Yet they may acknowledge distinctions concerning necessities without which a person cannot survive, such as food, clothing, and the like. Thus, in this world and the Hereafter, they content themselves with indispensable food and clothing, regarding this renunciation as the ultimate goal. They renounce everything in the sense that they neither desire nor dislike it, neither love nor hate it. Their renunciation of mosques is no different from their renunciation of taverns. Hence, when a leading shaykh among them arrives in a town, he begins by visiting the prostitutes in the taverns, saying:

“How are you faring under Allah’s decree?”

For in this state of witnessing, he sees no distinction between mosques, churches, and taverns, or between those who pray, enter the state of consecration for pilgrimage, and recite the Quran, and disbelievers, highway robbers, and those who associate partners with the Most Merciful.

Undoubtedly, their annihilation and their loss of awareness of “divinity and prophethood”—the testimony that none has the right to be worshipped except Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, together with the distinctions this entails—stem from deficiencies in knowledge, witnessing, faith, and affirmation of Allah’s oneness. They have witnessed one attribute of the Lord while losing awareness of another. This is a deficiency.

They may also consider witnessing the Essence in abstraction from the attributes to be more perfect. They say:

“Witnessing the acts, then witnessing the attributes, then witnessing the Essence in abstraction.”

They may assign the first to the self, the second to the heart, and the third to the spirit. They regard this deficiency in their faith, knowledge, and witnessing as the ultimate goal. Thus they resemble the Jahmiyyah, who deny the attributes, in affirming an essence devoid of attributes and saying:

“This is perfection.”

But the former maintain that the attributes do not exist in external reality, and thus say that they witness their nonexistence, whereas the latter affirm their existence in