradation, that is, disgrace and humiliation because of the manifestation of the falsehood of their religion and their beliefs, which will be nullified by the religion of the Truth, and by their vanquishing and their distress and their having been overpowered; and in the Hereafter there shall be a mighty chastisement, which is that they will be veiled from the Truth by their [false] religion.

And to God belong[s] the east, that is, the realm of light and manifestation, which is the paradise of the Christians and their prayer direction, and is, in reality, His esoteric aspect; and the west, that is, the realm of darkness and concealment, which is the Paradise of the Jews and their prayer direction, and is, in reality, His exoteric aspect whithersoever you turn, that is, in whichever direction you turn outwardly and inwardly, then there is the face of God, that is, the Essence of God self-disclosed through the totality of His attributes. Or [it means] to God belongs the illumination of your hearts by [His[ manifestation in them and [His] self-disclosure to them through the attribute of His beauty in the state of your presential vision and your annihilation [therein]; and [that to God belongs] the alienation in them through His self-covering and His self-veiling in their [your hearts’] forms and essences, and through His self-concealment by the attribute of His majesty in the state of your subsistence after annihilation. Thus, in whichever direction you turn, then there is His face, with no thing there except Him alone. Lo! God is Embracing, of the totality of existence, comprehending all directions and existences, Knowing, of all knowledge and knowables.

And they say, ‘God has taken to Himself a son’, meaning that He brought into existence an existentiator independent by his own essence and specified to the exclusion of Him. Glory be to Him!, we declare His transcending of that any other than Him can be something, let along be similar to Him. Nay, to Him belongs all that is in the heavens and the earth, that is, to Him belong the world of spirits and bodies, being His esoteric and exoteric aspects [respectively], similar to when you say that He possesses essence, countenance and attributes and the like; all obey His will, existing by His existence, acting by His act, non-existing in their own essences: that is the ultimate in obedience and in fulfilling what is due to Him, since He is absolute existence, so that without Him nothing exists. Existences that are designated by His attributes and His names, distinguished as they are by their very entification [sc. being entities] — that which is a contingent and nonexistent quality — are not Him, if considered on the basis of reason — which would classify these as [having true] existence. For quiddity that has no existence is not a thing externally but, in terms of the intellect and intelligibles, constitutes His inner aspect (bāṭinuhu); in reality that [quiddity] is nothing but Him and so anything other than Him cannot exist to then be [His] son, in other words, a caused or created thing or whatever else you wish to call it.

Originator of the heavens and the earth, that is, originating His heavens and earth without there being any preceding substratum or period of time, nay, they are shadows of His essence and the origination point of His knowledge, illumined by His luminous name, existing by His external existence. Were it not for the aspect of contingency and rational consideration as per things known with certainty, their existences would not be [existences] in the first place, since without Him they are nothing. Thus they exist with Him not relatively [speaking] but through the verification of His existence and they cannot be other than Him through separation but by rational consideration, for on the basis of their being entities they are created things and on the basis of their reality they are true; and when He decrees a thing, that is, He rules that it be, He but says to it ‘Be’, and it is, in other words, all that is needed is the connection between that [thing] and His will and it comes into existence, without the intrusion of time or the mediation of a thing, nay, [it comes into existence] together [with His will]. That connection is His statement [‘Be’], for otherwise there would be no words and no sound.

And those, polytheists, without knowledge, of His Oneness, say, ‘Why does God not speak to us?; Why does a sign not come to us?’ So, spoke those before them, the like of what they say; their hearts are much alike, in terms of [their] ignorance of [His] Oneness and the words of God and His signs, since knowledge of these is a branch of the knowledge of [His] Oneness. Yet We have made clear [the signs], the proofs of Oneness and the modality of communion [with God], to a people who are certain.

We have sent you with the truth, a bearer of good tidings, and warner. You shall not be asked about the inhabitants of Hell-fire, that is to say, you will not be accountable for their being veiled and it is not your concern to save them from the darknesses of their veils, but your duty is to summon them [to religion] through good tidings and warnings.

[Never will the Jews be pleased with you, neither the Christians, not until you follow their creed,] Say: ‘God’s guidance is the true guidance’, that is to say, the path of Oneness that is specifically qualified by truth is the path and none other, as [Imam] ʿAlī [b. Abī Ṭālib], peace be upon him, said: ‘Right and left lead astray, only the middle path [in-between] is the [true] route’. And if you were to follow their whims, after the knowledge that has come to you, that is, the knowledge of Oneness and gnosis, you shall have against God neither friend, nor helper, because of the impossibility of there existing any other than Him.

[Those to whom We have given the Scripture, and who recite it with true recitation, they believe in it; and whoever disbelieves in it, they shall be the losers.

O Children of Israel, remember My favour wherewith I favoured you, and that I have preferred you over all the worlds.

And beware of a day when no soul shall for another be requited, and no compensation shall be accepted from it, nor any intercession shall benefit it, neither shall they be helped.]

And when his Lord tested Abraham with certain words, that is, with the levels of spiritual concepts such as the heart, mysteries, the spirit, the hidden, Oneness, the states and the stations that are used to articulate these levels, such as submission, reliance, satisfaction and the sciences of these [levels], and he fulfilled them, by wayfaring to God and in God up to annihilation. He said, ‘I am making you for the people a leader’, through subsistence after annihilation and the return from the Truth to creatures, to lead them and guide them how to wayfare to Me so that they follow your lead and become guided. Said he, ‘And of my seed?’, in other words, and also make some of my descendants leaders. He said, some of them could be evildoers and ‘My covenant shall not reach the evildoers’, that is, they shall not be My viceregents and I shall not promise leadership to evildoers.

And when We appointed the House, of the heart, to be a place of visitation, a place of return and a place of settlement, for the people, and a sanctuary, a place of security or a cause for security and safety for them in which they shall feel secure and at peace upon their arrival there from the dangers of the attributes of the soul and [from] the havoc of the destructive and corruptive faculties of nature, and [from] the conjurings of the satans of illusion and imagination and their seductions and devices. ‘Take to yourselves Abraham’s station, which is the station of the spirit and the station of friendship, as a place of prayer’, a place for true prayer which is the witnessing and the divine union and the friendship of the tasting; and We made a covenant with Abraham and Ishmael, ‘Purify My House, We commanded them to purify the House of the heart from the defilements of the conversations of the soul and the impurities of the evil whisperings of Satan and the filth of the motivations of caprice and the dirt of the attributes of the faculties, for those that shall go round it, that is, for the yearning wayfarers who go round the heart during their journey, and those that cleave to it, those who have arrived at the station of the heart through that reliance that is the affirmation of the unity of the acts, those who reside therein without the variegations of the soul that could drive [them] away from it, to those who bow, that is, those who have submitted, who have reached the station of the self-disclosure of the attributes and the perfect level of satisfaction, and those who prostrate themselves’, those annihilated in the Oneness.

And when Abraham said, ‘My Lord, make this, breast that is the sanctuary of the heart, a land secure, for its people from the domination of the attributes of the soul and the seizing accursed enemy [Satan] and the snatch of the jinn of the corporeal faculties, and provide its people with fruits, the fruits of the gnoses of the spirit or its wisdoms and lights, such of them as believe in God and the Last Day’, such of them as affirm the Oneness of God and know [the truth of] the final return. He said, ‘And whoever disbelieves, that is, whoever veils himself also from among those who have inhabited the breast but do not transgress its limits to rise to the station of the eye because of their being veiled by knowledge whose receptacle is the breast, to him I shall give a little enjoyment, of intelligible meanings and universal knowables that come down to them from the world of the spirit in the measure that suffices them to live by, then I shall compel him to the chastisement of the Fire, of privation and veiling — how evil a journey’s end!’, shall be their journey’s end chastised as they shall be by their defeciency and the pain of privation.

And when Abraham raised up the foundations of the House: it is said that the Kaʿba was brought down from the heaven at the time of Adam, having two doors, [one] to the east and [one] to the west. So Adam made the pilgrimage from India and was greeted [there] by [a host of] angels 40 parasangs deep. He performed circumambulations of the House and entered into it. It was then raised [back to the heaven] at the time of Noah’s flood, peace be upon him, and was then brought back down another time at the time of Abraham, may God’s blessings be upon him; he visited it [the Kaʿba] and raised up its foundations and [re-]made its two doors a single door. It is said that [Mount] Abū Qubays shook violently and became split off from the Black Stone, which was a white ruby from the rubies of Paradise that Gabriel had brought down; it had been hidden away for him [Abraham] from the time of the flood until the time of Abraham, peace be upon him, who then placed it in its place [in the Kaʿba]. It became black from the touch over time of menstruating women. Thus, its [the Kaʿba’s] coming down at the time of Adam is an allusion to the manifestation of the heart during his time by virtue of his being upon it [the heart]; its having two doors, a western and an eastern one is an allusion to the manifestation of the knowledge of the origin and the final return and the spiritual knowledge concerning the world of light and the world of darkness during his time but not knowledge of the Oneness. His [Adam’s] setting out to visit it from India is an allusion to his heading off, by virtue of engenderment and equilibrium, from the world of dark corporeal nature to the station of the heart. The reception [of him] by the angels is an allusion to the attachment of the animal and vegetative faculties to the body and the manifestation of the effects of these [faculties] in it before the the effects of the heart during the forty days in which his build was being engendered and his clay was fermenting; or [it is an allusion] to his heading off to journey and to wayfare from the world of the soul of darkness to the station of the heart, with the reception of the angels being his reception of the ego-centric and corporeal faculties by accepting obedience and the beautiful character traits and excellent natural disposition, becoming accustomed to them by moving between stations until his arrival at the station of the heart. His circumambulation of the House is an allusion to his arrival at the station of the heart and his wayfaring therein through variegation; his entry [into it] is an allusion to his becoming stable^{1On the importance and place of ‘stability’ (tamkīn), with reference to the heart, as a station, which according to Ibn ʿArabī is higher than ‘variegation’ (talwīn), see Chittick 1989:108.} and upright in it [the heart]; its being raised to the heaven at the time of the flood is an allusion to people’s being veiled by the overwhelming of caprice and the flood of ignorance during the time of Noah, peace be upon him, from the station of the heart; its remaining in the fourth heaven, that is, the Frequented House [cf. Q. 52:4] which is the heart of the world, and its coming down another time during the time of Abraham, peace be upon him, is an allusion to people’s becoming guided during his time to the station of heart through his guidance; Abraham’s raising of its foundations and assigning it a single door is an allusion to the heart’s receiving on account of his wayfaring, peace be upon him, from his station to the station of the spirit, that which constitutes the mystery; the rising of his levels and his arrival at the station of Oneness, given that he was the first to manifest affirmation of the Essential Oneness — as he himself said: Verily I have turned my face to Him Who originated the heavens and the earth, a ḥanīf, and I am not of those who associate [others with God] [Q. 6:79]. The Black Stone is an allusion to the Spirit; the violent shaking of Abū Qubays and its being rent from it is an allusion to his becoming manifest through spiritual discipline and the movement of the limbs of the body when employed in reflection and worship demanding to become manifest, which is why it was said to have been hidden in it [the mountain], that is, it was veiled by the body; the blackening of it [the Stone] on account of the frequent touch of menstruating women is an allusion to its become concealed and sullied by the ego-centric faculties’ overpowering and mastery of the heart and their blackening of the luminous face that adjoins the spirit; and Ishmael with him, he was also one who affirmed the Oneness because of his mention as a [syntactical] supplement [to Abraham] with regard to the raising of the House’s foundations. [‘Our Lord! Receive this from us. Truly You are the Hearing, the Knowing.]

Our Lord! And make us submissive to You, that is, do not assign us to our own selves so that we might submit by our selves, but [that] we should submit [to You] through You and by Your making; [and, of our seed, a community submissive to You; and show us our holy rites, and relent to us. Surely You are the Relenting, the Merciful.]

Our Lord! And send among them a messenger, namely, Muḥammad, may God’s blessings and peace be upon him, which is why he [Muḥammad] said: ‘I am [the answer to] the supplication of my father Abraham, and the good tidings of Jesus and the vision of my mother — for she had seen in her sleep that a light was shining forth from her that illumined for her the palaces of Syria; [one of them, who shall recite to them Your signs, and teach them the Book and Wisdom, and purify them; You are the Mighty, the Wise.]

Who therefore shrinks from the religion of Abraham, that is, the religion of the affirmation of [God’s] Oneness, except he who fools himself?, except he who veils himself totally from the light of the intellect, remaining in the station of his soul’s darkness, in other words, being foolish in himself (safiha nafsan), [if read syntactically] as a specification, or safiha fī nafsihi, with the removal of the genitive-case preposition [fī].^{1Some early grammarians understood the phrase as safiha fī nafsihi, but because the preposition fī has been elided, the accusative (nafsahu) is read: cf. Bayḍāwī, Anwār al-Tanzīl: commentary to Q. 2:130. An analogous case is the expression alima raʾsahu, ‘his head hurt’, where raʾsahu is the actually subject but takes the accusative in this case because of the grammatical requirement arising from the specification coming after the verb.} Indeed We chose him in this world, that is to say, the one who is from among the beloved, destined pre-eternally for precedence (sābiqa), We select him upon his annihilation in the Oneness, and in the Hereafter, that is, in the state of subsistence after annihilation, he shall be [among the righteous], among the people of uprightness, those who are good for the government of the [cosmic] Order and the perfection of the species.

When his Lord said to him, ‘Submit’, that is to say, declare God’s Oneness and submit your essence to God: in other words, He assigned him a place among the people of the first row from pre-eternity, a muslim, a monotheist, obedient to the Lord of the Worlds, annihilated in Him; [he said, ‘I have submitted to the Lord of the Worlds’.]

And Abraham enjoined upon his sons this, declaration of the Oneness, and [so did] Jacob, upon his sons in [his] grief, ‘My sons, God has chosen for you the [true] religion, that is, His religion by which the one who believes in God’s Oneness worships, having no other religion or essence besides it, so that his religion is God’s religion and his essence is God’s Essence: see that you die not [save in submission], except upon this religion, in other words, do not die a natural death, the death of ignorance, but be dead in your souls, alive in God forever, so that when the death of the body overcomes you, you will be in that state [of submission].

[Or, were you witnesses when death came to Jacob? When he said to his sons, ‘What will you worship after me?’ They said, ‘We will worship your God and the God of your fathers Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac, One God, to Him we submit’.]

That is a community that has passed away: in other words, do not be followers of authority (muqallid) and do not be satisfied purely with following authority in terms of religion, for there can be no reliance on transmission since no one possesses but what he has acquired of knowledge, of deeds, of beliefs and behaviour; [theirs is what they have earned, and yours is what you have earned; you shall not be asked about what they did]: no one is requited for the beliefs of another nor for another’s deeds. So exercise your insight and ask for certainty and act in that way.

