5. Al-Maaida

when a people, from among the faculties and attributes of your veiled souls, purposed to extend their hands against you, by holding sway [over you], vanquishing [you] and dominating you in order to actualise their goals and pleasures, He restrained them from you by means of the methods of purifying [yourselves] and exalting [Him] which He has shown you; and fear God, and take Him as a shield by which you can vanquish this [people] and restraing them, and in God let the believers put their trust, by seeing that all acts are from Him.

[God had made] a covenant with the Children of Israel, the covenant mentioned [below]. The twelve leaders are the five external senses, the five internal ones, as well as the considerative intelligent faculty and the cognitive intelligent faculty. And God said: 'I am with you, in the subsequent bond [ensuing from the covenant], granting you assistance and help, that if you fulfil the dues in terms of self-purification and withdrawal in the way of refraining from corporeal felicities by means of devotions and abandoning the external felicities by means of renunciation and giving preference to the third, which is belief in the messengers of the intellect and in the inspirations, correct reflective thoughts, sincere thoughts coming in from the spirit, the heart, and [from] the reinforcement of the angelic realm, and by succouring these [messengers], that is, exalting them by unleashing them against the devils of estimation, reinforcing them and protecting these [messengers] from their [these devils'] whisperings and [their] casting [upon them] of illusory, imaginary and ego-centric thoughts, and lend to God a goodly loan, by acquitting yourselves totally from [claims to] the might, strength, knowledge and power that belong [only] to God in terms of the acts and attributes in their entirety, then from the Essence by means of [your] effacement, annihilation and surrender of these [acts and attributes] to God, I will absolve you of your evil deeds, that is, [of] the existences of these three, which constitute your veils and your impediments, and I will admit you to gardens, of My acts, My attributes and My essence, underneath which rivers flow, [these rivers being] the forms of knowledge relating to trust [in God], satisfaction, surrender, and the affirmation of the Oneness, which as a whole constitute the knowledge of the self-disclosures of the acts, the attributes and the Essence. Thus whoever remains veiled after this covenant and [after] the sending forth of leaders from among you, surely he has strayed, from the way that is made straight by the truth.

[So because of their breaking their covenant, We cursed them and made their hearts] hard: these [hearts] hardened as a result of the soul's attributes holding sway over them and because of their inclination towards solid and hardened earthly affairs, and so they have become veiled from the lights of the angelic realm and the realm of the divine attributes, which constitute the words of God; they exchanged the faculties of their souls for these [affairs] and implemented their illusions and imaginations instead of their gnoses and realities in the way of intelligible concepts, or they mixed them together, which is [what is meant by] the distortion of words from their contexts; and they have forgotten a share, that is, a substantial portion of what they were given in a former covenant in terms of the latent perfections within their preparedness [that reside therein] in potentiality and they were therefore reminded of this [share] in the subsequent covenant; and you will never cease to discover some treachery on their part, that is, some infraction of the covenant or the withholding of some trust because of the sway acquired over them by the attributes of the soul and by Satan and because of the hardness of their hearts [except for a few of them. Yet pardon them, and forgive; surely God loves] the virtuous, who witness such folk as they endure God's trial but do not counter them with requital; rather they treat them with forgiveness and pardon.

So We have stirred up among them enmity and hatred, that is to say, We have forced this upon them because of the mutually opposed exigencies of their predatorial, bestial and satanic faculties and [because of] their inclining towards the lower aspect, that which necessarily entails contrareity and mutual resistance by virtue of their veiledness from the light of the affirmation of the Oneness and their distance from the world of Holiness wherein lie purposes in their entirety entailing neither mutual attraction nor mutual resistance, until the moment of their rising by the manifestation of the light of the spirit and the major resurrection by the manifestation of the light of the affirmation of the Oneness; and God will assuredly inform them, of the punishment for what they have wrought at the point of death and the manifestation of privation and loss at the manifestation of the despicable and hurtful configurations deeply rooted in them.

They indeed are disbelievers those who say, 'God is the Messiah, by confining divinity to him and restricting the Deity by entifying Him; [if He desires] to destroy the Messiah, son of Mary, to where He says, all togetherḍ', by annihilating them in the affirmation of the Oneness and obliterating them in other than the union, as He has said Everything will perish except His countenance [Q. 28:88]ḍ And to God belongs the kingdom of the heavens, that is, the world of the spirits, and the earth, the world of bodies, and all that is between them, of forms and accidents, the manifest and the hidden in their entirety, as well as His names, His attributes and His acts.