is His attribute, connected with His essence, while the Throne is His creation, separate from His attributes. He has no need of a place to contain Him or a bearer to carry Him.”

He went on to say:

“Nothing encompasses Him but His will. He appears only in the lights of His attribute and is found only in the vastness of expansion. When He contracts, He conceals what He has revealed; when He expands, He restores what He has concealed. Likewise, His fashioning in every form is a coming into being, and His action through every name is a place, whether great and manifest or subtle and hidden. Nothing encompasses Him but His will, in His nearness. He is known only through witnessing Him and seen only by His light. This belongs to His close servants today, in their hearts, while He remains unseen; and it will be theirs when they behold Him with their eyes. He is known only by His will: if He wills, the least thing encompasses Him; if He does not will, not even all things encompass Him. If He wishes, everything knows Him; if He does not wish, nothing knows Him. If He so loves, He is found with everything; if He does not so love, He is not found in anything.”

He then cited the remainder of his words, as we related earlier.

I say:

What he mentions here concerning His nearness and His being unrestricted, and that He does not manifest Himself with the same attribute twice or appear in the same form to two people, describes what appears to some spiritual wayfarers of His nearness to their hearts and His manifestation to their hearts. It does not mean that this describes Him as He actually is, or that these differing manifestations will occur to their eyes on the Day of Resurrection just as they occur here.

This is a matter in which many spiritual wayfarers fall into error: they witness things in their hearts and suppose that these things exist in external reality just as they witness them. Indeed, many of them, both earlier and later, suppose that they see Allah with their eyes because of what overwhelms their hearts