And they say, ‘Be Jews or Christians [and you shall be guided’]: every person who is veiled by his religion claims that his religion and none other is the truth. Say, ‘Nay, rather the creed of Abraham [a ḥanīf; and he was not of the idolaters’], for absolute guidance is the affirmation of God’s Oneness which comprehends every religion and lifts every veil, as He says next in His statement:

Say: ‘We believe in God, to the end of this [statement: and in that which has been revealed to us, and revealed to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and the Tribes, and that which was given to Moses, and Jesus, and the prophets, from their Lord]

We make no division between any of them, by denying the religion of some of them or deeming false their creed, while affirming that of others and their truthfulness; nay, we believe that they have all coverged upon the truth and agreed about the Oneness of God; we accept all of these religions on the basis of the [belief in the] Oneness that comprehends all of them; [and to Him we submit’.]

And if they believe in the like of what you believe in, of the Oneness of God that unites [all], of every religion and dogma, then they are truly guided, an absolute guidance, that is, total guidance; but if they turn away, then they are [clearly in schism], apart from religion and split from guidance, causing trouble for you in it. [God will suffice you against them; He is the Hearer, the Knower.]

The mark of God, that is, we believe in God and He has marked us with a [particular] mark. Every adherent of a belief or a creed is marked inwardly by the mark of his belief, religion or creed. The adherents of the different creeds are all marked by the mark of their intentions; the adherents of schools of thought [are marked] by the mark of their imam and leader; the philosophers by the mark of their intellects; the various heretics and the innovators [are marked] by the mark of their heresies and souls, while the affirmers of God’s Oneness [are marked] specifically by the mark of God, better than which there is no mark and beyond which there can be no other mark, as the Messenger of God said: ‘Verily God created [His] creatures in darkness, then sprinkled upon them of His light and whoever was touched by that light was guided and whoever it missed went astray: that light then is His mark; [and who has a better mark than God? And Him we worship.]

[Say: ‘Would you then dispute with us concerning God, and He is our Lord and your Lord? Our deeds belong to us, and to you belong your deeds, and to Him we are sincerely devoted’.

Or do you say: ‘Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac and Jacob, and the Tribes — they were Jews, or they were Christians?’ Say: ‘Have you then greater knowledge, or has God? And who does greater injustice than he who conceals a testimony received from God? And God is not heedless of what you do’.

That is a community that has passed away; theirs is what they have earned, and yours is what you have earned; you shall not be asked about what they did.]

The fools among the people will say: He has called them fools, of slight intellect, because of the failure of their intellects to be true [to their nature] by perceiving the truth of the religion of Islam, and to fulfill this [truth] in accordance with what they knew to be the due of this school and to stop at this [religion]. That is why their dispute concerned God, despite their according with [the principle of] God’s Oneness and the singling out of Muslims for singular devotion [to God]. For were they to perceive the truth they would perceive their singular devotion and they would no longer dispute. Were their intellects composed, they would have inferred from signs and perceived what is due to every religion and school of thought, and would have distinguished between that religion of truth [Islam], which is like the spirit in comparison, and the falsehood promoted by its adherents, [falsehood] with which has the religion of Islam has become mixed and draped itself. For it [Islam] is all truth, nay, it is the truth of all truths, which is why they [Muslims] were appointed as a midmost community, that is, a balance between all communities, meritorious over them and witnesses against them. ‘What has turned them from the direction they were facing in their prayers formerly?’, [they said that] because they were restricted to a specific direction and so they could only accept something restrictive, not knowing the Oneness that accommodates all directions. Say: ‘To God belong the east and the west, [to be understood] as has been mentioned according to the two interpretations. He guides whomever He will to a straight path’, that is, the path of Oneness in relation to which all directions are the same by virtue of the fact that the Truth to which all is directed is not in any direction and that all directions are contained in Him, through Him and to Him, as He has said: Whithersoever you turn, there is the face of God [Q. 2:115].

[Thus, We appointed you a midmost community that you might be witnesses to the people; and that the Messenger might be a witness to you] The meaning of their being witnesses to the people and of the Messenger’s being a witness to them is that they will behold, through the light of Oneness, the dues of religions and will come to know the dues [incumbent] upon the followers of every religion and the due upon every religious person in terms of his [particular] religion, as well as the falsehood that is not the due of [any of] these [religions] but the inventions and desires of their souls, the mendacities of their traditions, their concoctions and their stopping short at their religion and their deeming false all other religions, and their veiling and confining themselves to the exoteric aspect [of their religion] without penetrating deeply its esoteric [dimension] and fundament. For otherwise they would have known the authenticity of Islam, as the path of truth is one, and would not have concealed themselves behind the truths all [other] religions; especially the religion of Islam which is the greatest and most manifest truth. The Messenger beholds the [spiritual] rank of every religious person in relation to that religion of his and the truth of his religion which he follows, as well as the veil by which he veils himself from the perfection of his religion. Thus he [the Messenger] is aware of their sins and the limits of their faith, as well as their deeds, the good ones and the evil ones, their sincerity and their hypocrisy and otherwise, through the light of the Truth; his community knows those [same things] about all other communities through his [their Messenger’s light];

and We did not appoint the direction you were facing, except that We might know, [meaning] knowledge at the level of differentiation (tafṣīl) that follows from a thing becoming knowable, not the knowledge that precedes at the source of the union at the beginning of existence, for it [a thing] is known to him by that [initial] knowledge before it comes into existence because all knowledge belongs to Him with no one other than Him possessing any knowledge. Thus our knowledge, by which we know things, manifests itself upon us as the loci of that manifestation through His knowledge, which is His differentiated knowledge, meaning, His knowledge of the details of existents. Thus by that differentiated mode of knowledge that manifests itself upon us He knows things after they come into existence, just as He knows them by that initial knowledge at the source of union before they come into existence; who followed the Messenger, by declaring His Oneness, from him who turned on his heels, because of his being veiled through his confinement to [his] religion — though it were a grave thing, in other words, that the change [of qibla] was grave, that is was troublesome and burdensome, save for those whom God has guided, those whom God has guided to the affirmation of His Oneness and delivered them from the veil of [religious] confinement; but God would never cause your faith to be wasted, that is, your prayers towards the Holy House [of Jerusalem], because it was [performed] for God. And since it was for Him, in whichever direction you orientated yourselves formerly, He would accept these [prayers]. Upon my life, it was a hardship only for two groups, those veiled by the truth from creation and those veiled by creation from the truth: the former realised that the initial change [of prayer direction], which was from the Kaʿba to the Holy House [of Jerusalem], represented the [external] form of the ascension from the station of the heart and the mystery, meaning, the unveiling and the communion, to the station of the spirit and the hidden, meaning, the witnessing and the direct vision; and so they [this former group] considered the second change [of prayer direction], which had represented the form of the return to the station of the heart in the state of uprightness and stability (tamkīn)^{1As Lloyd Ridgeon points out, for Sufis of the 13th century like the Persian ʿAzīz Nasafī, this term denotated the pinnacle of spiritual achievement: ‘When he [the wayfarer] ceases reflection and inspiration presents itself, and inspiration becomes dominant over him, he passes from the world of intelligence and reaches the world of love. When he ceases from inspiration and witnessing presents itself, he passes from the world of love and reaches the station of stability (maqām-i tamkīn) and in [the station] of stability, he becomes attributed with whatever attribute he desires. So at first the dhikr is dominant over the wayfarer, then reflection is dominant, then inspiration and then witnessing, and finally he reaches the station of stability, and he becomes pure from any variegation [talwīn]’: cited in Ridgeon 2002:153, see also p. 154 on Najm al-Dīn Kubrā’s use of talwīn, tamkīn and takwīn.} for the call, prophethood and the witnessing of the union at the source of differentiation and differentiation at the source of the union where there is no being veiled from creation by the truth or from the truth by creation, [they considered this second change] to be a descent after the ascent and distance after nearness, and they supposed that the efforts to [attain] the more noble station had been wasted and that there was now departure after arrival and a fall from the level, and so this [change] became a hardship for them. As for the other [the second] group, they confined themselves to the [external] form of their rituals and deeds without knowing the wisdom behind the change and supposed the soundness of the latter devotion and not the former and so its going to waste and its invalidation, as they imagined it, became a hardship for them; thus We guided to the opposite of what they had imagined according to what is understood from this verse; truly, God is Gentle with people, gentle to them by expanding the breast and removing the veil in the state of subsistence after annihilation for the former [group] and by accepting what the second [group] performed of deeds out of sincerity even if they were not aware of what they were doing, Merciful, being merciful to them through the existence of the Truth for the first [group] and the reward for deeds and guidance to the truth for the second [group] and His granting to them of success in rising from their state and station to the station of certainty.

We have indeed seen the turning about of your face [in the heaven], in the direction of the heaven of the spirit at the station of union upon being absorbed by the [inclusive] unity (waḥda) and being veiled by the Truth from creatures: you are oppressed by the burden of prophethood and the station of the [prophetic] call because of your not paying attention to multiplicity; it is difficult for you to return to the Truth at the beginning of the state of subsistence after annihilation before [your] stability because of the intensity of your orientation towards the Truth; now We will surely turn you to a direction that shall satisfy you: We shall make your face adjoin the qibla of the heart by the expansion of the breast, as He says: Did We not expand your breast for you, and relieve you of your burden, that which weighed down your back [Q. 94:1-3], for that is a qibla with which you shall be satisfied by virtue of the union being there in differentiated form and the unity not being veiled by the multiplicity. So you shall be satisfied with that qibla by calling creatures to the Truth while remaining in the vision of the unity. Turn your face towards the Sacred Mosque, the side of the expanded breast that is forbidden to the arrival of the attributes of the soul and the insinuations of caprice and Satan; and wherever you are, o believers and verifiers, whether you be in the direction of the rising of the spirit or that of the setting of the soul, turn your faces [towards it], to that side, so that you will find it easy to command good and forbid evil in the former [direction], that is, the eastern direction, and to rise from your state and station and to prevent yourselves from being veiled by the insinuations of caprice and Satan in the latter [western direction]. Those who have been given the Scripture, that is, the Torah, the Gospels and the Distinguishing Book of the Intellect, that is, the acquired intellect; know that it is the truth from their Lord, because of their being guided by what the Book contains in the way of the affirmation of the unity of the acts and the attributes, proof of the Muḥammadan affirmation of the Essential Oneness [of God], or [guided] by the light of the intellect illumined by the light of the Law, not [the intellect that is] veiled by the analogies of reflection [God is not heedless of what you do.]

Yet if you should bring to those who have been given the Scripture every sign, that is proof of the soundness of your prophethood and the validity of your prayer-direction, even if it should be from their own scripture or an incontrovertible rational one, they will not follow your direction, on account of their being veiled by their religion and their intelligibles and their confinement to them; and you are not a follower of their direction, because of your transcending the level of their religion and your rising above their station; neither are they followers of one another’s direction, because each of them is veiled by his religion and because of the contradictoriness of their directions that originates in the contradictoriness that is at the centre of [each of] their natures. If you were to follow their, sundry, whims after the knowledge, of unity that comprehends you, has come to you, then you will surely be among [the evildoers], [among] those who have diminished what is your due and what is due to your station [as prophet].

Those to whom We have given the Scripture, a giving [accompanied] with understanding and awareness, they recognise him, as they recognise their own sons, that is, [they recognise him as they would] an object of sensory perception that is witnessed and is near and is ever-sensed because of their proximity to him in reality and their knowing him by clear proofs.

[even though there is a party of them that conceal the truth, while they know.

The truth comes from your Lord; then be not among the doubters.]

Every person has his direction to which he turns, in other words, every person among you has an ultimate purpose and a perfection in accordance with [the extent of] his original preparedness, [a direction] to which God turns that person’s face, or [a direction] to which he himself turns his soul, turning towards it in the measure commensurate with his ipseity and his preparedness by God’s permission; so vie with one another in good works, [in] those matters that bring you closer to your perfection and your purpose, for which you were created and to which you are urged. Wherever you may be, in terms of station and state below [that perfection or goal] or in conflict therewith by virtue of [that station or state] being opposite to it, God will bring you all together, to that purpose, sooner or later, depending on the extent to which those things that bring you closer are required [for each of you] and [the extent to which] you vie [against one another] in them; surely God has power over all things.

From whatever place you issue forth, out of the paths of your senses and your inclination to your shares and concern for your welfare and the welfare of the believers, turn your face towards the Sacred Mosque, in other words, be present before the Truth in your heart, facing your breast, witnessing therein witnessings and paying attention to its side so that you might be in relation to things through God and not the soul;

[it is the truth from your Lord. God is not heedless of what you do.

From whatever place you issue, turn your face towards the Sacred Mosque;] and wherever you may be, O believers, turn your faces [towards it], to the side of the breast witnessing your witnessings in it, paying attention to it and not turning away from it in any state, so that there be not against you, from the people, any argument, any authoritativeness by [the possibility] that they might seem weighty in your eyes, or that you should take them into consideration [unduly] during your absence from the truth, or because of their feigning superiority over you; or [it means] [lest there be] any overpowering [by them of you] through words or deeds with respect to what you are seeking and demanding, for you will be upon the truth in [seeking] these then; nay, let them submit and yield to you: for verily the party of God, they are the victors [Q. 5:56]; excepting [illā] the evildoers among them, namely, the disbelievers, those who have been driven away, who have veiled themselves from the truth absolutely, for they are contemptuous of you, neither submitting nor yielding because of their failure absolutely to act upon the truth. The specious claim which they attempt to present as being [a valid] argument and their objection to the Muslims in both word and deed, and their haughtiness towards them in their souls, He has called an ‘argument’ [but only] figuratively; a variant reading has alā [instead of illā] as an [interjectory] alert so that a new sentence begins with the evildoers [among them]:^{1Thus, with this variant (alā alladhīna ẓalamū minhum fa-lā takhshawhum), the reading is: As for the evildoers among them, then do not fear them.} do not fear them, because they cannot overpower you or harm you, but fear Me, be in awe of My Grandeur self-disclosing itself, lest they acquire standing in your hearts and eyes, and lest your breasts incline and so you incline to agree with them in reverence and exaltation of them by virtue of your being in absence and [ensconced] in the soul, as the commander of the believers [ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib], peace be upon him, said: ‘[If you] extol the Creator in yourself, [His] creatures shall seem insignificant in your eyes’; [and that I may perfect My grace upon you, and that you may be guided]: [fear Me] because of My having completed the grace of perfection for you and because of My desire for you to be guided I have commanded you to be constantly present and self-examining.

Just as We have sent, just as you have been remembered by the sending of, a messenger to you, of your kind to enable you to receive and to learn and to accept guidance from him because of the similarity of genus and the human link,

[from among yourselves, to recite Our verses to you and to purify you, and to teach you the Book, and wisdom, and to teach you what you knew not.]

So remember Me, by responding [to the call], through obedience and out of [a positive] will, and I will remember you, by granting you more and successive wayfaring and the effusion [from Me] of the light of certainty, and be thankful to Me, for the grace of sending a Messenger and guidance by wayfaring along the path to Me out of love, and I will increase you in gnosis from Me and love of Me, and be not ungrateful towards Me, by being indifferent and veiling yourselves by the grace of religion from the Grace-giver, as this is ingratitude, nay, disbelief [itself].

O you who have faith, a faith of eyewitnessing, seek help in patience, with Me during the assaults of the self-disclosures of My greatness and grandeur, and [in] prayer, that is, [in] the true witnessing through Me; surely God is with the patient, those who can bear the self-disclosures of My lights.

