of union (1), for that is sheer heresy.

Fāris the Porter said, “I once saw al-Nūrī coming back from the wilderness; nothing of him was left but the merest flicker of life. A man asked him, ‘Do the inner secrets suffer what the outward attributes suffer?’—alluding to the wasting illness he saw upon him. Al-Nūrī answered, ‘Allah (2) turned toward the secrets and bore them aloft, but He turned away from the attributes and effaced them.’ He then recited:

Is this how He has made me,
driving me from my homeland?
Until, when I vanished in Him,
and when He appeared, He made me vanish again. (3)

He joined me to Himself—yet when
I reached out to Him, He cut me off;
He says, ‘Do not witness what you witness—
or else, witness Me.’ (4)

When al-Nūrī died, Junayd remarked, “Half of all knowledge departed with his death.”

It is also said that al-Nūrī told Junayd, “You flattered them, so they put you in the forefront; I was sincere with them, and they stoned me.”

It is further related that al-Nūrī was ever speaking of the annihilation of the gnostic’s attributes. This became the very ABC of the annihilation of the gnostic’s essence, as the proponents of union asserted. They went on to proclaim the universal annihilation of all that is other than Him, saying, “There is nothing in existence but Allah,” and they stated outright that the Exalted One had united with His creation—“You are I, and I am you”—and they recited: