and the resolve and love for the truth, along with a powerful hatred and aversion toward falsehood. One’s sensitivity, discernment, affection, and repulsion are all proportionate to his share of this life, just as a living body possesses a more complete sense of what benefits or harms it and a stronger inclination toward the beneficial and recoil from the harmful. The former corresponds to bodily life; the latter, to the life of the heart. When that life is extinguished, discernment disappears altogether, and even if a trace of discernment remains, it lacks the strength to prefer what benefits over what harms.

Just as a human being has no physical life until the angel—Allah’s messenger—breathes the spirit into him and he thereby becomes alive after being among the dead, so too (1) his spirit and heart have no life until the Messenger ﷺ breathes into them from the Spirit that has been conveyed to him. Allah the Exalted says, “He sends down the angels with the Spirit of His command upon whom He wills from among His servants” (16:2); and He says, “He casts the Spirit of His command upon whom He wills of His servants” (40:15); and He says, “Thus We have revealed to you a Spirit of Our command—you knew neither the Book nor faith, but We made it a light by which We guide whom We will of Our servants” (42:52). He has therefore declared that His revelation is both Spirit and light.

Life and illumination are therefore contingent upon the breathing of the angelic messenger [and of the human messenger]; whoever receives the breathing of both acquires the two lives, whereas whoever receives only the angel’s breathing attains one of the two and misses the other.

Allah the Exalted says, “Is he who was dead and whom We then gave life, and to whom We appointed a light by which he walks among people, like one whose likeness is in layers of darkness from which he cannot emerge?” (6:122), thus combining for him both