is light; were He to remove it, the radiance of His Face would burn everything in His creation that His sight reaches”—how could this sheer nonexistence conceivably be light, and how could removing that light cause the radiance of His Face to burn everything that sight reaches? How could it be said, “He then removes the veil, and they look upon Him”? Can sheer nonexistence be removed? How could it be said, “Nothing stands between the people and looking upon their Lord except something nonexistent over His Face in the Garden of Eden”? Moreover, in what language is sheer nonexistence called a veil?

It is well known that the opposite of a veil is the absence of a veil, and nonexistence can properly be described as not being a veil. If the veil were something nonexistent, its absence would be something existent. Something existent would thus be an attribute of something nonexistent, which is self-evidently impossible.

It should also be understood that this founder and others like him frequently engage in the same kind of interpretation practised by the philosophers among the Qarmatian esotericists and their like, who are the most ignorant and hypocritical of people. This approach was well known among the extremist Rāfidīs. Hence the association of