the Essence of Allah is lodged in his heart; rather, what resides there is a mental representation of Him, together with his knowledge of Him, his remembrance of Him, and his love for Him. Consequently he worships none but Allah, puts his hope in none but Him, fears none but Him, acts only for His sake, and enjoins nothing save obedience to Him. Thus, by worshipping Allah he becomes oblivious to worshipping anything else; by obeying Him he becomes oblivious to obeying anything else; and by loving Him he becomes oblivious to loving anything else.

Whatever has been said in this regard about the Messiah, peace be upon him, and others like him is true, yet it is not something exclusive to the Messiah.

Because statements of this kind are plentiful in the speech of the prophets and others—in fact, such language is well known among them—and because not one prophet ever claimed that the Essence of Allah dwells in any human heart, it is evident that the Christians abandoned the unequivocal words of the prophets, peace be upon them, and clung instead to the ambiguous, just as other deviant groups have done. They confused the reality grasped by the heart and articulated by the tongue with the entity that exists in itself, imagining that the very conceptual image was the concrete reality. Many of the misguided fall into the same error. Such people sometimes speak of “indwelling” and at other times of “union,” failing to distinguish between the indwelling of faith, knowledge, love, and the conceptual image in the heart, and the indwelling of the very Essence that is known and loved.

For this reason many of them believe that they are conversing with Allah and that Allah converses with them. One of them will say, “He stopped me, He said to me, and I said to Him,” while in fact his supposed discourse and intimate conversation is with