And do not say of those slain in God’s way, that is, [those] rendered annihilated, their souls slain in the wayfaring along the path of Oneness, dead in terms of their caprice, as the Messenger of God said: ‘Die before you die’. ‘They are dead’, that is, they are incapacitated and needy; rather they are living, with their Lord through real life and the everlasting eternal life of God, the witnesses of God through essential presence, empowered by Him, but you are not aware, because of the blindness of your insight and your privation from the light by which the hearts are able to see the individuals of the world of the Holy and the realities of the spirits.

Surely We will try you with something of fear, that is, fear of Me that necessitates the breaking of the soul and its defeat, and hunger, that necessitates the exhaustion of the body and the weakening of the faculties and the lifting of the veil of caprice and the blocking of Satan’s path into the heart, and diminution of goods, which are the substrata of lusts which strengthen the soul and increase its insolence, and souls, which overcome the heart with their attributes and suffice themselves with their essences, so that by the diminution of these [souls] the heart might be augmented and fortified; or [it means] the souls of kin and friends to whom you resort and seek strength in, so that [thereby] you might dedicate and devote yourselves exclusively to Me, and fruits, that is, pleasures and ego-centric enjoyments, so that you might find pleasure in the unveilings and the cognitions of the heart and the spiritual witnessings when your inner aspects become pure when severed from those [fruits] and the deliverance of the insights of your hearts by the fire of spiritual discipline, affliction and seclusion from the deceit of the attributes of your souls; yet give good tidings to the patient, meaning those who are patient [in staying away] from what they are familiar with by the pleasure of My love and the power of My will;

[those who, when they are struck by an affliction,] say, ‘Surely we belong to God, that is, they have submitted to, and are certain of, the fact that they are My possession of whom I have free disposal, and to Him we will return’, in other words, they have been annihilated in Me and witnessed their destruction in Me by Me.

Upon those rest blessings, in the way of the existence bestowed upon them after annihilation, [existence] characterised by My attributes and illumined by My lights, and mercy [from their Lord], and light and guidance by which they guide [other] creatures to Me, and those — they are the truly guided, by My guidance, as mentioned in the supplication: ‘And appoint us as guides, guided, not straying nor leading astray’.

Truly Ṣafā and Marwa, that is, truly the purity (ṣafāʾ) of the existence of the heart and the virtuousness (muruwwa) of the existence of the soul, are among the waymarks of God, among the heart-based milestones and rituals of His religion, [waymarks] such as certainty, satisfaction, sincere devotion, reliance and receptivity, such as the prayer, the fast, and all of the other devotions performed by the body; so whoever makes the Pilgrimage to the House, that is, [whoever] has attained the station of the Essential Unity and entered the Divine Presence by the total annihilation of his essence, or the Visitation, to the fire of the Presence by the affirmation of the unity of the attributes and by his annihilation in the lights of the self-disclosures of the Beauty and the Majesty, he would not be at fault, in that case, if he circumambulates them, that is, [if] he returns to the stations of both and comes and goes between them but not in their engendered existence, for that is indeed a fault and a sin, rather in the existence bestowed after annihilation upon [reaching the station of] stability; that is why He has precluded any [possibility of] fault [on the part of the one circumambulating], for in this [bestowed] existence, as opposed to the former [kind], there is ampleness; and whoever volunteers good, meaning, whoever gives good voluntarily in the way of teachings, compassion for creatures, [good] counsel, love for the good-doing folk who put things right, through the existence of the heart, and [whoever gives good voluntarily] in the way of manners, the acts of righteousness and piety, assisting the weak and the needy and securing kindnesses for them and for his dependants through the existence of the soul after the perfection of the wayfaring and subsistence after annihilation; then truly God is Grateful, thankful for his deeds by rewarding [him] with increase, Knowing, for these [deeds] are [performed] out of the free disposal over things [granted] through God, not through engenderment or affliction or indifference.

Those who conceal the clear proofs and the guidance that We have revealed, that is, [those] who conceal what We have effused upon them of the clear proofs of the lights of gnoses and the knowledge of the self-disclosures of the acts and the attributes and the guidance of the states and the stations, or the guidance to the affirmation of the Unity of the Essence via certain knowledge. For what is eyewitnessed cannot be concealed by means of variegations of the soul or the heart, [variegations] that mask the unveilings in the heart and the mysterious communions of the night and the spiritual witnessings, after We have shown them to the people clearly [in the Scripture], in the Book of their intellects, [intellects] illumined by the light of the pursuit that perceives the vestiges of the lights of the hearts and the spirits with the blessing of companionship — they shall be cursed by God, He will reject them and banish them, and by the cursers, from among the High Council, [who curse them] by forsaking them and refraining from reinforcing them from the world of support and light, and [by the cursers] from among the yearning prepared ones, the light of whose hearts they [the now accursed] had enjoyed the intimacy and on whose effusion of light they [the accursed] had drawn by the strength of their sincerity, and in whose constant companionship they had found rest, enjoying their blessedness and their breaths at the rising radiance of the gleam of their states, [cursing them] by abandoning them and relinquishing their companionship, rejecting them and turning away from them because of their [the accursed ones’] loss of that [light] and their [the cursers’] sensing the sullying of their purity.

Except those that repent, that is, those who have repented from the sins of their states and realised that it had been a trial from God, and make amends, in their states by returning [to God] and [engaging in] spiritual discipline, and show clearly, that is, [those who], as a result of their truthful conduct towards God and their sincere devotion [to Him], have unveiled and manifested what had been veiled to them — them I shall turn [relenting], I shall accept their repentance and cast upon them [My] relenting; I am the Relenting, the Merciful.

But those who disbelieve, [those who] are veiled from religion or [from] the Truth, and die disbelieving, that is, remained in their [state of] veiling such that their preparedness has disappeared and the light of their primordial nature extinguished by [their adherence to] the religion of the veil, and have been cut off from the means by which they would have able to lift the veil of death — upon them shall be the curse of God and the angels, and of people altogether: in other words, they have merited total distance, privation, banishment from the Truth and from the world of the angelic realm and from the natural human disposition that is represented by obliteration (ṭams).

Abiding therein, because of the obliteration of their preparedness and the extinguishing of the light of their primordial nature; the chastisement shall not be lightened for them, because of the fact that their chastised configurations are deeply rooted in the substances of their souls; nor any respite given to them, because of the attachment to them of those dark configurations.

Your God is One God [there is no god except Him]: the object of your worship to whom you have exclusively dedicated your worship, O affirmers of the Oneness, is a worshipped One in Essence, One absolutely, apart from Whom there is nothing in existence and besides Whom there is no existent to be worshipped. So how can you associate [others] with Him when all that is other than Him is pure non-existence. Thus association can only be out of ignorance of Him, the Compassionate, Who comprehends mercy for every existent, the Merciful, Who singles out the mercy of His guidance for the believers who are affirmers of His Oneness. This is the first verse revealed concerning the affirmation of Oneness according to the levels [of tawḥīd], in other words, [it is] the most formative declaration of Oneness from the perspective of the Truth but not from our perspective, for the first declaration of Oneness from our part is the affirmation of the unity of the acts, while that [formative one] is the declaration of the unity of the [Divine] Essence; but because this [latter] declaration of unity is too remote from the utmost extent of comprehension of people it came down to the station of the declaration of the unity of the acts so that it can be inferred from the latter. Thus He says:

Surely in the creation of the heavens and the earth, to the end of this [verse], in other words, in the existentiation of the heavens of the spirits, the hearts and the intellects and the earth of the souls, and the alternation of [the night and day], [the alteration] of light and darkness between them, and the ships, that are the bodies, that run in the sea, of the absolute mass, with what benefits people, in the acquisition of their perfections, and the water that God sends down from the heaven, that is, the spirit [which He sends down] from the water of knowledge, with which He revives the earth, of the soul, after it is dead, because of ignorance, and He scatters abroad in it all manner of crawling thing, [meaning] those animal faculties that are alive by the life of the heart, and the disposition [of the winds, and the clouds compelled between heaven and the earth]: [the disposition] the tempests resulting from the surplusses of the acts of the Truth and the clouds from the self-disclosures of the lordly attributes, [clouds] disposed and made ready between the heaven[s] of the spirit and the earth of the soul — surely there are signs, proofs, for a people who comprehend, by means of the intellect that is illumined by the light of the Law and disengaged from the blemishes of illusion.

Yet there be people who take to themselves compeers besides God, loving them as God is loved: in other words, those who worship besides God things, either humans of their own species, such as [their] partners, children, parents, ancestors, brothers, lovers, leaders, kings and others; or [who worship things] that are non-human, such as animals, inanimates and all their other properties by dedicating themselves to them, turning their attention to them, taking them into considering, preserving them, looking after them and their condition, thinking of [other] things of the same kind, loving them as they do God, that is, as God ought to be loved. Thus for them these things become equal to God in terms of [their] love and become compeers or associates of God from their point of view, or that they become their objects of love and their objects of worship and nothing else, and so they are for them their deities just as God is the Deity of creatures: they have thus appointed for themselves deities as compeers to the God of all creatures, the God of all worlds.

but the believers love God more ardently, than any other, because they only love God. Their love for Him is not confounded with love of others and is not subject to change. They love things through [their] love of God and for God and in the measure that they find in these [things] a divine aspect, as some have stated: ‘The Truth is our Beloved and creatures are our beloved, but if the two conflict, then the Truth is more beloved to us’, in other words, if the divine aspect no longer resides in them because of their divergence from Him, our love for them is no more; or [it means that] they love [God] more than they love their deities because they love things in themselves for themselves and so inevitably their love changes [for these things] when they themselves change the accidents of their souls upon fear of perdition and the harm that the soul brings upon them. Believers love God through their spirits and their hearts, nay, through God and for God. Their love [for Him] does not change because it is selfless. They expend their spirits and their souls for the sake of His countenance and His approval, abandoning all of their desires for His desire, loving His acts even when they conflict with their caprices, as one of them said: ‘I desire to connect with Him while He desires to abandon me, so I abandon what I desire for what He desires’.

If he were to see those who did evil [when they see the chastisement], that is, [those who] associated [others with God] by their love of warning at the moment they see the chastisement that is the due of their veiling themselves with their deities, that the might altogether belongs to God [and that God is terrible in chastisement], meaning that all power belongs to God, their deities having no share of it. As for the severity of God’s chastisement [of them] by joining them in fire-chains to their deities in the fire of privation fueled by their love of these [deities] cannot be described [in words] which is why the apodosis of the [conditional particle] law (‘if’) has been omitted.

When those who were followed disown [their followers]: idh tabarraʾa is a substitution for idh yarawna’l-ʿadhāb, in other words, the moment of their seeing the chastisement is the moment of the followed disowning the followers, both [moments] being concomitants of one another, as required by the love that was between them on account of the chastisement of each [group] by the other and the confinement and veiling of each [group] by the other from each’s perfection and pleasures, and the severing of the means and the connection that brought about the benefits and enjoyments that existed between them in this world in the way of kinship, blood ties, intimacy, covenants and all of the other ties of this world that bring about benefit and pleasure. All of these are severed when their concomitants and necessary causes are severed, except for the ties of goodness and the divine loves that are based upon spiritual correspondence and pre-eternal mutual acquaintance: these subsist by the subsistence of the spirit forever and increase in the Hereafter after the lifting of the corporeal veils because they entail the love of God that is profitable in the Hereafter, as God said: ‘My love I will surely grant to those who love one another through Me’; and they have seen the chastisement [and the cords are cut away before them]: the ‘and’ (wāw) is [the particle] of circumstance, in other words, they disown them at the point of seeing the chastisement and [at the moment of] the severing of the connection between them, that is, at the point of the manifestation of the evil of the comparison [between God and their deities], the consequence of that [comparison] and the end of its benefits, being as useful for them [at that point] as the copulation of dogs, for example.

And those who followed say, ‘O, if only we might return again, in other words, O for a return!

[and disown them, as they have disowned us!’]

So, God shall show them their works, anguish for them!: in other words, their loves and the deeds that are based on them are turned into anguish for them. Such is the predicament of the spiritual faculties that befriend the ego-centric faculties which are subordinate to them and disposed to them for the actualisation of their pleasures.

[Never shall they exit from the Fire].

O people, eat of what is in the earth [lawful and wholesome; and follow not the steps of Satan; he is a manifest foe to you]: that is, partake in the pleasures and the enjoyments that are in the lower direction of the world of the soul and the body in a manner that is lawful and wholesome, that is to say, according to the law of moderation as permitted by the Law and as sanctioned by the intellect in the measure that is needed and is necessary. And do not transgress the limit of moderation, within which these [pleasures and enjoyments] are wholesome and beneficial, into the bounds of immoderation, for these are the footsteps of Satan, which is why God says: Indeed squanderers are brothers of devils [Q. 17:27]. For he [Satan] is an enemy to you, [one] whose enmity is clear; he desires to lead you to perdition and make you odious in the eyes of your Lord by your committing of reprehensible acts of immoderation, as He [God] does not love the immoderate. Know that enmity in the world of the soul corresponds to the shadow of familiarity (ulfa) in the world of the heart, while moderation is its shadow in the world of the body. Familiarity is the shadow of love in the world of the spirit, the latter being the shadow of true Oneness. Thus moderation is the fourth shadow of the Oneness and Satan flees from the shadow of the Truth, unable to endure it, he is forever stepping from the realm of these shadows into the side of immoderation, and if he is unable, then to the side of excess, as happens in the case of love and familiarity; which is why the commander of the believers ʿAlī, peace be upon him, said: ‘You find that the ignorant is [one of two], either excessive or prodigal’. Verily the ignorant person is the laughingstock of Satan.

He [Satan] only commands you to evil, to cause harm and hurt, which is the excess of the irascible faculty, and indecency, namely, vile acts that are the excess of the appetitive faculty, and that you should speak against God what you do not know, which is the excess of the faculty of speech as a result of the intellect being sullied by illusion, which is the devil disposed for it.

And when it is said to them, ‘Follow what God has revealed’, in terms of taking into consideration the limits of moderation and fairness in all things in the manner prescribed by the Law, they say, ‘No; but we follow what we found our fathers doing’, in the way of reprehensible acts of immoderation that belong to the age of ignorance, in [blind] imitation of them. What?, will you follow them? Even if their fathers do not understand anything, of religion or knowledge, and they were not guided?, to right deeds because of their ignorance.

The likeness of those who disbelieve, the likeness of the one who calls on the rejected disbelievers, is as the likeness of [one who shouts to that which hears nothing, save a call and a cry; deaf, dumb, blind — they do not comprehend], [as the likeness of] one who shouts to beasts who cannot hear anything but sounds and do not understand the meaning: thus is their predicament.

O you who believe: if you are [true] affirmers of Oneness devoting worship exclusively to God, then do not, eat of, anything but, the good things wherewith We have provided you: in other words, those things provided which justfully ought to be used, and give thanks to God [if it be Him that you worship], by using them for their intended purpose in the proper manner and in the proper measure, for affirmation of Oneness entails paying attention moderation and justice in all things, as the essence entails its shadow and its concomitant. [It is reported] from the Prophet, may God bless him and grant him peace, that God, exalted be He, said: ‘Verily I with humankind and the jinn are [involved] in an awesome tiding: I create, yet others are worshipped, and I provide, but others are thanked’.

