5. Al-Maaida

[They said, 'O Moses] there are a tyrant people in it, in the way of the sultan of estimation and the princes of caprice, wrath, lust and all the other pharaonic attributes of the soul which they have seized by force and by subjugation and they have mastery over them, dominating them and compelling all to [follow] their whims; we have no strength against them and are unable to resist them. They said that because they had become habituated to physical pleasures and carnal appetites and because of their being overcome by caprice. Thus they were unable to pursue spiritual disciplining, or to curb desire, or to curtail the attributes of the soul through spiritual struggle; we will never enter it until they depart from it, that is, [until] God should turn them out of it withouth any spiritual discipline or struggle on our part, or [until] they depart out of [their own] nature, despite the impossibility of this, or [until] their sway be weakened as is the case with [the advent of] old age, despite the fact that they would not be able to enter it then.

There said two men of those who feared: the two were from among the twelver leaders - and they were the considerative intellect and the cognitive intellect, who feared the evil sequel of contiguity with the body and the evil consequence of being punished with its dark configurations - to whom God had been gracious, by guiding them to the straight path and the upright religion: 'Enter against them by the gate!, the gate of the village of the heart, which is trust through the self-disclosures of the acts, just as the gate of the village of the spirit is satisfaction. For if, you enter by the station of trust which is the gate of the village, you will be victorious, by having departed from your acts and your states and by being agents through God. For if might and strength are [procured] through God, the Satan of estimation and imagination as well as caprice and wrath shall flee from you and you shall be made victorious. That the gate is trust is indicated by His words: Put your trust in God, if you are, truly, believers, for faith when it is absent to the one adhering to it is the least of the degrees of presence at the self-disclosures of the acts.

They said, 'O Moses, that is, they persisted in their refusal and their refraining from entry. So go forth, you and your Lord, and fight, that is to say, if you are [truly] a prophet then drive them away by the power of your soul and curb the caprice and those faculties in us without any spiritual discipline or struggle on our part, and ask your Lord to drive them away from us, as shrewd scoundrels [are given to] say when you admonish them, rebuke them and threaten them, 'Why don't you rid us of this wretchedness by your own resolve!', either in mockery and out of obduracy, or earnestly and out of conviction; we will be sitting here, we will adhere to our place at the station of the soul, cleaving to the whims of our souls and the pleasures of our bodies, as they said, 'Ḥiṭtan samqāthā!'

He said: 'Then it shall be forbidden them for forty years; they shall wander lost in the land: this constitutes the duration of their subsisting at the station of the soul. In other words, they remained in the wilderness of nature wandering perplexed for forty years [searching] for the village of the heart. For entry into the station of the heart when it is under the mastery of the tyrannical attributes of the soul is forbidden and prohibited. That is why He says [elsewhere] until when he is attained maturity and has attained forty years [Q. 46:15], for that is the moment of true maturity. It is related of this story of the wandering in the wilderness that they would journey earnestly all day the distance of six parasangs, but when it came to evening they found that they were still at the same station from which they had departed [earlier]. In other words, their endeavour was focused on the actualisation of carnal satisfactions and corporeal desires, which were confined to the six aspects and did not depart from these [six] aspects by disengaging. Thus they were [still] at the first station because they failed to orient themselves towards the azimuth of the heart by seeking disengagement and rising above corporeal configurations and ego-centric attributes. At night a column of fire would descend from the heaven by whose light they could journey and benefit; that is to say, there would descend upon them the light of the intellect of livelihood from the heaven of the spirit and they would be guided thereby to their welfare. It is described as being 'of fire' because it is an intellect that is blemished by illusion and not a pure intellect, for otherwise they would have been guided thereby to the path of the heart. As for the clouds, the manna and the quails, these have already been mentioned along with their interpretation. It is said that every child born in the wilderness had a shirt that was the length of his body and would grow as the child grew; by this they meant the garb of the body, but God knows best. If you wish to effect the correspondence between this story and your state, then you should interpret Moses as the heart and Aaron as the spirit, since he was his elder brother, which is why he said he is more eloquent than me in speech [Q.

