6. Al-An'aam

What, is he who was dead, and We gave him life, making for him a light whereby he walks among the people, like one who is in the darknesses, not coming out from them? The life of recognition is one thing, and the life of mortal nature something else. The world's folk live through the life of mortal nature, and the friends live through the life of recognition. The life of mortal nature comes to an end when this world ends and the term arrives. When their term comes, they shall not put it back by an hour, nor put it forward [7:34]. But it is fitting that the life of recognition never come to an end, for recognition will never be finished. Day by day it is more and closer to the Real. God says, “We shall surely give him to live a goodly life” [16:97]. Junayd was washing the corpse of one of his disciples. He took hold of Junayd's index finger and said, “This one is being transferred from abode to abode. His friends do not die. Rather, they are taken from their secret cores to another house.” Junayd said, “Yes, I know, such is the case. But you must let go of my finger so that I can wash you and carry out the custom of the Shariah.” Abū ʿAbdallāh Khafīf said that Abu'l-Ḥasan Muzayyan said, “I went to Mecca, and Shaykh Abū Yaʿqūb AqṬaʿ was in the state of going. They said to me, 'If he looks at you, present the Sha- hadah to him.' They took me as inexperienced because I was a child. I sat at his pillow, and he looked at me. I said, 'O Shaykh, bear witness that there is no god but God!'” He said, “You mean me? By the exaltedness of Him who does not taste death! Nothing re- mains between Him and me save the veil of exaltedness.” Shaykh al-Islām said, “The curtain of His exaltedness is He, for He indeed is He, and you are you.” Abū ʿAbdallāh Khafīf said, “A man was burning in the Divinity beyond the curtain of exalted- ness, and they came and presented him with the Shahadah!” Abu'l-Ḥusayn Muzayyan for a time used to say, “A beggar like me came so that I could pres- ent the Shahadah to His friends!” Shāh Kirmānī recited this verse and then said, “The mark of this life is three things: Finding intimacy by losing dread, being filled with solitariness by the constancy of remembrance, and be- ing aware of awe by the purity of watchfulness.

And thus, We have made in every town, by virtue of the wisdom mentioned whereby prophets are exalted. So it is also in the town of man's existence, which is the body: We have made them great ones, its sinners from among the faculties of the commanding soul, that they may plot therein by leading the heart astray, tempting it and enticing into error; but they plot only against their souls, because the sequel of their plotting shall return against them by causing them to be consumed by the fires of the loss of instruments and means in the Hell-fire of caprice and privation from pleasures and lusts and [by] the actualisation of the corporeal instruments in the vilest of forms and in the worst of states upon the disintegration of the body and at the final return and the sending forth [for the resurrection].

And when a sign comes to them, in the way of an attribute of the heart, a luminous radiation from an angelic character configuration, or knowledge, wisdom and an effusion from a spirit, they deny them by turning away therefrom and [instead], from the part of the estimation and the imagination, they wish for perceptions similar to those intellective and reflective perceptions, and [desire] imaginary compositions and estimative fallacies with which to oppose the veridical proofs in order to believe in them and to yield thereto. God knows best where to place His Message, placing it only where it belongs among the spiritual faculties that are disengaged from primordial substrata. Those who have sinned, by being veiled and plotting to lead astray those who have prepared themselves to be guided, or [those] who pure hearts that have become guided, shall be smitten with humiliation from God, by the elimination of their capacities and their empowerment at the disintegration of the body, and a terrible chastisement, by depriving them of what is favourable for them and the procurement [to them] of what is incompatible for them at the physical resurrection in return for their plotting.

Whomsoever God desires to guide, He expands his breast to the submission. The mark of this expansion is that at three moments He throws three lights into the heart of the servant: the light of intellect at the beginning, the light of learning in the middle, and the light of recognition at the end. Then, with the sum total of these lights, all his difficulties are solved and he begins to see something of the Unseen. MuṣṬafā said, “Be wary of the perspicacity of the man of faith, for he gazes with the light of God.” With the light of the beginning he knows his own defects, with the light of the middle he rec- ognizes his own loss, and with the light of the end he perceives his own nonbeing. With the light of the beginning he escapes from associationism, with the light of the middle he escapes from op- position, and with the light of the end he escapes from himself. Disown yourself, for what harms you is you. Don't talk about stars, for your heaven is you.

This is the path of thy Lord, straight. The straight path is undertaking servanthood while realizing lordhood. This is a dispersion con- firmed by togetherness, and a togetherness delimited by the Shariah. Dispersion without togeth- erness is the effort of the Mu'tazilites, who fell off the road and did not reach the station of the Haqiqah. Togetherness without dispersion is the path of the libertines, who let go of the Shariah and fancied a Haqiqah that was not. It is said that dispersion is the Shariah's place, and togetherness is the Haqiqah's place. If the Shariah is empty of the Haqiqah, this is deprivation, and if the Haqiqah is empty of the Shariah, this is abandonment. The Shariah is explication, the Haqiqah face-to-face vision. MuṣṬafā was possessor of both face-to-face vision and explication. If the Shariah and the Haqiqah are not brought together in the servant, the Abode of Peace will not be his place and home.

Theirs will be the abode of peace, of safety from every deficiency, fault, fear of the manifestation of an attribute or the existence of a remnant, with their Lord, in the presence of His attributes, or the presence of His essence; and He will be their Friend, granting them His love and perfection and admitting them into the shade of His attributes and His essence, placing them within His security by means of timeless subsistence after the annihilation of the misfortunes precipitated by the deeds of their hearts and their [spiritual] moulds during their wayfaring.

And, the day when He shall gather them, on the day of the source of the nondelimited union, all together, We shall say: 'O assembly, of the jinn of the ego-centric faculties, you have garnered much of mankind', that is, [much] of the senses and the external organs, or of the human forms, making them your adherents and the folk whom you obey and your seducing of them and adorning for them the ephemera of this world and corporeal pleasures and your evil whisperings to them to [commit] acts of disobedience. Then their friends from among mankind, who befriended them, will say, 'Our Lord, we enjoyed one another, by profiting each from the other in the form of the concentration (jamʿiyya), but, verily, now we have arrived at the term which You have appointed for us', at death, or at the physical return in the vilest of forms and the most evil of living. He will say, 'The Fire, the fire of being deprived of pleasures and the finding of pain, is your lodging to abide therein' - except what, moment, God wills, that it be lessened or that from among you should be delivered he the cause of whose chastisement is not idolatrous association that had been firmly-rooted in his beliefs. Surely your Lord is Wise, not chastising you except for the configurations of your souls that you have acquired, commensurate with what is entailed by [His] wisdom, Knowing, of the one who is chastised for his beliefs and whose chastisement thus endures, or [who is chastised] for the configurations of his evil deeds and who is thus chastised in the measure commensurate with these [configurations] but is then delivered therefrom.

['O assembly of jinn and mankind: did not] messengers come to you from among you, from among those mortals who are of your own species - and on the basis of intepretation - the [messengers] mentioned from among your intellects which are faculties from among your own speciesḍ These questions, responses and testimonies are all [spoken] by the tongue of the state and the manifestation of descriptions - as in the saying: 'The wall said to the nail, �Why do you split meḍ�, to which the nail replied, �Ask the one who is hammering me!�' - and as the witnessing of hands and legs in the forms that correspond to the configurations of their deeds and by which they are chastised.