beings; there is no deity worthy of worship except Him. As the Most High says:

“So do not invoke another god besides Allah, lest you be among those punished.”

And as the Most High says:

“Say, ‘Is it other than Allah that you order me to worship, you ignorant people?’”

And He says:

“Say, ‘Shall I take as protector anyone other than Allah, the Originator of the heavens and the earth?’”

For these heretics, however, there is no other who could be worshipped, nor any other who could be taken as protector or god. Rather, He is both the worshipper and the worshipped, the one who prays and the one prayed to. As their poet Ibn al-Fārid says in his poem Nazm al-Sulūk (The Poem of the Spiritual Path):

“To her I offer my prayers at the station,
And in them I witness that she prayed to me.
We both are one worshipper, prostrating to his own reality,
In union at every prostration.”

He continues later:

“None but myself has ever prayed to me,
Nor was my prayer directed to another as I performed each unit of prayer.
To myself I was a messenger, sent from myself,
And my essence found proof of me in my signs.”

And he says:

“I have ever been her, and she has ever been me;
There is no difference; rather, my essence loved my essence.”

These “Jahmiyyah” among the speculative theologians and Sufis, who say that faith is merely knowledge and assent, say that the object of this knowledge is the existent described through negation and denial. Thus they say: “He is neither inside the world nor outside it, neither separate from the world nor occupying the same place as it”; then