As if you see Him (kaʾannaka tarāh)

It was narrated that Sayyidunā ʿUmar b. al Khaṭṭāb said: “We were with God’s Messenger ﷺ one day, when there came to us a man wearing dazzling white clothes, with jet black hair. There were no signs of travel on him, and yet none of us knew him. He sat down by the Prophet ﷺ knee to knee, placed his hands on his thighs, and said, ‘Muḥammad, tell me about submission (Islām). God’s Messenger ﷺ replied, ‘Submission is to testify that there is no god but God, and that Muḥammad is God’s Messenger ﷺ, to perform the prayer, give the alms, fast Rama- dan, and perform the pilgrimage to the Holy House if you are able.’ He said, ‘You have spoken the truth.’ We were astonished at how he questioned him and then corroborated him. He then said, ‘Tell me about faith (Īmān).’ He replied, ‘It is to believe in God, , His angels, , His books, , His messengers, and the Last Day, and to believe in fate, both the good and the bad.’ The man said, ‘You have spoken the truth. Now tell me about spiritual excellence (iḥsān).’ He replied, ‘It is to worship God as if you saw Him; for if you see Him not, He assuredly sees you.’ He said, ‘Tell me about the Hour.’ He replied, ‘The one questioned knows no more about it than the questioner.’ He said, ‘Then tell me of its portents.’ He replied, ‘The slave-girl will give birth to her mistress, and you will see barefoot, naked, needy herdsmen constructing buildings ever higher and higher.’ Then the stranger went away, and I tarried a while. Then he said to me: ‘ʿUmar, do you know who the questioner was?’ I replied, ‘God and His Messenger know best.’ He said, ‘It was Jibrīl. He came to you to teach you your religion.’” (Muslim,Ṣaḥīḥ#12).

When God wanted to be known and to manifest His hidden treasure through itself, He took a handful of His primordial Light and created from it the Throne, the Footstool, the celestial bodies, and the kingdoms. His wisdom dictated that its Lights be covered with the cloak of secrecy and the veil of might, and so the unification of Oneness was manifested in the realm of ephemeral creation. The levels, properties, perspectives, and identities were manifested, while He remained as He ever was: unique, singular, and self-subsisting.

So directions, places, and created beings became distinct, subsisting through the Lights of the divine Attributes, yet effaced by the oneness of the Essence. Hence the holy saying: “I was a hidden treasure, and I loved to be known, so I created creation and acquainted them with Me, and they knew Me.” (Although this ḥadīth is weak in terms of its chain of transmission, it has been mass-transmitted from the great Poles, may God sanctify their secrets, through the path of unveiling.).

Thus He became hidden by His Name, manifest by His Essence, and present in everything in the same way as the number one is present in all the numbers. He appeared in one- ness through his Name and his Essence, and hid himself in duality through His Name, while remaining in His Essence. Two is nothing more than one plus one, and so on for all the other numbers.

A poet said:

The representation of the cosmos is like Diḥya (A Companion of the Prophet whom he described as resembling the angel Jibrīl.),

A materialization of the spirit in a deceptive appearance.

Another said:

Nothing remains but God, and no other;

There is no one to arrive, nothing to be distinct.

Thus says the proof of eye-witnessing, for He
Sees nothing but Himself when He looks through my eye.

Someone once said to Junayd , “Do you see your Lord while worshipping Him, or do you believe you can reach Him with your hearts?” Junayd replied, “We would not worship a lord we could not see; nor one whom our eyes saw, lest we com- pare him to others; nor one unknown to us, lest we be unable to declare his transcendence.”

The man asked, “So how do you see Him?”

He replied: “The ‘how’ is known for mankind, but unknown for the Lord. Eyes will not see Him directly in this world, but hearts may recognize Him through the realities of faith, then ascend from recognition to beholding by witnessing the Light of favor. For He is visible through sacred realities, free from all created attributes, sanctified by His sublime beauty, adorned with His absolute perfection. He graces hearts with His gifts and favors. He is known by his justice, described by His grace.”

When he heard this, the man stood up and kissed Junayd’s hand and repented, then remained his faithful disciple for the rest of his days, may God have mercy on them both. (Ibn ʿAjība, Īqāẓ al-himam pp 620-621).

So He is veiled through His manifestation, and manifest through His concealment. Eyes fail to see Him only because of the cloak of might and majesty. The created vessels were only made manifest after being covered with the veils of divine clemency and wisdom. Otherwise, they speak in the midst of their stillness and through it, alluding to their Creator, pointing towards their Maker; but no one can understand their glorification. From the Ḥikam: “He points to His Names through His traces, and to His Attributes through His Names, and to His Essence through His Attributes; for an attribute cannot exist in and of itself.” (See the 217th aphorism of al-Iskandarī).

Everything exists through Him, manifests through His Essence, issues from His Attributes, nonexistent in His exist- ence, extinguished in His subsistence. The diversity of the phenomena in the universe are but manifestations of the implications of the Names. Flowers may be diverse, but there is only one water.

God says: Upon the earth are neighboring tracts, vine- yards, sown fields, and date palms of a shared root and not of a shared root, watered by one water. And We have favored some above others in bounty. Truly in that are signs for a people who understand. (Q Raʿd 13:4).

God’s folk have compared the universe to an ice cube whose external surface is hard while its inside is liquid. The one who looks at the ice cube without any thought would think other- wise, while the one who scrutinizes it carefully would observe that water and ice are identical, and ice is but a manifestation of water. A poet said of this:

The cosmos is like ice,
And you are the water that flows in it.

