comprehending their kunh (innermost reality) or their kayfiyyah (actual manner of being); for Allah, glorified is He, has neither obligated His servants to acquire such knowledge, nor desired it from them, nor opened for them any path to it. Indeed, with respect to many—rather, to most—of His creatures, He has likewise withheld any avenue to knowing their true essence and mode of existence. Take their own souls—which are nearer to them than anything else (1): He has veiled from them the soul’s reality and how it operates, and (2) has not granted them the means to know it or to discern (3) how it differs from the souls of animals.

Furthermore, He, exalted is He, has informed us in detail about the Day of Resurrection and about what is in Paradise and in Hell. The realities of those matters have taken firm root in the hearts of the believers, and their intellects attest to them, even though they do not know the how or the innermost reality of any of them. No Muslim doubts that in Paradise there are rivers of wine, rivers of honey, and rivers of milk; yet they do not know the true nature, substance, or specific quality of those rivers. In this world they know wine only as that pressed from grapes, honey only as that produced by bees in their hives, milk only as that drawn from udders, and silk only as that spun from the mouth of the silkworm. Nonetheless, they grasp the meanings of those delights in Paradise while believing them to be utterly unlike their earthly counterparts, as Ibn ʿAbbās said: “Nothing in this world corresponds to what is in the Hereafter except the names.” (4)

The absence of any worldly analogue has not prevented them from understanding what they have been told; in just the same way