is Knowing of all things.” He begins with knowledge and concludes with knowledge, making it clear that He means He knows them wherever they may be—they can never be hidden from Him, and their secret conversations are never concealed. Were a group to assemble in the lowest place while an observer looked down on them from above and said, “I have always been watching you and I know your private discourse,” he would be telling the truth—yet to Allah belongs the highest example and the creation is not to be likened to Him. But if they insist on the mere outward sense of the recitation and protest, “This is only your claim,” they have abandoned their own stance regarding the apparent text, for whoever is “with” two or more people is with them, not within them; and whoever is with something is, by that very fact, physically separate from it, and this