He has only forbidden you: carrion, because blood in it is congealed and [because the consumption of] it is far removed from [the principle of] moderation by the deviation of that [creature’s] constitution; blood, because it mixes with impure faeces which do not receive life, justice and luminosity and because of its ineligibility for such [things] thereafter on account of the lack of maturity; the flesh of swine, because of the prevalence of predatorialness and voraciousness and because it [swine] by nature openly engages in filth and unrestricted sexual behaviour, and the same is caused by the consumption of it; what has been hallowed to other than God, that for which the voice has been raised that it be sacrificed for other than God, in other words, that by whose sacrifice and consumption association [of things with God] was intended, since this is contradictory to the affirmation of Oneness and revealing of an associationism; from this [statement] one is given to understand that [it] also [includes] whatever encourages the one consuming it to speak of, and raise his voice [in support of], anything other than God. In other words, every thing that is not consumed in affirmation of [His] Oneness is forbidden to the one consuming it. Yet whoever is constrained, from among the community, not desiring, [sinfulness] against another constrained person by withholding it [from him], nor transgressing, but just to stay alive, no sin shall be on him. [God is Forgiving, Merciful.]

[Those who conceal what God has revealed of the Scripture, and sell it for a little price] — they shall consume nothing in their bellies but, that is, their bellies’ fill is nothing but the fuel of, the Fire, of privation and the cause for the igniting of the fire of nature that veils [one] from the light of the truth and chastises through the dark configurations of evil, [configurations] that lead that person to the hell-fire of corporeal [primordial] matter (hayūlā). God shall not speak to them on the Day of Resurrection [and He will not look at them],^{1The author includes a sentence from a similar passage in another sūra **.} neither purify them: an expression of the intensity of His wrath against them and their banishment from Him; [and theirs is a painful chastisement.]

[Those are they that have bought error at the price of guidance, and chastisement at the price of pardon; what makes them so patient for the Fire?

That is because God has revealed the Book with the truth; and those that are at variance regarding the Book are in schism, far removed.]

It is not piety that you turn your faces to the east, of the world of the spirits, and to the west, of the world of [physical] bodies, for that is delimitation and veiling. True piety is [that of the one who believes in God and the Last Day and the angels], the piety of the affirmers of the Oneness who believed in God and the final return at the station of the union — for the affirmation of the Oneness at the station of the union requires sempiternal subsistence, which is the real final return — and who witnessed the union at the [level of the] differentiation of multiplicity and did not veil themselves with the union from the differentiation, that is the inner aspect of the world of the angels and the outer aspect of the world of the prophets, and the Book [and the prophets], [the Book] that combines the outer aspect, by means of rulings, with gnosis and teaches the knowledge of uprightness, [those who believe in that Book] and [who] then become upright after completing the affirmation of Oneness, both at the [level of] union and [that of] differentiation by means of the works mentioned. For uprightness is essentially when all the faculties [of an individual] remain within their [respective] limits by the divine command, because of their illumination by the light of the spirit upon that individual’s verification of God at the station of subsistence following annihilation, that being the station of justice, so that these [faculties] end up residing in the shadow of the Truth, devoted in its totality to the path of Oneness; [and who gives of his substance,] however cherished, in other words, when he [himself] is in need of it and guards it avariciously, as [ʿAbd Allāh] Ibn Masʿūd said: ‘That you should give of it when you are sound [in health] and protective of it, hoping to live [long] and fearful of being poor; do not wait until [death] reaches the throat and [only] then offer, “this is for him and that is for the other”’. God, exalted be He, said: But prefer others [to themselves] though they be in desperate poverty [Q. 59:9]. Or [the phrase ʿalā ḥubbihi may be understood] out of love for God, lest his heart be occupied by anything other than Him, and because God, exalted be He, is satisfied with its being given; or [it means] out of the love of giving, that is, out of the goodness of [one’s] soul, for the munificent person is the one who gives happily and out of the goodness of his soul. From His words and gives of his substance to where He says [to near kin and orphans and the needy and the traveller and beggars, and for slaves, and who observes prayer] and pays the alms, out of virtuous abstention, which is the perfection of the appetitive faculty and its remaining within its limit for what concerns it. As for His saying: and those who fulfil their covenant [when they have engaged in a covenant], out of justice that is the concomitant of wisdom, which is the perfection of the faculty of speech, since if it does not know the consequences of treachery and betrayal and the benefit of the virtue of countering the two, it would not fulfil a covenant; as for His saying, those who endure with fortitude severity, hardship, [such as] poverty, harm, sickness and terminal illness, and peril, namely, war, [enduring it] out of valour, which is the perfection of the irascible faculty, they, the ones described in terms of all of these virtues, the ones who are fixed in the station of uprightness, are the ones who were true, to God, in the abodes of disengagement, by virtue of their acts which are true piety, and they are the ones who are fearful, of loving anyone other than God, even the soul, [those] who are disengaged from the coverings of the initial creation and of nature. ‘Substance’ (māl) may be interpreted as [meaning] knowledge, which is the substance of the heart because on account of it [the heart] becoms stronger and self-sufficient. In other words, he gave away knowledge even though it is beloved to the near kin of the spiritual faculties, because of their nearness to it, and [beloved to] the orphans of the ego-centric faculties, because of their severance from the light of the spirit, which is the true father, and [beloved] to the needy of the natural faculties by virtue of these [faculties] being ever subservient to the rewards of the body and possessing knowledge of virtuous character traits and meritorious behaviour. When such a person [who gives knowledge] has imbibed spiritual knowledge and knowledge of character traits, manners and the means to [acquire] livelihood, both generally and in an undifferentiated mode, and is finished with his own self, he then bestows [such knowledge] upon the travellers, that is, the wayfarers, and the beggars, that is, the seekers of knowledge and [expends it] for the sake of freeing those enslaved by this world and by [their] lusts from their bondage by means of admonition and sermon and the observance of the prayer of presence, in other words, [by] maintaining [the performance of] it through witnessing, and pays the alms that fortify him against casting his eyes unto the other and against the distractions of passing inclinations [achieving this] through denial and the effacement of attributes. [And by those who fulfil the covenant is meant] those who fulfil the pre-eternal covenant by their adherence to the affirmation of the Oneness and the annihilation of [their] essence and actual existence; and [by those who endure is meant] those who endure with fortitude the severity of being ever in need of God and the harm of the breaking of the soul and the repressing of caprice and the peril of battling against Satan: they are the ones who are true to God by fulfilling His covenant and by the resoluteness and determination of [their] wayfaring; they are the ones who guard against associating [others with Him] and who are exalted above all the rest.^{1This entire passage is a commentary on verse 177, above.}

[O you who believe, prescribed for you is retaliation, regarding the slain; a free man, for a free man, and a slave for a slave, and a female for a female. But if anything is pardoned any one in relation to his brother, let the pursuing be honourable. And let the payment to him be with kindliness; that is an alleviation given by your Lord, and a mercy; and for him who commits aggression after that — his is a painful chastisement].

Retaliation is a law based on principles of justice, prescribed to remove the aggressions of the predatorial faculty, being a shadow of His justice, exalted be He, so that if He dispenses [of this] to a servant of His by annihilating him, He compensates him the ‘free man’ of his spirit with a better spirit divinely-endowed and [compensates him] the slave of his heart with a heart divinely-endowed and the female of his soul with a divinely-endowed soul that is perfect.

There is for you [in retaliation], in God’s compensating you in the manner mentioned, a great life, that is, a life whose very essence cannot be described, O people of pith, that is, [O people] of intellect pure of the rind of illusion and the coverings of individual existences and physical bodies; such then is [the case with] this [principle of] retaliation, so that you might be wary, of neglecting it and so that you might adhere to it.

[Prescribed for you, when any of you is approached by death and leaves behind some good, is to make testament in favour of his parents and kinsmen honourably — an obligation on those that fear]

The making of a testament and honouring it is another law prescribed in order to remove the deficiency of the possessive faculty, that is to say, the faculty of [rational] speech, and its [that faculty’s] falling short of the wisdom required to dispose of wealth and to have mastery over the other two faculties by means of the light of the Truth and the stipulations of the Law and also to prevent these [faculties] from any aggression in the way of changing the testament [in question], which is a kind of crime and a betrayal; [the law is also meant] to incite that [rational faculty] to verify and scrutinise the wisdom that constitutes its perfection by setting things right among those for whom the testament is made in accordance with wisdom when any harm is anticipated or known from the part of the testator, be it inadvertent or intentional. Fasting is another law that has been prescribed to eliminate the aggression of the bestial faculty and its power of control. The right to retaliation of the people of the truth is as has been mentioned and the testament for them [to honour] is to uphold the pre-eternal covenant by shunning all that is other than the Truth, as God, exalted be He, says, And Abraham enjoined this upon his sons and [so did] Jacob [Q. 2:132]. Their fast is to abstain from any speech, act, movement, or rest that is not [performed] in truth for the sake of the Truth.

[Then if anyone changes it after hearing it, the sin shall rest upon those who change it; surely God is Hearing, Knowing.

But if any one fears injustice or sin from one making testament, and so makes things right between them, then no sin shall be upon him; surely God is Forgiving, Merciful.

O you who believe, prescribed for you is the Fast, just as it was prescribed for those that were before you so that you might guard yourselves.

For days numbered; and if any of you be sick, or be on a journey, then a number of other days; and for those who are able to do it, a redemption: the feeding of a poor man. For him who volunteers good; that is good for him; but that you should fast is better for you, if you but knew.

The month of Ramaḍān, namely, the consumption of the soul by the fire of the light of the Truth, wherein, at that time, was revealed the Qurʾān, in other words, the all-encompassing undifferentiated knowledge that is called the Qurʾānic intellect that leads to the station of the union [a guidance for the people] as a means to guiding people to the unity on account of the union, and as clear signs of the Guidance [and the Criterion], and proofs that are connected to the union and the dispersion, in other words, the differentiated knowledge that is called the Criterion intellect. [So let those of you who are present at the month], so let he who was present at that time, that is to say, [let] he who had attained the station of the witnessing of the essence, fast it, that is, let him abstain from any speech, act or movement that does not involve the Truth; and if any of you be sick, that is, tested by sicknesses of the heart by way of the ego-centric veils that prevent such a witnessing, or if he be on a journey, that is [if he] still be wayfaring and has not reached [the station of] the witnessing of the essence, [then a number of other days] then he has other stages which he needs to pass in order to reach that station. God desires ease for you, by [your] attaining the station of the Oneness and being reinforced by the power of God, and desires not hardship for you, namely, the charging of acts upon weak and incapacitated souls; and so that you fulfil the number, and so that you complete those stages and states and stations that will make [you] arrive [at the station of the witnessing of the Essence], [and magnify God for having guided you], and so that you extol God and come to know His grandeur and magnificence for His guiding you to the station of the Union, and that you might be thankful, by being [morally] upright: He has commanded you [to do] that.

And if My servants, the wayfarers, the seekers, those oriented towards Me, should question you [concerning Me], about [spiritual] knowledge of Me, I am near, manifest, I answer the call [of the caller when he calls to Me], of the one who calls me by the tongue of his state and preparedness by granting him that which is commensurate with his state and preparedness; so let them respond to Me, by making pure their preparedness through renunciation and [acts of] worship [and let them believe in Me that they might go aright], for I summon them unto Me and apprise them of the way of wayfaring unto Me; and let them witness Me at the point of their purification [of their preparedness], for I disclose Myself to them in the mirrors of their hearts so that they might become rightly-guided through uprightness, in other words, so that they might become upright and righteous.

It is permitted to you, that is, it is allowed for you, upon the night of the Fast, that is, at those moments of forgetfulness which intervene in the abstention mentioned during the time of your presence, to go in to your wives, to condescend to the temptations of your souls on account of the shares due to them, since you will not endure staying away from these given that these [temptations] constantly garb you and that you constantly dress yourselves with them, necessarily by virtue of [your souls] being attached [to you]; God knows that you have been betraying yourselves, by stealing [moments for those] shares during various times of such wayfaring, spiritual discipline or presence [that you may be involved in]; and so He has turned to you [relenting], and He has pardoned you. So now, that is, during the time of uprightness and stability in the state of subsistence after annihilation: lie with them, during those moments of forgetfulness, and seek what God has prescribed for you, of fearing God and having power over those shares by allowing for what is due in the way of uprightness and the fulfilment of what God has commanded of servanthood (ʿubūdiyya) and the calling [of others] to Him; and eat and drink, that is, be in the company [?] of these [things], until the white thread is distinct to you from the black thread at daybreak, [that is] until there manifest upon you the glimpses and flashes of the Presence, [until] Its effects and lights prevail against the blackness and darkness of forgetfulness; [then complete the fast to the night; and do not lie with them, while you cleave to the mosques in devotion [to God]: then adhere to the mentioned abstention through [your] presence with the Truth until the time of forgetfulness comes [again]: for were it not for this [return of forgetfulness] a person would not be able to pursue [his] best interests for what concerns livelihood and [the fulfilment of] his duties.^{1Moments of forgetfulness that litter the spiritual path or journey, despite being distractions, are necessary for the fulfilment of one’s duties in this world; that is what is meant by Kāshānī’s reference to the ‘shares’ that a person’s worldly desires exact from him. This is an important riposte to the oft-repeated inaccuracy that Sufism requires severing oneself from the things of this world: the animal soul that is part and parcel of an individual’s existence in this sublunar world demands what is due to it. Of course, the idea is to discipline that aspect until one has mastery over it, which then allows that the true dues are performed (devotion to God etc.).}

[Those are God’s bounds; do not approach them]: and do not approach them in your state of spiritual retreat, during your stay and presence in the mosques of your heart, lest your [spiritual] moment be disturbed by the manifestation of these [temptations].^{2The reference is to the temptations to which they are permitted to submit after the breaking of the fast, but not during iʿtikāf.}

[So, God makes clear His signs to people so that they might fear.]

And do not consume your goods, your gnoses and the knowledge that you have acquired, among yourselves in deception, [that is] through the vain passions and pleasures of the soul by the actualisation of the objects of its desires and the acquisition of its sensory and imaginal goals in the use of these [goods]; and proffer them, so that they are sent to [to the judges] to the arbiters of the evil-commanding souls, that you may consume a portion of the goods [of other people], of the spiritual faculties, in sin, that is, out of injustice as you expend these [goods] in [pursuit of] the delights of the ego-centric faculties, while you are aware, that this is a sin and a misuse of a thing.

