3. Aal-i-Imraan

They rejoice in blessings from God and bounty, and that God does not leave to waste the wage of the faithful, those who answered God and the Messenger after the wound had befallen them. Those who bow their heads before the command of God and the Messenger in passion for the religion made their own dear spirits the target of the enemy's arrows. They made their spirits a gift, their bodies a path, and their hearts a sacrifice. They bought that suffering and wounding with spirit and heart. Sarī SaqaṬī said, “God appeared to me in a dream saying, 'O Sarī! We created the creatures. Some of them saw this world and clung to it. Some of them saw trial, and they fled to paradise and well-being. Some of them thought nothing of trial and took the tribulation into their spirits and hearts, asking for union with Us. Which one of these are you? What do you want?'” Sarī said, “I answered, 'You know what I desire.'” How often will you ask, why do you make me suffer? In truth you know my state better than I. “He said, 'O Sarī! By the majesty of Our measure, We will strike your head with the whip of trial, and We will make the millstone of tribulation revolve on your head.'” Sarī said, “I replied with the light of recognition by lordly inspiration, 'Are You not the one who sends trials?'” The lover's soul is patient with illness- perhaps He who made him ill will one day make him well. * Since the healing, O Heart-taker, is from Your wound and pain, make no balm for the wounded, don't cure the pain!

They rejoice in blessings from God and bounty, and that God does not leave to waste the wage of the faithful, those who answered God and the Messenger after the wound had befallen them. Those who bow their heads before the command of God and the Messenger in passion for the religion made their own dear spirits the target of the enemy's arrows. They made their spirits a gift, their bodies a path, and their hearts a sacrifice. They bought that suffering and wounding with spirit and heart. Sarī SaqaṬī said, “God appeared to me in a dream saying, 'O Sarī! We created the creatures. Some of them saw this world and clung to it. Some of them saw trial, and they fled to paradise and well-being. Some of them thought nothing of trial and took the tribulation into their spirits and hearts, asking for union with Us. Which one of these are you? What do you want?'” Sarī said, “I answered, 'You know what I desire.'” How often will you ask, why do you make me suffer? In truth you know my state better than I. “He said, 'O Sarī! By the majesty of Our measure, We will strike your head with the whip of trial, and We will make the millstone of tribulation revolve on your head.'” Sarī said, “I replied with the light of recognition by lordly inspiration, 'Are You not the one who sends trials?'” The lover's soul is patient with illness- perhaps He who made him ill will one day make him well. * Since the healing, O Heart-taker, is from Your wound and pain, make no balm for the wounded, don't cure the pain!

So they returned with grace and bounty from God, that is, they returned by means of the existence deriving from [His Name] the Truth to the garden of the attributes and the Essence, as was mentioned earlier; and evil, the remainder and the sight of other [than God], touched them not, and they followed the beatitude of God, which is the garden of the attributes during their state of wayfaring when they did not know what had been hidden for them of things that delight the eye, and that is the garden of the Essence referred to in His words: and God is of bounty abounding. For 'bounty' is an increase [granted] over beatitude.

[That is only Satan] giving fear to [or of] his friends, those people who are veiled by their own souls like him, or [it means] that he is making you fear his friends; therefore do not fear them, and do not reckon with their existence, but fear Me, if you are, affirmers of the Oneness. In other words, do not fear anyone other than Me, because that [other] has no existence in itself and no effect.

Let them not grieve you those that vie with one another in unbelief, given their innate veiledness and essential darkness, for fear that they might hurt you; they will not hurt God at all: the indulging of the disbelievers and the extending of their lifespans are [in fact] a cause for the intensity of their chastisement, their utter ignominy and abasement, since the longer their lifespan the more they become veiled and distant and the more they become distant from the Truth, with His unassailable might, the more they increase in ignominy.

It is not God's purpose to leave the believers in the state in which you are, of outward submission and affirmation [of belief] by the tongue, till He shall distinguish the evil, in the way of the attributes of the soul, the doubts of estimation, the shares of Satan, or the exigencies of desire, from the wholesome aspects of the attributes of the heart, such as sincerity, certainty, unveiling, the witnessings of the spirit, the sweet talk of the innermost heart and its night conversings, so that gnosis and love of God might be made pure through the testing [of you by God] and the befalling among you of trials and afflictions. And it is not God's purpose to apprise you of, the Unseen of your existence in terms of the realities and states that are dormant in you without the medium of the Messenger, because of the great gulf that separates you from Him, the nonexistence of any correspondence [between you and God] and the absence of preparedness to receive from Him; but God chooses of His messengers whom He will, and apprises him of His mysteries and realities through the unveiling so that He might guide you to what is hidden from you of the treasure troves of your existence and His mysteries on account of the generic compatibility in terms of the soul between you and him that necessitates the possibility of your being guided by him. So believe in God and His messengers, with an affirmation of the heart and a will and adherence to the divine law so that you might be able to receive and accept [such things] from them; and if you [continue to] believe, after that faith through verification and wayfaring towards certainty and observance of the spiritual path, and are wary, [guarding against] the egocentric veils and the bars to wayfaring, then yours shall be a great wage, by way of the unveiling of reality. The bounty that God has granted them in the way of property, knowledge, power and soul, which they do not expend in the way of God on those who deserve [them], and the [spiritually] prepared, as well as the prophets and the truthful ones in order to protect them or to be annihilated in God,

Let not those who are niggardly with the bounty that God has given them reckon that it is better for them. In the language of knowledge and according to the Shariah, “niggardliness” is withholding the in- cumbent. The incumbent in wealth is a little bit of a lot, so a man gives the poor a little and keeps a lot for himself. But in the language of the Tariqah and the folk of allusion, niggardliness is leaving a little for oneself, a tiny amount of property, or a moment of the state. “The ransomed slave stays a slave so long as a dirham is owed.” Wealth and states in the path of these chivalrous men have the form of a dog, and passion in its own world has the form of an angel. MuṣṬafā's Shariah reports that the angel gets along badly with the dog and never descends into a house that has one. “No angel enters the house within which there is a dog or pictures.” When will the angel come forth if you do not take the dog from the door and the painting from the wall? When will you arrive at AḤmad and Abū Bakr, with a spider spinning its web at the door of the cave? Lift up the veil so that down may come a litter of magnificence to the bench of the threshold. [DS 200]