In reality, ice is but water,
Its property changed by the divine Law;

When it melts, that property changes,

And the property of water reasserts itself.

And in the Ḥikam: ““What veils you from God is not the presence of a thing that exists alongside Him; what veils you is your delusion that anything exists alongside Him.” (See the 115th aphorism of al-Iskandarī.).

So nothing veils you from God but your illusion that any- thing other than Him exists, and your regard for the shells of cosmological phenomena. If you took notice of the attributes of Lordship and the might of divinity, you would realize that He is wherever you turn: To God belong the East and the West. Wheresoever you turn, there is the Face of God. God is All-Encompassing, Knowing. (Q Baqara 2:115).

Sīdī Ibn ʿAjība said:

Know that all places, directions, and created beings subsist through the Lights of the Attributes, and are effaced by the One- ness of the Essence. “God was, and there was nothing with Him; and He is now as He ever was.” For nothing possesses existence but God: Wheresoever you turn, there is the Face of God. All traces are annihilated by the celestial Lights, and in turn, all Lights are annihilated by the oneness of the secrets, so that none possesses existence but the One.

From the ʿAyniyya:

My Beloved disclosed Himself in the guises of His beauty,

And in every guise, the Beloved is present.

When His beauty appeared in manifold forms,

They were called by names, each leading to Him.

One of the early Muslims said, “Once I went into a monastery during the time of prayer, and asked a Christian to show me a pure place where I could pray. He replied, ‘Purify your heart from everything but Him, and then pray wherever you want.’ I was ashamed in front of him.”

It is said that Abū Yazīd used to pray in any direction he pleased, reciting this verse. According to the people of realiza- tion, the “Face of God” means His very Essence, namely the secrets of the Essence and the Lights of the Attributes. He says, All things perish, save His Face. (Q Qaṣaṣ 28:88). That is, everything is anni- hilated in the past, present, and future, except His hallowed Essence. A poet said of this:

The gnostics are annihilated, for they no longer witness Anything but the Sublime Almighty.

They see all else but Him to be perishing,

In the past, the present, and the future.

The knowers of God have passed away from themselves, subsisting through their Lord, and this is why they no longer see anything other than the Real, for they do not believe anything else could exist. A poet said of this:

I have seen no other since I came to know God,

And in truth for us there can be no other.

Ever since I was unified, I have not feared separation,

For today I am united and unified.

To behold anything but the Real nullifies ritual purity, since for the Sufis, to break the bond of annihilation in His attrib- utes by relying on the manifestations of the cosmos is to incur major ritual impurity, for it is the gravest of mortal sins. They performed ablutions with the water of the unseen, which descends from the oceans of the realm of invincibility to the meadows of the spiritual world, and so they became annihi- lated to their deeds, attributes, and faculties. Then they bathed to wash of their annihilation and shed all that is other-than- Him entirely. They are in constant prayer; ever since they prostrated themselves in the hallowed presence, they have not lifted their heads.

Shaykh Mawlāy Abdul-Salam b. Mashīsh said to Abū al-Ḥasan al-Shādhilī : “Abū al-Ḥasan, make keen the eye of faith, and you will see God in everything, at everything, with everything, before everything, after everything, above everything, below everything, near everything, and encom- passing everything. His nearness is His attribute, and His encompassment is His quality, beyond all extremities and limits, spaces and directions. His company and nearness are not measured in distance, and His encompassment is not a ques- tion of encircling His creatures. He erases everything with His Own description: He is the First, the Last, the Manifest, the Hidden. He, is He, is He. God was, and there was nothing with Him; and He is now as He ever was.” (Ibn ʿAjība, Īqāẓ al-himam p. 460, 68).

If the glory of the God were to manifest in full, the entire universe would come to naught. This is why the divine Acts are the visual manifestations of the Names, the Names the visual man- ifestations of the Attributes, the Attributes the visual manifesta- tions of the Essence. Thus God is manifest in the midst of His concealment, as His Lights flow through the dense bodies of created things. If He were truly veiled from the world for so much as the blink of an eye, the world would cease to exist.

Sīdī Ibn ʿAjība says in his commentary on the Prayer of Ibn Mashīsh:

He is Manifest in His concealment, Hidden in His manifes- tations. His Name the Manifest (al-Ẓāhir) erases the manifes- tation of other-than-Him and conceals it, for there can be no other manifest but Him. His Name the Hidden (al-Bāṭin) necessitates the manifestation of His self-disclosures, so that He may be hidden relative to their outward senses. If He remained ever hidden, He would not be known or worshipped. Thus He alone is the Manifest and the Hidden; anything that manifests is He, and anything that is hidden is He.

Or you might say that He is the outward manifestation of all that is hidden, and the hidden secret of all that manifests, which is all divine, since there is nothing besides Him.

Or you might say that He is the Manifest in regard to bestowal of knowledge, and the Hidden in regard to modality, since the divine Essence is beyond modality.

Or you might say that He is Manifest through His wisdom, and Hidden through His omnipotence, which is the cause of His wisdom; for He manifested wisdom, but concealed omnipotence. (Ibn ʿAjība, Sharḥ ṣalāt al-Quṭb Ibn Mashīsh, p. 51).

It has been said:

Nothing remains but the Real, and no other;
Hence, there is no one to arrive, and nothing to be distinct.

The proof for this comes by way of eye-witnessing, for He Sees nothing but Himself when He looks through my eye.

It has also been said:

All mortals are but a manifestation-sites of My guise,

They subsist through the resplendent beauty of My Face.

I manifest through the attributes of all creatures, Indeed!

My dazzling Light discloses in all the essences.