They will ask you about the new moons, that is, about the risings of the heart upon the radiation on them of the light of the spirit. Say, ‘They are appointed times for the people [and the Pilgrimage’], that is, [they are] the moments in which transactions must be carried out for the cause of God, as well as the resolve for wayfaring, the circumambulation of the House of the heart and the standing at the station of gnosis. It is not piety to come to the houses, of your hearts, from their backs, by way of your senses and the knowledge that you have acquired that derives from corporeal feelings, for the back of the heart is the aspect that is adjacent to the body; but piety is, the piety of, the one who guards himself, against the distractions of the senses and the murmurings of the imagination and the whisperings of the soul; so come to the houses by their, inner, doors, those that lie adjacent to the spirit and the truth, for the door of the heart is the path by which it is opened unto to the truth; and fear God, if you are distracted by what distracts you from Him, that you may prosper.

And fight in the way of God with those who fight against you, from among Satan and the faculties of the souls that command [evil], but do not aggress, in fighting against these [faculties] by totally suppressing them and not fulfilling what is rightfully due to them and adhering to [what is] their limits, lest they then fall into excess, shortcoming and laxity. Indeed God loves not the aggressors, on account of their being outside the shadow of love and unity, that itself constitutes justice.

And slay them wherever you come upon them, [wherever] you find them: eliminate the life in them and prevent them from their acts by suppressing their desires which are [the source of] their spirit wherever they may be; and expel them from [where they expelled you]: from the Mecca of the breast when they seize it, as they expelled you from it when they drew you down to the site of the soul and out of the seat of the heart; [seditious temptation is more grievous than slaying]: their seditious trial, that is their worship of its [the soul’s] desires and the idols of its [carnal] delights, is more grievous than the suppression of its desires and its total mortification or [it means] that your being tested and tried by their conquest is more grievous for you than being slain which is the obliteration of your animal instincts and the total effacement of your preparedness because of the increased pain [that would ensue] therefrom.

But fight them not by the Sacred Mosque, which is the station of the heart, that is, [do not fight them] during the presence of the heart if they accord with your orientation, for they would then be aids to you in your wayfaring, until they should fight you there, and contend with you in pursuit of their demands, dragging away from the heart and the religion of truth towards the station of the soul and their religion, which is the worship of the calf; [then if they fight you, slay them — such, is the requital of disbelievers].

But if they desist, surely God is Forgiving, Merciful.

Fight them till there is no sedition, caused by their contention, motives and worship, and the religion is for God, by the orientation of all of these towards the Holy and their falling on the side of the mystery in being oriented towards the Truth, wherein neither Satan nor desire has any share; then if they desist, there shall be no enmity, against them, [save against evildoers], except against the transgressors who overstep their bounds.

The sacred month for the sacred month, in other words, the time during which these [the faculties of the evil-commanding soul] prevent you from [fulfilling] your goals and [the obligations of] your religion is the very time during which you should prevent them from their recalcitrance until they are content to adhere to their bounds; their sacred month is the time for them to fulfil what is due from them; your sacred month is the time for the presence and self-examination;

[holy things demand retaliation; whoever commits aggression against you, then commit aggression against him in the manner that he committed against you; and fear God, and know that God is with the God-fearing.]

And expend in the way of God, what you possess of knowledge by acting in accordance therewith and do not store this away for some other time, lest you not live to see it, for there is nothing more injurious than procrastination; and cast not [yourselves] by your own hands into, the, destruction, that is excess and the postponement of action through knowledge, expending it for the welfare of your souls, since that necessarily brings about privation; but be virtuous, in other words, in [the performance of] your acts be witnesses, for indeed God loves the virtuous, those who are witnesses of their Lord in their acts, performing them in sincere devotion to Him.

Fulfil the Pilgrimage, that is the declaration of the unity of the Essence, and the Visitation, that is the declaration of the unity of the attributes by completing all of the stations and states through your wayfaring, to God, and in God; but if you are restricted, by the [evil-]commanding soul’s unbelievers’ preventing you from these, then [give] such offering as may be feasible, and struggle in the way of God by driving the offering of the soul and sacrificing it in the courtyard of the heart’s Kaʿba or the open space of that which the heart has desired of it in the way of a station. The [expression] ‘such as may be feasible’ is an allusion to the fact that each souls is different [from the next] in terms of its preparedness and its attributes: some [souls] are characterised by [possessing] the attributes of a feeble animal, while others [are characterised] by the attributes of a powerful animal, and upon each is what is feasible; some [are characterised] by the attributes of a meek animal, easily-led, while others still by the attributes of a difficult animal, not easily-led; it may be that some of them possess an attribute which cannot easily be curbed, even though all its other attributes may be easily curbed — such a pilgrim always finds himself restricted; and do not shave your heads: do not remove the effects of nature and prefer that the heart be in [a state of] goodness and the mind free of all anxieties and attachments, as well as habits and devotions, [content in] restricting yourself to untroubled moments, as is the way of the Qalandriyya; until the offering, of the soul, reaches its place, namely, its sacrificial spot or the place of its immolation, which requires that its acts, which had been prohibited during its lifetime on account of its [desire for them out of] caprice, become permitted upon its slaughter because these [desires] are then from the heart, so that you then become secure from the remains of these [acts] for otherwise your moment would be disturbed and your peacefulness sullied by their becoming manifest and stimulated upon being summoned by the expansion of the heart, as is the case with most [adherents] of the Qalandriyya today. If any of you is sick, that is, of a weak preparedness, whose heart is filled with accidents that are concomitants of its [the soul’s] nature or acquired through habit; or has an ailment of the head, or is prevented, afflicted with anxieties, attachments, depravities or [certain] configurations so that neither wayfaring nor [spiritual] struggle in the way required is feasible for him, but that [if] instead such [a person] is content to restrict himself to goodness of the heart and a peaceful moment so that he might remain upon [his] primordial nature and not relapse or come down a degree, even if [it means that] he would not [be able to] rise [a degree], then he has to offer a redemption by way of abstaining from some of his pleasures and ego-centric preoccupations, or performing a pious act or spiritual disciplining and struggling that might curb some of his competing faculties: let such [a person] preserve his moment and look after his purity [of state] by means of some [act of] renunciation, devotion or [simply by] contravening the [temptations of his] soul.

When you are secure, from the beseiging enemy, then whoever enjoys [the Visitation], the tasting of the self-disclosure of the attributes seeking this as a means to the pilgrimage of the self-disclosure of the Essence; let his offering be such as is feasible, in accordance with his state, or if he finds none, because of the weakness of his soul, its dullness and defeat, then a fast of three days, then he has to abstain from the acts associated with the faculties, which are the powerful principles, [in the Pilgrimage], at the time of self-disclosure and the total immersion in the union and the annihilation in the unity; for these, the [faculties of] intellect, estimation and imagination, must be veiled and dragged down to the depths of the soul and the breast; and of seven when you return, to the station of differentiation and multiplicity, which is the five external senses, as well as anger and passion, so that he might be upright in [performing] things for the sake of God; that is a full ten, an outline, in other words, those mentioned abstentions from the acts of these faculties and sentiments constitute all of the perfect details that inevitably induce the great effects of the faculties of that existence of his that is endowed with the truth upon the attainment of perfection, as He said, ‘I become his hearing by which he hears and his sight by which he sees’ until the end of the ḥadīth;^{1This ḥadīth qudsī is cited above, in the commentary to Q. 2:9.} that, ruling, is for him whose family are not present at the Sacred Mosque, those perfect beloved who are present at the station of the heart at the unity, for he can have no offering, no struggle and no spiritual discipline for his arrival and wayfaring to God; rather that is for the lovers. [And fear God, and know that God is severe in retribution].

The Pilgrimage is in months well-known, in other words, the time for the Pilgrimage is a series of defined periods, namely, from the attainment of physical maturity to the age of forty, as He said in the description of the cow, [that it was] neither old nor virgin, [but] middling between that [Q. 2:68]; whoever undertakes the duty of Pilgrimage during them, upon himself with resolve and commits himself, then no lewdness, that is, [no] lewd act by the manifestation of the appetitive faculty, nor wickedness, no revilement [of others], meaning, the dissent of the irascible faculty against obedience to the heart, or disputing, that is, violating the rational faculty by means of a devilish act, in the Pilgrimage, that is, when seeking the house of the heart. Whatever good you do, in the way of a meritorious act through these three faculties by the command of the Law and that of the intellect, to the exclusion of any despicable acts, God knows it, and will reward you for it. And take provision, from the meritorious aspects [of these faculties] which necessarily means that you avoid the despicable ones; for the best provision is guard oneself, against such [despicable acts], and fear you Me, in your actions and intentions, O people of pith!, for the main issue for the pith [your innermost heart], that is, the intellect that is pure from any of the blemishes of illusion and the husk of matter, is to fear Me.

You would not be at fault if you should seek bounty from your Lord, that is, do not have any inhibitions, upon your return to mutiplicity, about seeking gentle comforts for your souls and giving them the enjoyment of their shares [of this world] in accordance with the Law and as permitted by the Truth, for [the fulfilment of] their shares thus would reinforce their being in harmony with the heart in its pursuit of its goals and because they would not then be transgressors illumined as they would be by the light of the Truth; but when you press on, that is, when you push your souls forward [from ʿArafāt], from the station of complete gnosis, which is the last of the holy rites of the Pilgrimage and the mother of them all, as the Prophet, peace be upon him, said, “The Pilgrimage is essentially ʿArafa”; then remember God at the Sacred Waymark, that is, witness God’s beauty at the spiritual mystery that is called the Hidden (al-khafiyy), for remembrance at this station is to witness, while the sacred waymark is the locus for sensing the beauty which the other is forbidden from reaching; and remember Him as He has guided you, to remembrance of Him at the [various] levels. For He, exalted be He, has guided [you] first to remembrance by the tongue, which is the remembrance of the soul, then to the remembrance by the heart which is is the remembrance of the acts, [remembrance] from which issue forth the graces and favours of God, then to the remembrance of the innermost heart which is the eyewitnessing of the acts and the unveiling of the sciences of the disclosures of the attributes, then to the remembrance of the spirit which is the witnessing of the lights of the disclosures of the attributes together with the observing of the light of the Essence, then to the remembrance of the Hidden which is the witnessing of the beauty of the Essence together with the subsistence of the duality [?], then to the remembrance of the essence which is the witnessing of the essence through the lifting of the subsistence, though previously, that is, before your arrival and stand at the ʿArafāt of gnosis, you were misguided, [away] from these remembrances.

Then press on from where the people press on, then press on towards the outer forms of devotion and obedience, and all of the duties ordained by the obligations and transactions of the Law, ‘from where’ meaning from the station from which all people press on [to engage in these devotions] and be like any one of them. Al-Junayd [of Baghdad], God’s mercy be upon him, was once asked, “What is the end?”. He said, “The return to the beginning”; and seek God’s forgiveness, against the soul’s manifesting itself and becoming weary of its state and its tyrrany. The Prophet said, “Verily my heart is overcome [by the temptations of the soul] and I so seek God’s forgiveness seventy times a day”. And he said, “O God, establish me firmly upon your religion” and he was asked about [why he would say] this, to which he replied, “What [else] would give me security given that the likeness of the heart is as a feather in an open expanse which the winds turn about as they wish”. And when his feet became swollen [from the exertions of prayers], ʿĀʾisha, may God be pleased with her, said to him, “Has not God already forgiven your sins past and future?”, to which he said, “Should I not then be a grateful servant?” The Commander of the Believers [ʿAlī], “I seek refuge with God from misguidance after guidance”.

And when you have performed your holy rites, and are finished with the Pilgrimage, remember God as you remember your fathers, or yet more intensely, in other words, do not be like the followers of habit, preoccupied with the remembrance of your lineage and mutual vainglory and all of the worldly states, for all of that sullies your moment and hardens the heart. Rather, occupy yourselves with the various types of invocation and group remembrance with your brothers, just as you used to invoke the states of your lineages and the states of this world before the wayfaring, or as intensely as such people remember these states habitually or more intensely and more profoundly and more frequently than them so that your purity might subsist and people might be guided through you. There are some people who say, ‘Our Lord, [give to us in this world]’, in other words, they only demand the things of this world and occupy themselves solely with remembrance of them and only worship God for the sake of [securing] these; such people will have no part in the Hereafter, since his orienting of himself towards the lowly prevents him from receiving the nobler because his aspirations never rise to the latter and [because of] the acquisition of the darkness that precludes [the acquisition of] light.

And there are others who say, ‘Our Lord, give to us [in this world good, and good in the Hereafter, and guard us against the chastisement of the Fire’], that is, such a person demands the good of both abodes and guards against being veiled by darkness and being chastised by the fires of physical nature and [against] the privation from the lights of mercy.

Those — they shall have a portion from what they have earned, of the shares of the Hereafter and the lights of the abode of permanence and the pleasures that endure as a result of [their] righteous deeds after the self-reckoning and the removal of some of [their] good deeds by the evil ones and their chastisement commensurate with these [evil deeds] or their being pardoned.

And remember God during certain days numbered, that is, at certain levels after finishing from the Pilgrimage, which are the levels of the spirit, that of the heart and that of the soul, for if the one who has arrived returns, he will return to these levels and in all three levels he must be in God, that which constitutes his remembrance. If any man hastens on in two days, that is no sin for him, in other words, the one who hastens to his shares at the levels of the spirit and the heart, then no sin shall be against him, for the spirit and the heart and their [respective] shares do not veil and do not harm. The meaning of ‘hastening’ is that if movement takes place through God, then it is faster because it is not accompanied by delay or stop until either the heart or the spirit manifests itself and becomes a luminous veil, as it does in the case of those of variegation; and if he delays, until the third, which is the level of the soul, it is not a sin for him, if he guards himself; that judgement applies to the one who guards against being with the soul during the shares of the soul; for the soul adheres more intensely to its share than [do] its two companions [the heart and the spirit] and its share is harsher and remoter from light than the shares of these two [companions] and it manifests itself more rapidly given that it is marked by fickleness and movement, in contrast with its two companions. Moreover, its share often veils and when it veils, its veil is a harsh and dark one; thus to be on one’s guard and to be cautious is obligatory and more of a priority than in the case of the other two, since if these [latter] manifest themselves their veil is thin and disappears more easily; or [it is that] this choice [of delaying] is for the one who guards himself at all three levels; and fear God, in all three places, lest egoism and the ego in existence (āniyya) manifest themselves, so that you might be in Him in all shares, and not with your soul, heart or spirit; and know that to Him you shall be gathered, that is, that you will be gathered with Him, gathered from one Name to another Name, present in His presence. Thus you stand in great danger, unlike all other people, as is mentioned in the ḥadīth, “The saved ones are upon great danger”, and it is related from the Prophet from God, “Give good tidings to the sinners that I am Forgiving and warn the truthful ones that I am Forgiving”.

And among people there is he who pleases you, that is, he feigns love, but is most stubborn in dispute, because he stands at the station of the soul as a heretic, which is why He says in his speech in the life of this world, since he has nothing to say through his heart in the Hereafter.

And when he turns his back, he hastens about the earth [to do corruption there and to destroy the tillage and the stock], because of his disregard of the Law and his heresy, which is the case that you see with most of those who claim love [of God] and affirmation of the Oneness, and God loves not corruption: in other words, he is a worker of corruption but claims to love God. But how would such [love] be forthcoming in his case when the lover only does what his beloved loves and God does not love what he does. Such a person cannot be truthful in his claim, as the poet says:

‘You disobey the Divine while you outwardly manifest love of Him.

