have to be reduced to dust when confronted with something it cannot withstand. If manifestation meant nothing more than making it see, then clearly it would be capable of doing what it had been made to do, and so would not be reduced to dust. Were that the case, the appropriate wording would have been: “When the mountain saw its Lord, He reduced it to dust.”

Since the Quran, together with the hadith explaining this verse, indicates that manifestation means His appearing, and that the one to whom He manifests Himself may nevertheless be unable to bear seeing Him because of its weakness, manifestation cannot mean creating vision within it. It is thus known that He may manifest Himself both to one who sees Him and to one who does not, and that manifestation does not mean creating vision within someone while He remains veiled. It follows that there is a veil external to the human being, and that manifestation occurs through the removal of the entire veil.

The twenty-second point concerns his statement: “Those who deny that Allah can be seen interpret the veil as His preventing the effects of His beneficence from reaching them.”

The response is: If the veil meant withholding beneficence, then Allah’s speaking to someone from behind a veil—as He spoke to Moses, the very speech by which Allah favored him above all other servants—would amount to withholding beneficence. Thus, the one whom Allah called and brought near for intimate discourse, or chose above others through His messages and His speech, would have been denied His beneficence. This is among the most untenable notions according to the elementary intuitions of