to pursue what they had chosen, and admitted them through the door toward which they had raced. He closed to them the door from which they had turned away in aversion. Nothing is uglier than their conduct, and nothing finer than His action. Had He willed, He would have created them with different qualities and brought them into being with a different constitution.

Yet He—glorified is He—is the Creator of the high and the low, light and darkness, the beneficial and the harmful, the wholesome and the foul, angels and devils, women and flies. He gives them their faculties, attributes, powers, and actions, and employs them for the purposes for which they were created: some act according to their natural dispositions, and others through their will and choice. All this proceeds in accordance with His wisdom, calls for His praise, and follows from His transcendent perfection and complete dominion. What His creatures know of this bears no comparison whatsoever to what remains hidden from them. It is no more than what a sparrow takes from the sea with a single peck.