That is vile, an act unheard of. For if your love were truthful you would be obedient to Him. Indeed, the lover is to his beloved obedient’.

And when it is said to him, ‘Fear God’, he is seized by vainglory in his sin, in other words, egocentric zealotry, the zealotry of pagandom [cf. Q. 48:26] has driven him to sin in obstinacy and insolence because of his soul’s becoming manifest at that point and his claim that he is better informed about his actions than the one counselling him; so Gehenna shall be enough for him, that is, his ultimate goal is the very depth of his lowly level, in which he is, and its darkness, for Gehenna means a darkened abyss of unfathomable depth.

[But there are other men who] sell themselves, desiring God’s pleasure, who expend themselves in wayfaring upon the path of God seeking His satisfaction.

[O you who believe] come into submission [all of you], meaning, into surrender and the submission of your countenances to God, since the mutual enmity between the faculties and their discord in failing to submit to God’s command is proof that you are following [the steps of] Satan, who wishes for you to merit God’s subjugation by committing reprehensible acts of excess, because of his instinctive enmity towards you on account of his innate disposition being different from yours and [on account of] his lacking the light of your primordial nature, given that he was created from fire and seeks only that you be fiery like him and not luminous. He is thus an enemy in the form of a lover.

But if you slip, from the station of submission to God’s command, after the clear proofs, the proofs of the disclosures of the acts and the attributes, have come to you, know then that God is Mighty, Victorious and will vanquish you, Wise, vanquishing only as required by wisdom and wisdom requires the vanquishing of the contending opponent so that the assenting obedient one takes heed and becomes more obedient.

What do they wait for that God shall come to them, disclose Himself, in the shadows, in the attributes of Ipseity from among the entirety of the disclosures of [His] attributes and [in] the forms of the angels of the heavenly powers while He has decreed the command for their destruction in the [Preserved] Tablet; and to God all matters are returned, whereupon every man is confronted with his recompense or his soul departs to Him through annihilation.

People were one community, that is, upon the [one] primordial nature and the religion of truth, as the Prophet said, “Every newborn is upon the primordial nature and while he is upon the covenant of the first nature — or [he said] during childhood, or during the time of Adam, peace be upon him — he is upon the truth”. People were one community, they then differed upon being created, in accordance with their different natures and [the different degrees of] in which [certain] attributes of their souls predominate, and their different airs.^{1Cf. Chittick’s discussion of this term (as the plural of hawāʾ, ‘caprice’), 1989:137.} For the opposition within the bases of their make-up and the positioning points of their bodies together with the variedness of [their] locations and atmospheres requires that [it be so], as does [the tendency in] their character to draw out what is specifically beneficial [to each] and to repel what is specifically harmful, [and this is] because of the fact that each [one of them] is veiled by the matter of his own body and [because] the divine wisdom requires that it be so for the welfare of creation, since growth entails mutual enmity and contrariety;

then God sent forth the prophets, in order to summon them away from disagreement and towards concord, and from multiplicity towards unity, and from enmity towards mutual love; but they split into groups against them and became distinct [groups]. As for the inhabitants of the lower world, those in whose character love of falsehood has taken deep roots and whose hearts have been taken over by rust that which has imprinted itself upon them and blinded them, such that their preparedness has dissipated because of the predominance of their caprice and their discord and obstinacy have increased: it is as though they differed only at their sending forth [at the resurrection] and [at the point of] their being brought the book, which is the cause for truth and concord becoming manifest, out of the mutual envy that has issued forth from their souls and because of the prevailing [over them] of their caprice and [because of] their being veiled. As for the inhabitants of the higher realm, who have remained upon the original purity and the primordial preparedness, these God has guided them to the truth over which they had [previously] been in disagreement, so that their disagreeement disappears and they wayfare upon the straight path.

Or did you suppose that you should enter, the, Paradise, of the disclosure of the Beauty, without there having come upon you [the like], the state, of those who passed away before you? They were afflicted by, the misery of avoidance, disengagement, poverty and need [of God], and [by] the hardship of struggle, spiritual discipline and the breaking of the soul through worship, and were shaken, by the exigencies of yearning and love away from the established abodes of their souls so that they might manifest the potential within their preparedness, to the point that the Messenger and those who believed with him said, ‘When will God’s help come?’, in other words, to the point that you have become exasperated at the lengthy duration of [their state of] being veiled and the extent of [spiritual] struggling against the separation and the loss of patience [waiting] to witness the Beauty and to taste the union; they thus demand God’s help through Self-disclosure in order to suppress the attributes of the soul despite the strength of their patience and virtuous suffering of what the Beloved does and what He wants for them in the way of afflicting them with abandonment and making them taste of separation because of the intensity of the power of [their] love [for Him]: [imagine then] how it is with those others [who have no such love for Him]. And when their effort has reached its limits and their energies are exhausted they are granted their request and it is said to them: Ah, but surely God’s help is nigh: in other words, the veil is lifted and the effects of the Beauty become manifest.

Prescribed for you is, to fight against the soul and Satan ‘though it be hateful to you’, more bitter than the taste of colocynth and more terrible than the bone-crunching bite of a lion. Yet it may happen that you hate a thing which is good for you, because you veil yourselves with the caprice of the soul and the love of quick pleasure from what is within [that struggle] in the way of much good and tremendous spiritual pleasure that scorns that shortlived hardship when compared with that enduring good and timeless everlasting pleasure; the same applies to the opposite [statement] [and it may happen that you love a thing which is bad for you]. And God knows, the good and the evil that affairs entail, and you do not know, these things because of your being veiled by the here and now from what will be and by the manifest from the hidden.

They ask you about the sacred month, [about] fighting in it: they ask you about the struggle of the soul and its helpers and [about] Satan and his hosts at the moment of orientation and wayfaring to the Truth and the concentration of the hidden aspects, in which any motion of by the inmost consciousness is forbidden. Say: to engage in the spiritual struggle at that [very] moment is a serious and arduous affair; to turn your faces away from the way of God and the station of the mystery and the locus of the presence is to become veiled from the Truth; and to expel the people of the heart, who are the spiritual faculties, from their resting places is more terrible and grave in God’s sight; the seditious trial of idolatry and disbelief and the test you have to endure by them is graver than your slaying of them with the swords of spiritual discipline; these egocentric faculties and satanic caprices will not cease to fight against you by driving you away from your religion and your goals and summoning you to the religion of caprice and satanism, until they turn you from your religion if they are able; and whoever of you turns from his religion, by following them — those, their works, which they have done, in terms of their submission and obedience, have failed. Those are the inhabitants of the Fire, of the veil and [its] chastisement, abiding therein.

Verily those who have believed, with certainty, and have emigrated, from the places inhabited by the soul and [from] the familiarities of caprice, and have struggled in God’s way, and [against] the hosts of Satan and the evil-commanding soul — those have hope of God’s compassion, the self-disclosures of the attributes and the lights of the witnessing.

They ask you about, the, wine, of caprice and the love of this world, and the chance-games, of the conniving of the soul in order to draw out [its] share. Say: ‘In both there is [great] sin: veil and distance [from God]; and profit for people, in the way of livelihood and the actualisation of egocentric pleasures and joy at the overlooking of contemptible and disturbing [spiritual] configurations and sullying anxieties but the sin in them is greater than the usefulness’. And they will ask you what they should expend. Say: Comfortably’. So, God makes clear His signs to you that you might reflect …

Have you not seen who went forth from their habitations, that is, from their familiar [spiritual] abodes and the habitual resting-points of their souls and [from] their stations and levels of this world and did not become dependent on them by the exigencies of caprice — such people being numerous?, [in their thousands], fearful of death?, [that is, fearful] of ignorance and severance from the real life and [fearful] of falling into the abysses of natural desire; God said to them, ‘Die!’, in other words, He commanded them to voluntary death or He made them die to their essences by the self-disclosure of His essence so that they were annihilated in the Unity. Then He gave them life, through the real life of knowledge or through Himself by means of the bestowed existence of the Truth and subsistence after annihilation; it is not far-fetched [to say] that what He means by this is what was meant by the story of Ezra: they went forth in flight from natural death, whereupon God made them die and then gave them life by attaching their spirits to bodies of a genus similar to their bodies so that they might actualise therewith their perfection. [Truly God is bounteous to people, but most people are not thankful].

So fight in God’s way, [against] the soul and Satan according to the first [interpretation] and the second; according to the third [reading], do not fear death when engaging the enemy for fleeing [from it] shall not avail you just as it did not avail those [mentioned above]: God will give you life as He gave those life; [and know that God is Hearing, Knowing].

[Who is he that will lend God] a loan that is good, namely the expending of the soul through struggle or expending wealth out of love [and He will multiply it for him manifold?] God straitens and enlarges, in other words, He is as you are in your dealings in terms of straitening and enlarging, for in your descriptions you are demeaning His descriptions. When you are niggardly with what you possess, He straitens [things] for you and stints; but when you are munificent, He enlarges [His provision] for you in accordance with your munificence, as mentioned in the ḥadīth: ‘Assistance is sent down commensurate to the provision [given]’; [and to Him you shall be returned].

[Then their prophet said to them, ‘Verily as king for you God has raised up] Saul: [he] was a poor man of no [distinguished] lineage and no wealth and so they did not accept him as king, because according to the generality the eligibility for kingship and leadership is through [the manifestation of] outer felicity, that is wealth and lineage, which is why their prophet warned them that eligibility is rather through the other two felicities, that of the spirit, which is knowledge and that of the body, which is increased physical strength and solid build and breadth, by saying [to them]: ‘and He has increased him broadly in knowledge and body, and God knows best who is fit for kingship and gives it [the kingship] to whom He will; and God is Embracing, great in gift, giving wealth as He gives kingship, Knowing, who is eligible and what wealth such [a person] would need to support himself and give it to him [accordingly]. He then makes it clear that [an individual’s] fitness for kingship entails another sign which is that [God’s] creatures submit to him and that awe of him and respect for him alight in their hearts and that their hearts are at peace with him, and that they love him and cede to his command in obedience and compliance; that is what the ancient Persians used to call khoreh^{1The kingly aura or magnetism associated with ancient Persian monarchs that derived from the royal communion with the Divine: see [ref needed]} that was exclusive to the Kayanian [Persian] Kings. Thereafter, they called [this special aura] farr^{2A variant, later Persian form, used to refer to the same concept of khoreh, a divine mystical power projected onto the appointed monarch.} and said that the farr of kingship was possessed by Fereydun; and that when it had disappeared from Kay Kāvus, they sought the one who possessed this farr and found it in the blessed King Kay Khusrau,^{3Kay Khusrau was Kay Kāvus’s grandson and successor. On all of these characters, see Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh.} who then called it the tābūt, that is, the thing to which he would refer all matters — because tābūt is [based on the grammatical paradigm] faʿlūt from [the infinitive] al-tawb [to return]; in other words, there will come to you from this [tābūt] what will establish his kingship by way of submission, obedience, compliance and love for him which God will cast into your hearts — as the Prophet said, ‘I was given victory [over my enemies] through terror [being cast into their hearts] even [they happen to be] at a distance of one month’s journeying’^{4The ḥadīth, in Muslim’s Ṣaḥīḥ, mentions five other aspects in which the Prophet Muḥammad was favoured over all other prophets, including his intercession (shafāʿa) and ‘the sum of all [excellent] speech’ (jawāmiʿ al-kalim).} — or [it meant] that to which he will refer in terms of his ego-centric condition and his [spiritual] configuration (hayʾa), which will testify to the validity of his kingship.

[And their prophet said to them, ‘The sign of his kingship is that there will come to you the Ark:] in it is a Spirit of Peace from your Lord, in other words, that in which your hearts will find peace, and a remnant of what the folk of Moses and the folk of Aaron left behind, among their descendants of the concept called farr, which is a light from the angelic realm by which the soul is illumined through its being joined to the angelic heavenly realm and receiving that effusion from the world of power, a requisite for the actualisation of the science of governance and the disposal of kingship and the wisdom created for it; the angels bearing it: in other words, it will come down to you through the medium of the heavenly angels. It is possible that this [tābūt] was a box containing a talismanic seal of the sort that would bring victory to the [king’s] army, and other such royal talismans as are mentioned. It seems that it contained an image with a half human half feline head with a tail like a cat’s, similar to the one that existed during the reign of Fereydun, called Darafsh-e Kaviyan.

‘God will try you with a river, the spring of the corporeal nature; whoever drinks of it, is not of me: meaning whoever gulps from it drinking in immoderation, because the people of [corporeal] nature and the worshippers of passions are lowlier and the most incapacitated of God’s creatures, possessing not the strength to fight against the Goliath of the evil-commanding soul nor against Goliath the enemy of religion, since they possess neither [spiritual] zeal nor intensity [and whoever tastes it not, he is of me] except for him who scoops up with his hand, that is, except for the one who contents himself from it in the measure that necessity and need require, without covetousness and over-indulging in it.

But they drank of it, that is, they gulped away at it and became engrossed in it, except a few of them: for those who rise above the filth of [physical] nature and sanctify themselves against coming into contact with it and who disengage themselves from its coverings are few in comparison with those others. God, exalted be He, says but few are they [Q. 38:24] and And few indeed of My servants are thankful [Q. 34:13]: and these are the ones who believed with him [Saul] from among the people of certainty (ahl al-yaqīn), those who knew with the certainty of their light that victory comes not with numbers but through divine assistance. Thus they remained steadfast in the face of what they saw with their own eyes because of the power of their certainty and were hence victorious:

Scarcely is there one who when he is resolute in a matter which he seeks and takes steadfastness as his companion who does not then win a victory

God, there is no god except Him, in existence. So no matter what is worshipped other than Him, the worship that [actually] takes place is of Him alone, whether it is known or not, since there is no worshipped [being] nor exsitent except He; the Living, whose life is His very essence and all that is living lives only through His life; the Eternal Sustainer, is the One who subsists in Himself, and all that subsists does so through Him; were it not for His subsistence, nothing in existence would subsist. [It] seizes Him not, somnolence and drowsiness, as it does living creatures without their intending it, which can only be [the case] for one whose life is accidental, so that nature overwhelms him with an essential state seeking calm and rest and a replacement for the dissolution (taḥlīl) of the waking state. But as for Him whose life is His very Essence, that [state] is not possible for Him. He has made it clear that His life is not an accident in His words: neither sleep. For sleep is incompatible with a life being essential as it is the thing that most resembles death, which is why it is said that sleep is the brother of death. He who has no sleep on account of His Essence — because of it being precluded that His life is other than His Essence — undergoes no somnolence, since somnolence constitutes one of its [sleep’s] preludes and effects. [It is] similar to when one says, ‘He does not laugh, not even astonished’. His saying slumber seizes Him not, neither sleep, is an explanation of His being the Eternal Sustainer. To Him belongs all that is in the heavens and the earth: their fate^{1Literally, ‘their forelocks’.} is in His hand; He does with them as He pleases. Who is there that shall intercede with Him save by His leave? Since everything belongs to Him and it is through Him that the one who speaks through Him speaks and with His speech, so how can they speak without His permission and His will? He knows, what is before them and what is after them, so how [can He not know] about them and their state? In other words, His knowledge encompasses all times and all individuals and all states, and thus He knows who is worthy of intercession and who is not worthy of it. And they encompass nothing of His knowledge save such as He wills, that is, [except for] what His will has required that He teach them. Thus the knowledge of every knower is something of His knowledge manifested in that locus, in the manner related by the angels when they said: we do not have any knowledge except that which You have made us know [Q. 2:32].

