without any specification or limitation whatsoever.’ In that there is really nothing to dispute, though some people may still object.

Yet he must be asked:
‘How do you know that this is the Lord of all worlds, the One who created the heavens and the earth? That the being you behold in your heart is Allah is not something the heart’s perceptive faculty can determine. Should you claim that your kashf (spiritual unveiling) has granted you something that flatly contradicts plain reason, it is evident that you are mistaken—

just as the leader of these atheist pantheists, al-Tilmisānī, once recited:
O friend, you forbid me and command me,
while ecstasy is the truest forbidding and commanding!
If I obey you and disobey ecstasy, I return—blind—
from direct vision to the shadows of reported tales;
and the very thing to which you summon me, when you examine it,
you will find to be the prohibition itself, O neighbor.’

He is therefore told:
‘Your wajd and dhawq (ecstasy and “tasting”) have shown you nothing but a simple, undifferentiated existence. But how do you know that this is the Lord of all worlds? Indeed, how do you know that such a universal, absolute abstraction has any reality outside your own mind? All you truly witness is that unqualified universal within yourself.

Neither sense perception, nor reason, nor transmitted knowledge tells you that it exists externally—just as a sleeper, when his inner sense perceives things, has no certainty that they are outside himself. Once his rational faculty returns, he realizes that what he saw had been nothing but images in his dreaming imagination.’