Praise be to God, Who manifests through the magnificence of the Essence, and discloses Himself through the Light of the attributes. He is the First in His beginninglessness and the Last in His endlessness. He has made Light the means of witnessing Him, and the Path the way of knowing Him. I bear witness with certainty that there is no god but God, and I bear witness that Muḥammad is His servant and Messenger, the delight of the holy spirits, the quarry of the innate disposition of human souls. May peace and blessings be upon him and upon his family, companions, and all who follow his guidance. Let us begin.

Light: Light is that which is hidden by the intensity of its own manifestation. It brings things forth into manifestation from the concealment of nonexistence to the outpouring of existence, as our master the Messenger of God ﷺ said, “God Almighty created mankind in darkness, then took some of His Light and cast it upon them. Some of them it touched, and some of them it missed, each according to His will; and He knew those it would touch from those it would miss. Whomever the light touched would be guided, and whomever it missed would go astray.” ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAmr said after relating this, “This is why I say that the pen has dried.” (Ibn Ḥibbān, Ṣaḥīḥ, 6170.)

Knowledge of Lights is a knowledge rooted in the experien- tial taste of the saints. The noble folk who bathe in the glow of the divine Presence have spoken about it, and composed vol- umes of poetry to sing of their love and passion for it. The time has come for me to throw in my lot with them, and to pull back the veil from the subtle effusions of a pearl named al-Maḥajja al-Bayḍāʾ, the Radiant Path (The original Arabic title of this work is Kitāb al-Maḥajja al-bayḍāʾ (lit. The Radiant Path). It was first published in 2014 by Maṭbaʿat ṣināʿat al-kitāb, Casablanca. The following English translation was made pos- sible through the generous support of Abdullah Elkammar.), so that you may drink of an exqui- site wine sealed with the subtleties of yearning, and feel the holy breezes of nearness blow over you, and so that your spirit may roam through the meadows and gardens of ecstasy and divine proximity, exulting in the Light of the Beloved.

In all of this, I oscillate between concealing and divulging, and I incline more towards concealing it, because the science of our spiritual Tribe is first and foremost a matter of heart-to- heart transmission:

I conceal the jewels of my knowledge,
Lest the ignorant should see them and be tempted.

Thus I follow in the way of the Father of Ḥasan,

Who passed it on to Ḥasan and Ḥusayn.

(Lines attributed to al-Ḥallāj.)

Therefore I shall reveal to you the pure meaning of Light in the imaginal world, and the forms it assumes in the disclo- sure-site of the eye. This will allow you to take the first step upon the Path. I shall ignite the lamp of experiential taste and presence in your heart, that your saintly aspiration might flow forth with desire to walk the Sufi way. You must know that the Radiant Path is a lived reality by way of unveiling, not merely a phrase that you read in the noble ḥadīth and pass by with respectful indifference while invoking a blessing upon the Best of Mankind . Your heart will then become illuminated by the Lights of the Path, and you will learn how its night is as bright as its day, and how to stray from it is to pursue self-destruction.

I will take you back to the realms of Yea, we bear witness in order to help you understand what this means. For when the spirits were compounded in the bodies, and the atoms in the accidental qualities the scales became unbalanced, hearts hard- ened, souls changed, and tastes were crushed between the hammer of the sensory realm and the anvil of pure meaning.

Our Lord is Light; our Prophet ﷺ is Light; our unswerving Islam is Light; our Holy Qurʾān is Light; and our prayer is Light.

Why then do you wish to live in darkness? Why do you aloofly imagine, with your delimited and narrow mind, that the Light is merely an abstract concept that cannot be seen? The self-disclosure of Lights is the beginning of witnessing, and witnessing is the beginning of verifying the truth of the proclamation of divine Oneness. You know Islam with your bodily idol, yet your spirit does not recognize it, for you are absent from witnessing the Lights of the Real and the Lights of the Real’s Messenger ﷺ.

You say, “I bear witness”, yet your insight is blotted out, your heart blind, and your inner heart rusted over. Your testimony is mere speech, not witnessing.

Come with me, then, upon a voyage into the depths of pure meaning. Let us travel from one verse to another, until you come to know that the road has been one from the Messenger of God ﷺ until today—the road named the Radiant Path, whose night is as bright as its day, from which none stray but those bound for ruin.

I write these words in the early hours of the year 2014 after the birth of Christ, may blessings and peace be upon him and upon our Prophet ﷺ. I hope that the Almighty will make it a year of joy and delight, as well as divine assistance as we bring it into the open, by the glory of the Light of the Radiant Path.