His seat, that is, His knowledge, embraces the heavens and the earth, since the kursī is place where knowledge is, which is the heart, as Abū Yazīd al-Basṭāmī, may God have mercy on him, said, ‘If the world and everything in it a thousand thousand times over were located in some corner of the heart of the gnostic, he would not notice it, because of the extent of its [that heart’s] embrace’. That is also why al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī said that His seat (kursī) is His throne (ʿarsh), drawing upon his [the Prophet’s] saying, peace be upon him: ‘The heart of the believer derives from the throne of (ʿarsh) God’. [The term] kursī in the classical language is a small ʿarsh, not larger than the seat on which a person sits: the heart is likened to it in order to convey an image in the imagination of its greatness and [the extent of] its embrace. As for the greater glorious throne, it is the First Spirit. The representation of both [the ʿarsh and the kursī] and their image in the witnessed [world] are [respectively] the greatest sphere and the eighth [sphere] which encompasses the seven heavens and all that is in them. [It] wearies Him not, that is, the preserving of them, does not weigh Him down, because they do not exist without Him such that the bearing of them [should then] weary Him. Rather, the whole of the supra-sensory world (ʿālam maʿnawī) is His esoteric aspect and the formal world (ʿālam ṣuwarī) is His exoteric aspect: these have no existence except through Him and are none other than Him. He is the High, in rank, whom nothing surpasses and who surpasses everything and overwhelms it through [its] annihilation; the Tremendous, the quintessence of whose greatness cannot be conceived. Any greatness that might be conceived in the case of a given thing is but a percolation of His greatness. Every great thing is so [only] because of a portion and a tremendous share that it receives from His greatness. Absolute greatness belongs exclusively to Him; indeed all greatness belongs to Him and no other has any share in it. This [verse] is the greatest verse in the Qurʾān because of the magnitude of what it demonstrates.

There is no compulsion in religion, because in reality religion is the guidance that is acquired from the light of the heart that is a concomitant of the human primordial nature and that is required for the faith of certainty, as God, exalted be He, says: so set your purpose for religion as a ḥanīf, a nature given by God, upon which He originated mankind. There is no changing God’s creation. That is the upright religion [Q. 30:30], and Islam, which is the exoteric aspect of religion, is built upon this [guidance] and is something in which compulsion can have no place. The proof that the esoteric and true aspect of religion is faith, just as its exoteric aspect and [outer] form is Islam, comes in what follows: Rectitude has become clear, that is, it is distinguished, from error, by means of clear proofs, for the one who possesses insight (baṣīra) and reason (ʿaql), as they say, ‘The morning is bright for he who has eyes’; so whoever disbelieves in the false deity, that is, [in] what is other than God and denies its existence and its effect, and believes in God, a belief of witnessing and in truth, has laid hold of the most firm handle [that cannot be split], that is, he has held onto the Essential Unity whose ties and modes of operation are in of Itself, such that there is nothing firmer than It, since every thing that holds onto It is firmly attached, nay, every existence is existent through It and non-existent in itself. Thus if one were to consider such [a thing’s] existence, then it is split (infiṣām) in itself because a contigent thing’s attachment and existence is only through the Necessary [Existent]. When consideration [of this Existent] is severed from that [contingent] thing then that contingent’s existence is terminated and is no longer anything in itself. This [Necessary Existent] cannot be split from the existence of His very essence since He does not entail divisibility (tajazzuʾ) or duality (ithnayniyya). There is a subtle detail in this [concept of] ‘splitting’ (infiṣām), which is that a splitting (infiṣām) is a breaking (inkisār) but without separation (infiṣāl). Since no contingent can be separated from His Essence, exalted be He, or remove itself from It — given that it would either be an act of His or an attribute of His — there can be absolutely no separation. Nay, if reason would consider such [a contingent] in isolation, it would appear split, that is lacking [independent] existence, its existence attached to His existence, exalted be He. And God is Hearing, hears the speech of those who have religion, Knowing, of their intentions and their faith.

God is the Protector of the believers, taking charge of their affairs and their love [for Him]. He brings them forth from, the shadows of the attributes of the soul and the ambiguities (shubuhāt) of the imagination and estimation into the light of certainty and guidance and [into] the space of the world of spirits. And the disbelievers — their protectors are, those whom they worship besides God, that bring them forth, from the light of preparedness and the guidance inherent in the primordial nature into the shadows of the attributes of the soul and [into] uncertainties and doubts.

Or such as he who passed by a town: in other words, have you considered the example of he who passed by a town whose inhabitants had perished under its fallen roofs and collapsed walls, and who then marvelled that it could be brought back to life, being as he was a wayfaring seeker who had not yet attained the station of certainty and had not been prepared to receive the light of the self-disclosure of the Life-giver. The most widespread opinion is that this [man] was Ezra. So God made him die, that is, He made him subsist upon a death of ignorance, just as He said our Lord You have caused us to die twice [Q. 40:11], according to [the interpretation of] one opinion, and He also said when you were dead and He gave you life [Q. 2:28], a hundred years: it is possible that in their time a single year was based on the lunar cycle, making it 8 [proper] years and 4 months; or it could have been based on the seasons of the year, making it 25 years, and [it is also possible] that at that time their spans of life were [considerably] longer; then He raised him up, with true life and asked him to consider the period he had tarried; he did not think that it had been longer than a day or part of a day, deeming insignificant the duration of time he had tarried in that death of ignorance which is finite in relation to everlasting life and also because he did not sense the passing of this period, as with one who is asleep and oblivious to the passage of time. Then after he had reflected, God pointed out to him how long the period of ignorance and the death of obliviousnessn had been by [informing him] that it had been a hundred years. Or [it could be understood] that He made him die through voluntary death during one of the periods mentioned so that the period then represents the time spent in spiritual discipline, wayfaring and struggling in the way of God. Or [still] that He made him die a natural death such that his spirit became attached to the body of another of his own genus in order to acquire perfection either after a certain period or immediately until one of the three mentioned periods had passed without him looking into his state, unaware of his origination and his [ultimate] return: in this way he had been dead throughout his actual life. He then looked into his state through the light of knowledge and came to know his origination and his return. As for his words: ‘I have tarried a day, or part of a day’, these are similar to God’s statement [elsewhere] And on the day when We shall gather them as if they had not tarried but an hour of the day [Q. 10:45],^{1The first person plural, as opposed to the third person singular, is historically the reading of all Qurʾān reciters, with the exception of ʿĀṣim (cf. Ibn Mujāhid, Qirāʾāt, 327).} and His statement The day they see it, it will be as if they had only tarried for an evening or the morning thereof [Q. 79:46], and His statement And on the Day when the Hour comes the guilty shall swear that they had not tarried more than an hour [Q. 30:55]: all of that is because of their obliviousness to the passage of time. Similar is the case of one who after having parted with a brother or a companion or some such thing is reunited after a lengthy period of separation: it will be as if that period had never been, for he no longer senses it after it has passed [and he has been reunited], even though he may have suffered its hardship before the reunion. Look at your food and drink, it has not spoiled: they say that his food was figs and grapes, his drink wine and milk. Figs are an allusion to the universal objects of perception since they are made up totally of kernels and since the particulars that are in them are there potentially, just like the seeds that are in the figs. Grapes are an allusion to the particulars because material appendages remain with them upon perception, such as the dregs of the juice and its seeds. Milk is an allusion to beneficial knowledge, such as the prescriptions of the divine law. Wine is an allusion to the fervent love [of the divine], will, the gnostic sciences and the realities. ‘It has not spoiled’: in other words it has not changed from what has been since pre-eternity in accordance with the primordial nature, deposited as it is within you. Indeed these various aspects of knowledge are stored within every soul in accordance with its preparedness, as he [the Prophet], peace be upon him, has said: ‘Mankind are minerals like gold and silver minerals. Even if they are veiled by [other] materials and are hidden for periods of time as they endure fluctuation in the shadows of barzakhs,^{2On the concept of the barzakh, see Chittick 1989: 117-118, 125. Also EI2, ‘barzakh’, I, 1071; EQ, ‘barzakh’, I, 204.} they are not spoiled and do not change their state, such that when the veil is removed through the purity of the heart, they manifest themselves as they had once been. That is why he [the Prophet], peace be upon him, said: ‘Wisdom is a believer’s ultimate goal’. And look at your ass, that is, [at] your body in its present state, according to the first and second interpretation; according to a third it means [look at your ass] how its bones have crumbled and wasted; so that We might make you a sign for people, that is, and so that We might make you a proof of [the truth of] the resurrection for people, We resurrected you. And look at the bones, how We shall set them up, how We shall make them become upright, and then clothe them with flesh’: in both aspects the meaning is obvious [enough], for when he is resurrected and comes to know his state and his disengagement from his body, he will know that his body is composite by [the act of] the bones being raised, gathered and clothed with flesh. So, when it, the gathering forth and the resurrection, was made clear to him, he said, ‘I know that God has power over all things’.

And when Abraham said, ‘My Lord show me how You give life to the dead’, in other words, make me attain the station of eyewitnessing at the station of certain knowledge, which is why his faith was affirmed with the [use of the] affirmative interrogative hamza [a-] in He said, ‘Why [a-wa-lam] do you not believe?’, that is, do you not know that for certain, to which Abraham, peace be upon him, responded by saying: ‘Yes, but so that my heart may be re-assured’, that is, so that it may be at peace and its reassurance may be actualised as a result of the eyewitnessing, for the eye of certainty brings about reassurance but not [certain] knowledge. Said He, ‘Take four birds: that is, the four faculties that prevented him from the station of the eyewitnessing and the witnessing of the true life. They say that these [four birds] were a peacock, a cock, a raven and a dove or, according to another version, a duck. The peacock represents wonder, the cock passion, the raven ravenousness, the dove love of this world as it consists of its home and its nest; it would appear that [the fourth bird] was a duck, which would then constitute an allusion to the covetousness that is its predominant characteristic; and twist them to you, that is, tilt them and draw them towards you by restraining them and preventing them from going forth in pursuit of pleasures and inclining to their habits. It is said that he was commanded to slaughter them, pluck out their feathers and mix their flesh and blood by pounding them together, but to keep their heads with him, in other words, to prevent them from their acts and remove their configurations from the soul, to suppress their motivations, natures and habits through spiritual discipline, retaining in them [only] their fundaments; then set a part of them on every mountain, that is, from among the mountains that are in your presence, namely the four elements which are the pillars of his body. In other words, suppress them and make them die so that nothing remains but the fundaments centred in your existence and the substances thereof that are deposited in the very natures of the elements that are within you. There seven mountains which accordingly allude to the seven limbs that constitute the parts of the body; then summon them: in other words, if you become alive through their life, then they are disobedient and dominate you, wild, reluctant to accept your command and so if you kill them you will then be alive with the true life that is bestowed [by God] after annihilation and effacement, whereupon they become alive through your life, and not through their own life, the life of the soul that is obedient to you, compliant with your command such that if you [now] summon them, they will come to you in haste. And know that God is Mighty, victorious in vanquishing [disobedient] souls, Wise’, vanquishing them only through wisdom. It [the verse] can also be understood as referring to the gathering of beasts and birds, in which case the [act of] setting the parts of these [birds] on the mountains represents the nourishment of the body through these [attributes] and his [Abraham’s] summoning them and their coming to him in haste represents their orientation towards man after the resurrection.

The likeness of those who expend their wealth in the way of God: Glory be to Him, He mentions three types of expenditure and assigns greater merit for some over others in terms of recompense. The first of these is to expend in the way of God, which is to expend in the world of the kingdom against the self-disclosure of the acts which a person does so that God might reward him and He rewards him seven hundred times what he had given, multiplying it [for him] manifold without limit in accordance with His wish because His hand, exalted be He, is infinitely more open [in generosity] and outreaching than his. And God is Embracing, of great gift, whose gift cannot be compared to ours, Knowing, the intentions of givers and their [varying] convictions that such [gifts] are a result of God’s favour and so He rewards them accordingly. The second [type of expenditure] is to expend against the station of the witnessing of the attributes in the manner that will be mentioned, which is to expend for the sake of God’s satisfaction, in the same way that the former [type of expenditure] is to expend for the sake of acquiring God’s gift. The third [type] is to expend through God which is against the station of the presential vision of the Essence.

[Those who expend their wealth in the way of God] then do not follow up their expenditure with reminder of their generosity and injury: He [here] warns that expenditure is invalidated by reminding [the recipient] of one’s generosity and injury, because expenditure is praiseworthy in all three instances as long as it is in harmony with God’s command, exalted be He, and that it removes the vice of greed form the soul of the expender and that it benefits and comforts the deserving [recipient]. But when the [giving] person reminds [the recipient] of his favour, he has then contravened God’s command, because such [behaviour] is forbidden, and his soul has manifested itself in arrogance and presumptuous reliance on this blessing with conceit, veiling itself with its [conceited] act and deeming that the blessing is from itself as opposed to from God. All of these are vile traits, more base than greed, that attach themselves to that person: had he only see himself in terms of him being the source of that virtue, it would have sufficed him that that [virtue] was invalidated.^{1The point is that such a person makes matters worse when he then proceeds to remind the recipient of his charity of the latter’s indebtedness to him.} As for the third aspect [of expenditure] from the point of view of the one deserving it, the act is invalidated by any injury since that is incompatible with comfort or benefit; the reminder of one’s generosity also invalidates that act because it entails haughtiness and the manifestation of artificiality and establishes blame upon that person. He then says:

Honourable words and forgiveness are better than a voluntary almsgiving followed by injury, because kind words, even in [a negative] response, delights the heart and revives the spirit. As for the voluntary act of charity, it benefits his body and delights the heart but only secondarily and upon the imagining the [subsequent] benefit. When what benefits the body is compared to what injures the spirit, any [potential] benefit is sullied and spoiled and does not materialise [as anticipated] in return for the delight that would result from kind words, even if it is not spoiled [in the first place] because spiritual matters are nobler, more beautiful and have a greater impact upon the soul; and God is Independent, [without need] of any act of charity that is accompanied by injury and He gives the deserving person from the storehouses of His Unseen, Forbearing, not hastening to punish [the evildoer].

But the likeness of those who expend their wealth seeking God’s good pleasure: this is the second category of expenditure, which He has given greater merit than the first by likening it to a garden, since the garden by yielding its produce remains upon the [same] state, unlike the grain [of corn]. Thus He alludes to it as [a constant source of] wealth for them, as though it [the expenditure] were an essential attribute [of such individuals], which is why He says, and to confirm their souls, in other words, to make them settle permanently upon [the attribute of] generosity, which is an attribute of the Lord. As for His saying: upon a hill, that is an allusion to the elevated rank of this [type of] expenditure and its ascendancy over the degree of the first [type]; a torrent, that is, a great share of the Merciful’s attribute of mercy, smites it, as well as a generous reinforcement from the effusion of His generosity, because it [this attribute] is the trait that connects to God, exalted be He, by the interrelationship of the attribution and the preparedness to receive this attribute and to acquire it as an attribute; and if no torrent smites it, that is, [it does not receive] a great share, then [dew], only a small share; and all that you do God sees, [seeing] from which perspective your deeds are performed.

