the servants take pleasure in looking upon Him, this means that, when they look upon Him, He creates for them pleasures in created things which they enjoy—not that looking upon Allah itself gives rise to pleasure. More than one of them has stated this, including Abū al-Ma‘ālī in his Nizāmiyyah Epistle. To count this among the secrets of monotheism belongs to the polytheism of what these deniers call monotheism, not to the secrets of the monotheism with which Allah sent the messengers and revealed the Scriptures. For love arises only from something in the beloved that the lover loves. Yet, in their view, there is nothing in existence that the Lord loves except in the sense that He wills it, and He wills every event that occurs. Nor, in their view, is there anything in the Lord that the servant loves. Rather, the servant loves only what he desires, and desires only natural things agreeable to his disposition. According to them, nothing agrees with his disposition except bodily pleasures such as eating, drinking, and sexual intercourse.

The second group—the Sufis whose spiritual journey culminated in this perception—recognized the distinction based on natural disposition. Yet their spiritual path was founded upon abandoning this distinction and renouncing the self’s gratifications and desires, wanting nothing for themselves. In their view, anyone who seeks something to eat or drink in Paradise is merely seeking his own desires and gratification. They regard all this as a deficiency incompatible with true annihilation in affirming the oneness of Lordship: it is remaining attached to the self and its gratifications.

In their view, all the spiritual stations—reliance upon Allah, love, and so forth—are merely stages for those who adhere to the revealed law as they journey toward reality itself. Once they witness the oneness of Lordship, they regard these stations as defects in relation to that reality, either because of deficient knowledge and witnessing, or because this amounts to defending