5. Al-Maaida

O you who have faith, do not ask about things which would harm you if they were made to appear to you. He is saying, “Do not circle around the stations of the great ones, do not seek access to their states, and do not ask about their way stations, for then you will see that your level falls short of that and you will despair, and despair is the seed of remorse and the foundation of idleness.” A merchant from the bazaar came to Junayd and said, “O Pir of the Tariqah! If servanthood is what you have, then what do we have? What can we hope for? This is a place for despair.” That pir said, “The army of the commander is not all special friends and boon companions. There are also dog-keepers and herdsmen. In the empire, all are useful and all live in their own places and their own measures.” Though you be beautiful, do not disdain the ugly, for in this realm flies are as useful as peacocks. [DS 307] You should consider exalted the state of the dervish who said in his whispered prayer, “O God, approve of me as a lover! If you do not approve of me as a lover, approve of me as a servant! If you do not approve of me as a servant, approve of me as a dog!” O friend, if you won't give me the forefront of respect, at least keep me outside the door like the dogs.

O you who have faith! Against you are your own souls. Those who are misguided cannot hurt you if you are guided. The tongue of commentary is what I explained. The tongue of allusion in keeping with the tasting of the folk of desire is this: “O faithful, beware! Subjugate your own soul before it subjugates you. Busy it with obedience before it busies you with disobedience.” When Abū ʿUthmān was asked about this verse, he replied, “Against you is your own soul. If you occupy yourself with making its corruption wholesome and concealing its shameful parts, you will be too busy to gaze on the creatures and to occupy yourself with them.” Ḥusayn Manṣūr Ḥallāj gave advice to his disciple, saying, “Against you is your own soul-if you do not keep it busy, it will keep you busy.” MuḤammad ibn ʿAlī said, “Against you is your own soul-if you spare the creatures its evil, you will have taken care of most of its rightful due.” The nature of the soul is always to be at rest with this world and to hurry toward disobedience. It counts disobedience as a small thing and is lazy in obedience. It is conceited and acts with eye- service toward the creatures. Within it are found associationism, eye-service, and hypocrisy. It is said, “The soul is duplicitous in all its states, hypocritical in most of its states, and an associater in some of its states.” Abū Yazīd BasṬāmī said, “If in that world the Lord says to me, 'Make a wish,' I will ask per- mission to enter hell to punish this soul, for in this world it has always made me writhe and suffer.” MuṣṬafā said, “Your worst enemy is your soul between your two sides.” He said this because when you get along with an enemy, you become secure from his evil, but when you get along with your own soul, you will perish. If you act well toward someone, he will thank you at the resurrec- tion, and if you act badly, he will complain. The state of the soul is the opposite: If you act well toward it in this house, it will be your antagonist in that house, and if you act badly toward it in this house, it will thank you in that house.

on the day when God shall gather the messengers, at the source of absolute union, or the source of the union of the Essence, and He will say: 'What, answer have your communities given to you when you summoned them to Me. In other words, 'Do you [messengers] have any insight into their [spiritual] levels with regard to the perfections to which they oriented themselves when they followed youḍ'; they shall say, 'We have no knowledge, that is, all knowledge belongs to You, comprehensively and in differentiation, and none other than You has any knowledge, because our attributes have been annihilated in Your attributes. You, only You, are the Knower of things unseen', and so the unseens of our innermost aspects and their innermost aspects all constitute knowledge that is Yours.

[When God said, 'O Jesus, son of Mary, remember] My favour to you, in the way of special guidance and the station of prophethood and sanctity through [divine] friendship (walāya), and to your mother, in terms of purification, cleansing and election, [when I strengthened you with the Holy Spirit] such that you spoke to people, in the cradle of the body, and in maturity, attaining the light of the grey hairs of perfection by the disengaging from the body and its garments, and when I taught you, the scripture of realities and gnoses that are fixed in the Preserved Tablet by means of reinforcing [you] with the Holy Spirit and the wisdom of [the method of] wayfaring to God by the actualisation of [virtuous] character traits, states, stations, outer disengagement and inner solitude; and [taught you] the Torah of the exoteric forms of knowledge, judgements concerned with acts and the states of the soul and its attributes, as well as the Gospel of the esoteric forms of knowledge in the way of the knowledge of the self-disclosures of the attributes and the rules governing them, and the judgements concerning the states of the heart, its attributes and its deeds; and how you create, out of the clay of the intellect of primordial matter, which is the pure preparedness, by the hand of nurture and practical wisdom, the likeness of, the bird of the heart that flies to the Holy Presence because of its disengagement from its world and [because of] its perfection, by My permission, that is, by My knowledge, My power and My facilitation upon the self-disclosure to you of My attributes of life, knowledge, and power, and [My] vindicating you and calling you to prophethood, and you breathe into it, from the spirit of perfection the life of true knowledge by perfecting [it] and [by] correlation, and it becomes a bird, a perfect disengaged soul flying off to the Holy Side by the wings of love; and you heal the blind, the one veiled from the light of the Truth, and the leper, the one blemished by the sickness of the love of this world and the overpowering of caprice; and you raise, those dead by ignorance from the graves of the body and the earth of the soul, by My permission; and how I restrained the Children of Israel, those veiled from the light of the self-disclosures of the attributes, the ignorant who are opposed to you because of their ignorance of your state and station, from you, when you brought them clear signs, definitive arguments and clear proofs, and those who, were veiled, among them, from the religion of truth, said, �This is nothing but manifest sorcery�, because of their bewilderment regarding it.