speaking, commanding, forbidding, and sending His messengers to the farthest reaches of His dominion by His Word, which He causes whom He wills among His creatures to hear; that He upholds absolute justice, rewarding goodness and requiting evil; that He is forbearing, ever-forgiving, appreciative, generous, and bountiful; endowed with every perfection and sanctified from every flaw and deficiency; that there is nothing comparable to Him. He beholds His wisdom in governing His realm and how He decrees all matters by a will that never conflicts with His justice or wisdom. Reason, revelation, and innate disposition converge before him, each one affirming its companions. He grasps from Allah—glorified be He—what He has described of Himself in His Book: the realities of His names by which the Scripture was revealed, with which it spoke, upon which it affirmed and established, and through which He made Himself known to His servants, until intellects confessed and primordial natures testified.

Once his heart comes to know and be certain of the attributes of the Lord of the covenant, their lights shine upon it so that it is as though he beholds them with his very eyes. He then sees how they relate to creation and command, how both depend upon them, and how their effects course throughout the physical and spiritual worlds (1). He observes their workings among creatures: how they act universally and specifically, draw near and cast far, give and withhold. With his heart he witnesses the settings of His justice, equity, bounty, and mercy. Thus faith settles in him: belief in the inevitability of His proof together with the enforcement of His decrees, the perfection of His power alongside the perfection of His justice and wisdom, His supreme transcendence above all creation together with His all-encompassing knowledge, nearness, greatness, majesty, sublimity, might, and vengeance together with His mercy, beneficence, kindness, generosity, pardon, and forbearance.

He sees the inescapability of the proof in the face of the overpowering decrees from which no creature can break free, how the divine attributes accompany and harmonize with one another, each bearing witness to the rest, and the turning