And recite to them the story of the two sons of Adam, [Adam] of the heart, of the two who are Abel of the heart and Cain of estimation. Each of them had a twin. As for the twin of the intellect, this is the cognitive intelligence (āqila ʿilmiyya) that manages the affairs relating to livelihood and the final return by means of beneficial opinions that require righteous deeds and excellent characters traits which are able to infer all types of handiwork and rules of governance. As for the twin of the estimative faculty, this is the imaginal faculty that has free disposal of objects of sensory perception and particular meanings for the purpose of actualising satanic opinions. Thus the Adam of the heart commanded that the estimative faculty be married to the twin of the intellect, namely, the cognitive intelligence so that it might acquire mastery over it by means of rational proof-based analogies and that it might train it by means of obedience-inducing forms of spiritual disciplining and spiritual manipulation, making it subject to the intellect so that it might become obedient to the father-heart, be kind to him and be dutiful towards him and designate him in righteous deeds and refrain from being disobedient to him through corrupt satanic enticements and embellishments and by tempting the soul to these through wicked configurations and evil deeds. As for the marrying of the intellect the twin of estimation, that is in order to make it righteous and to prevent it from lusting after corrupt imaginations and from the goading of the mendacious conversations of the soul so that its father [the heart] might find rest from it and exercise it in intelligible and sensory objects as well as universal and particular meanings so that it then becomes a reflective entity that works to actualise forms of knowledge and its father thereby profits. The Cain of estimation was envious of the Abel of the intellect since his [Abel's] twin was more beautiful to him [Abel] and more beloved [to him] on account of its correspondence to him. Their father the heart commanded that each of them offer a sacrifice, a ritual slaughter, with which to draw nearer to God by means of the effusion of the result [of the sacrifice] and the annihilation of the analogous form and the acceptance of the universal intelligible form [of the sacrifice] that corresponds to the very thing that is his ritual sacrifice by which he seeks nearness to God.

'I will not extend my hand against you to slay you, because I shall not invalidate your deeds, which in their contexts are intense, in the way of objects of sensory perception; nor shall I sever from you your life which is the sustenance of the soul and of desire; nor shall I prevent you from any act that is specific to you, for the intellect knows that the particular benefits, the rules governing sensory objects and the particular meanings attached to these and the hierarchic arrangement of the means to livelihood are not actualised or facilitated except by means of estimation. Were it not for hope and the actualisation of wishes and aspirations produced by the estimation, no one would have any means of acquiring a livelihood. I fear God, the Lord of the Worlds, because I know Him - He says Indeed only those of God's servants who have knowledge [truly] fear Him [Q. 35:28] - and I know that He created you for a purpose and brought you into existence for a wisdom and so I do not [suppose to] interfere with His purpose in that.

I desire that you should end up with my sin, the sin of slaying me and the sin of your slaying in the way of false opinions and corrupt conceptualisations because of which your sacrifical offering was not accepted, and so become an inhabitant of the Fire, of veiledness and privation. That is the requital of the evildoers, of those who place things in other than their contexts such as your application of the rules governing sensory things in the context of intelligible things.

Then his soul prompted, facilitated and enticed, him to slay his brother, so he slew him, by preventing him from his specific acts and veiling him from the light of guidance, and became one of the losers, because of his suffering harm by his assumption of mastery over the intellect and exchanging the guidance and rightness of the intellect for his own misguidance and wrongness. For when estimation suffers the severing of the support of the intellect, it prompts the soul by all manner of temptations and [seductive] embellishments to indulge in things by which both the soul and the body suffer harm, such as those reprehensible acts of immoderation in the way of bestial and predatorial pleasures such as extreme covetousness in the pursuit of wealth and repute and excess, and therefore estimation is weakened or even invalidated.