nothing in this cloak but Allah. In this connection a story is often recounted: a man was passionately devoted to another, and when the beloved threw himself into the water, the lover immediately hurled himself in after him.

The beloved asked, “I am the one who fell in—why did you follow me?”

He replied, “I became lost in you and absent from myself, so I thought you were me.”

Thus, when the sovereignty of love takes possession of a servant’s heart, that heart becomes completely immersed in the beloved; it no longer witnesses anything but what love contains, and its awareness of self and of personal actions fades. The lover then supposes that he himself is the beloved—though this error is less grave than imagining that the very essence of the beloved is one’s own.

To assume a literal union of essences or an indwelling of one within the other is a mistaken notion that has ensnared many people. Those who assert that the Messiah—or any other human being—is God, or that God dwells in him, may have slipped into just such an error. Hearing words that appear to mean that Allah is within a given person, and treating that person’s deeds as though they were God’s, they imagined an actual merging or indwelling of essences.

What is really intended, however, is that knowledge of Allah resides in him, and that his commands and prohibitions, his loyalties and enmities, are fully aligned with Allah’s—just as the Exalted One says,

“Indeed, those who pledge allegiance to you are actually pledging allegiance to Allah” (al-Fath 10),

and,

“Whoever obeys the Messenger has indeed obeyed Allah” (al-Nisāʾ 80).

This is not because the Messenger is Allah, nor because His very Being dwells in—