them both, just as the pleasure of eating and intimacy reaches them both.
Indeed, an even clearer example is that when a jinn enters a human being, overwhelms him, and speaks through his tongue, the human’s condition is altered to the point that the voice and words heard from him are no longer his familiar voice and speech.
And when that human body is beaten, it is the jinn who suffers the blows: he feels the pain, cries out, and screams, while the hurt leaves the man. People have witnessed such cases beyond counting, and we ourselves have carried out experiments in this regard whose description would be lengthy.
If, then, a jinn’s attributes and states are transformed merely by its indwelling in a human, how much greater must be the change in the human soul?
Yet they claim that the union of the lahut (divinity) with the nasut (humanity) is more perfect and complete than the union of soul and body. Would any rational person, in the face of such a union, still contend that the two remain separate essences, each possessing voluntary acts in which the other has no share?
Nevertheless, while insisting on this union they say that the one who prayed and fasted, who supplicated and pleaded, who spoke and suffered, who was beaten and crucified, corresponds to the body; whereas the one who commands and forbids, who creates and provides, corresponds to the soul.
And at the same time they assert that Mary gave birth to the lahut together with the nasut, that He was united with it while alive, before life, and at death, and that throughout all these stages the body remained like the rest of the human bodies, with none of the Lord’s properties manifest in it whatsoever—even after He produced the signs, for similar and greater wonders had been wrought at the hands of