Would any of you wish: this is a simile of a state entailing a good deed, be it an [act of] expenditure or otherwise, through which one draws near to God and seeks His satisfaction — as is the case with this category of expenditure. But then his soul manifests itself in this [deed] and stirs so that its stirrings, which are at variance with the motion of the spirit, and its motives, which are different and in opposition to the exigency of the heart, become like a torrent. Satan then exploits its stirrings and makes these a means for his evil whisperings so that he breathes into it [the soul] the seeing of its deed or making a show [of it]. That breath is thus like a fire that consumes his deed, despite his dire need for it, as the commander of the believers ʿAlī, peace be upon him, said: ‘O God forgive me that [deed] by which I draw near to You but which my heart then disagrees with’.

[O you who believe] expend of the good things you have earned: He commands the third category of expenditure, of the good things that you have earned, because the one who chooses through God chooses the most noble in all things on account of the correspondence [of that noble thing to God], just as the commander of the believers ʿAlī, peace be upon him, said: ‘Verily God is beautiful and loves beauty’. The one who expends through [the stirrings of] his soul is unable to expend what is the most noble because of the niggardliness of the soul and its love of that [which is most noble] and its preferring it for itself instead of singling it out for God: thus what is done through the soul cannot be piety from the outset, because of what God, exalted be He, says you will not attain piety until you expend of what you love [Q. 3:92]; and seek not the corrupt of it for your expending, singling it out for your expending as is the habit of those who expend through their souls and their [physical] nature; for you would never take it yourselves without closing your eyes to it, because of your love of the best of possessions for your selves given that your love of self is exclusively dedicated to such [acquistions], which is why you do not give preference to expend wealth for the sake of God over them and [why you do not] expend the best for Him; and know that God is Self-sufficient, so acquire His attribute of sufficiency which will then give you an abundance that will avail you of wealth and the love of it, Laudable: He does only what is laudable, so make Him your exemplar.

Satan promises you poverty and enjoins you to indecency, that is, [to] the despicable trait, which is niggardliness; so seek refuge from him in God for He, promises you pardon from Him, that the attributes [of His] conceal your souls by His light, and bounty, a bestowal for you from among the bestowals and self-disclosures of His attributes, such as absolute sufficiency so that you never have fear of poverty; and God is Embracing, embracing your essences, your attributes and your gifts. His gift, however, never reduces the extent of His generosity and His gifts are never exhausted, Knowing, where His self-disclosures fall and the [extent of] the preparedness and the deservingness of these [souls of yours].

He gives wisdom to whomever He will, when that person expends sincerely and is doing it with God [in mind], and so He gives him wisdom of expenditure so that he might expend of [this] divine wisdom qualified as he is by His attributes; and he who is given wisdom, has been given much good, because it is the attribute most specific to God; yet none remembers, that wisdom is the noblest of things and the most [God-]specific of attributes, but the people of pith, whose intellects God has illumined by the light of guidance and thus rid it of the blemishes of estimation and the rind of descriptions and habits that is the soul. The reward for the first [type of] expenditure is the doubling [of the reward]. The reward for the second is Paradise of the attributes that yields the fruits of doubled [rewards]. The reward for the third is the wisdom that is the concomitant of existence and the one endowed [with it]: consider then how very different each [type] is.

And whatever expenditure you expend, and whatever vow you make, surely God knows it, [knows] which type it is and rewards you accordingly. For the evildoers, those who expend to make a show before people, who expend in the wrong way, or who diminish what is their due by contemplating their expenditure or combining it with reminder [of one’s favour] or injury, or by expending of what is vile: they have no helpers, to protect them from the might of God.

[If you proclaim your voluntary almsgivings, it is a fine thing; but if you conceal them, and give them to the poor] that is even better for you: because of this being far removed from making a show and closer to sincerity [of intention].

You are not responsible for guiding them, to the three types of expenditure mentioned that are free of reminder, injury, making a show, contemplating the expenditure and its being out of vile [sources]. In other words, you are not responsible for making them guided, rather your responsibility is solely to deliver the [means to] guidance; but God guides whomever He will. And whatever good you expend it is for yourselves, and so why remind people [of the favour] and harm them? for then you are expending desiring only God’s Face, so what is with you that you act arrogantly in this with people and how can you make a show of it? And whatever good you expend, shall be repaid to you in full, none other than you will have a share of it. So in reality do not expend except upon yourselves and not others so that as a result of this [expenditure] nothing of yours is diminished. Why then do you seek to expend of what is vile. Thus the three [types of expenditure] belong to the three categories of expenditure mentioned and by providing similes of the purpose behind them this is a way of warning against the [potential] ruin [that can result] from them.

For the poor, in other words, target the poor with your charity, those who are, constrained by the struggle, in the way of God; and they are unable to journey in the land, in order to engage in commerce or earn [livelihood] because of their preoccupation with God and their being absorbed in their states, spending their moments in devotions: the ignorant man supposes them, rich because of their abstinence, from begging and having no need of people; but you shall know them by their mark, by the paleness of their faces, the light of their foreheads and the configurations of their facial expressions, that they are gnostics, indigent, the folk of God: only God knows them and who belongs with them. They do not beg of men importunately, that is, by persisting, meaning that they do not beg people at all, as when they say, ‘[One] upon an open road but cannot be guided even by a light’, where both the light and the ability to be guided are being precluded. Or [what is meant by the verse] is the preclusion of [their begging with] importunity but the affirmation of their provoking sympathy when begging. And whatever good you expend, that is, regardless of whom you expend on, whether a rich person or a poor one, surely God has knowledge of it, that is, [knowledge] of whether that expenditure is for that person or another and rewards [you] accordingly.

Those who expend, [here] He first refers to [any] expenditure in general, then secondly [He refers to it] according to the time [of day] and state, so that it might be known that there is no difference therein, rather it is [only different] according to purpose or intention.

Those who devour usury shall not rise again, to the end of this [statement]: the devourer of usury is worse off in terms of his state than any grave sinner. For, every thing that a person earns constitutes a [source of] dependence in some way in terms of his livelihood, be that [earning] small or great, as is the case with a merchant or a farmer or an artisan since they have not designated their [sources of] provision by their power of reason, nor was it designated for them prior to its being earned, and so in reality they are upon something of which they have no knowledge of, as the Prophet said: ‘God refuses to provide for the believer except from where he knows not’. As for the one who consumes [through] usury, he has had his source of earning and provision designated, whether the consumer profits or makes a loss; he is veiled from his Lord by his own soul and from his provision by its being designated: in effect he has no dependence on it whatsoever. Thus God, exalted be He, has made him dependent upon his soul and his reason and has removed him from His protection and preservation such that the jinn have seized him and possessed him and on the day of resurrection he shall rise with no connection between him and God, unlike other people who will be connected to Him through [their] trust (tawakkul) in Him. Thus he will be like the demented one made prostrate by Satan unable to guide himself in any direction; that is because they say, in other words, that is because they veiled themselves behind their [false] analogy, and the first to make such a [false] analogy was Satan and so they will be among his companions, outcasts like him.^{1The false analogy that Satan made was when he objected to God’s command to prostrate himself before Adam, arguing that God had created him, Satan, from fire which was superior to Adam’s clay [cf. Q. 38:76].}

God effaces usury, even if it should outwardly seem like an increase, but He augments voluntary almsgivings with interest, even if it should be a diminution in the [state of] witnessing. That is because increase and diminution are so only when one considers their consequences and benefit in both abodes [this and the next]. Wealth that results from usury entails no blessedness because it has been acquired through the contravention of the truth and hence its consequence is an evil one as that person is committing all manner of disobedient acts because every thing consumed generates, by its very consumption, motivations and acts of the same [evil] kind. Thus if it is illicit it drives that person to illicit acts; if it is reprehensible, then [it drives him] to reprehensible acts; [likewise] if it is permitted, then [it drives him] to permitted acts; if it is consumption from a surplus, then [it drives him] to recommended acts and his acts are voluntary extras and favours; and if it should be simply what is mandatory in terms of what is due, then his acts will be mandatory and necessary; if it should be from surpluses or [unanticipated] shares, then his acts will correspond accordingly. Therefore, the sin for usury and the effects of his illicit acts generated by his consumption [of usury] shall fall upon that person, in the way mentioned in the ḥadīth: ‘A sinful act that follows a sinful act is punishment for the former sinful act’. His punishments and sins accumulate continuously while God ruins his wealth in this world such that neither his progeny nor his children and he ends up being among those who have forfeited this world and the Hereafter, that which constitutes total effacement. As for the one who gives voluntary alms, because his wealth is purified, God blesses it so that it bears much fruit as well as retaining for the person the original [reward for the act]. The consumer of such [good acts] can only be an obedient individual in terms of his acts. His wealth will remain for his offspring and his children a source of benefit [for them]: that is the true increase. And even if the only increase [gained] were that it was expended in obedience of God, that would suffice as an increase. For what increase is more excellent than that which remains with God. [Similarly] if the only diminution from usury were that it contravened God and entailed the commission of what He has forbidden, that would suffice as a diminution, for what diminution is more abominable than that which causes the person to be veiled from [God] and his chastisement and the loss of his share [of the Hereafter] with God. God loves not any guilty ingrate, that is, the devourer of usury, ungrateful and guilty in this act of his and God loves not such a person.

To God belongs all that is in the heavens, that is, all that is in the spiritual world in its entirety, His esoteric aspects, His attributes and the covers of His Unseen and the treasure-troves of His generosity, and all that is in the earth, that is, all that is in the corporeal world in its entirety, His exoteric aspects, His names and His acts witness the two worlds witness while He is witness of all things. Whether you disclose what is in your souls, He witnesses it through His names and His exoteric aspects and knows it and requites you for it, and if you hide it, He witnesses through His attributes and His esoteric aspects and knows it and requites you for it, then He will forgive whom He wishes, on account of that person’s affirmation of [His] Oneness and the power of his certainty and that his misdeeds had been accidental and had not taken deep roots in his essence. God’s wish is based on His wisdom; and He will chastise whom He wishes, on account of that person’s corrupt inner conviction and his harbouring of doubt or the misdeeds that have taken deep root in his soul. And God has power over all things, and hence has the power to both to forgive and to chastise.

The Messenger believes in what was revealed to him from his Lord: he has confirmed it by receiving it and assuming the character traits mentioned in it — as ʿĀʾisha said: ‘His [the Prophet’s] character was that of the Qurʾān’ — and his [spiritual] elevation and realisation by means of its significations; and the believers; each one believes in God, each one alone in totality, and in His angels, and in His Books, and His messengers, each one along in differentiation upon becoming upright, witnessing His Oneness in the form of that multiplicity, ascribing a wisdom to each one of His self-disclosures in one of His loci; ‘we make no distinction: in other words, they say, ‘we do not distinguish between any of them [either] by rejecting some or accepting others. Nor do we doubt that they are upon the truth and [sent] with the truth on account of [their] witnessing of the Oneness and [our] witnessing of the truth in them through the truth. And they say, ‘We hear: that is, we have responded to our Lord with respect to His books, messengers and the sending down of His angels and we are upright in our behaviour; Your forgiveness, our Lord: that is, forgive us our existences and attributes and efface them through Your existence and the existence of Your attributes, to You is the homecoming’, through the annihilation in You.

God charges no soul save to its capacity: He does not make it bear except what it has the capacity for and does not constrain therewith its endurance and its preparedness for [His] self-disclosures. For each person’s share of the unveilings and self-disclosures is [commensurate with] what can be borne by the receptacle of his preparedness with which he has been endowed from pre-eternity [that stemmed] from the holiest effusion and will not constrain him; for it is what it is has merited, in the way of good things, knowledge, perfections and unveilings, wherever these be found, whether it be intentional on its [the soul’s] part or unintentional, since these things derived from the world of light: good things are entirely essential to it [the soul] and their benefit returns to it [the soul], unlike the evil things, such as ignorance, despicable traits, acts of disobedience and deficiencies, which are dark affairs, alien to its [the soul’s] substance and cannot harm it nor can their consequences befall it unless the soul is attracted to them, intentionally seeking them and actively acquiring them, which is why it is said in the ḥadīth that the guardian [angel] of the right records every good deed that issues from that person immediately, whereas the guardian of the left waits for six hours to pass before recording anything and if the person seeks forgiveness within these [six hours], repents and is remorseful, then nothing is recorded; but if that person persists, it is recorded. What is meant by the soul here [in this verse] is the essence, for otherwise the matter would be the converse. Therefore the significance [of the verse] is that He does not charge it except what it can bear and what is eased for it in the way of works regardless of the extent of the effort and the power [involved]. [The form] kasb is mentioned in the context of ‘good’ because it [signifies that the soul] is not concerned with it nor active in seeking it; [the form] al-iktisāb is mentioned in the context of ‘evil’ because it [signifies that the soul] is attracted to it and active in and intentionally seeking it, given that it is a repository of evil.^{1The statement here bears on the syntactical nuances of the Arabic verb forms brought out by the difference in emphasis between the 1st and the 8th forms of the root k-s-b from the point of view of the subject, the person doing ‘the earning’. The 8th verbal form (iftaʿala) generally connotes a more active and intentional act on the part of the person.} Our Lord, take us not to task if we forget, Your covenant, or err, when we act other than in Your cause or that of the Qurʾān in order to part with You and be veiled from You, for we are strangers, remote [from You], for a long time journeying away from You, tried through the darknesses by all sorts of afflictions and we have neither value nor measure in Your presence until You have taken us to task for our sins; our Lord, burden us not with a load, in our selves, our attributes and our actions such that You burden us and imprison us in our places, banished from You, for there is nothing more burdensome than such [a predicament]; such as You did lay upon those before us, from among those who veiled themselves with the outward aspects of acts or the inward aspects of the attributes. Our Lord, do not burden us beyond what we have the power to bear, of the burden of banishment and privation from Your contact and the witnessing of Your beauty by the veiling of Your majesty; and pardon us, the evil of our deeds and attributes, for all of these are evils that have veiled us from You and have deprived us from the cool of Your pardon and the pleasure of Your satisfaction; and forgive us, the sins of our existence, for these are the gravest of grave sins, as has been said:

‘If I were to say, “I have not sinned”, it [my soul] would respond saying, “your very existence is a sin incomparable to any other sin’

and have mercy on us, by [granting us] the existence that is bestowed after annihilation. You are our Patron, our Helper and the Guardian of our affairs, so grant us assistance, for it is the duty of the patron to assist his subject; or [You are] our Master, and it is the duty of the master to assist his slaves; against the disbelieving ones, from among the faculties of our commanding souls and [from] their attributes and the hosts of the satans of our estimations and imaginations, which are veiled from You and veil us [from You] through their disbelief and darkness.