is better than saying “There is no deity worthy of worship except Allah,” because it explicitly expresses the reality of their Pharaonic, Qarmatian doctrine. Some of them even say: “‘There is no deity worthy of worship except Allah’ is the remembrance of worshippers; ‘Allah, Allah’ is the remembrance of those who possess spiritual knowledge; and ‘He’ is the remembrance of those who have attained realization.” Such a person makes his remembrance: “O You besides whom there is no ‘He’!”

When someone says “Allah, Allah,” this conveys only the affirmation of His existence. It may be accompanied by the denial of anything other than Him—not merely the denial of the divinity of anything other than Him—and so the practitioner falls into the doctrine of the unity of existence. Sometimes the heart may cease to perceive anything other than Him when the practitioner is in a state of effacement; this comes close. But believing that the existence of created beings is He Himself—that is misguidance.

They combine this with a form of purification, such as renouncing bodily appetites for food and drink, relinquishing leadership, practising seclusion, and other forms of asceticism and worship pursued without qualification. They thus also arrive at an unqualified devotion and a general knowledge affirming the Lord’s reality and existence, and similar conclusions resembling those reached by practitioners of syllogistic reasoning.

This knowledge and understanding may then fade through engagement in ordinary activities, such as eating and mixing with people, because its sole cause is that detachment: when the detachment disappears, the knowledge disappears. Hence the saying: “Every spiritual state that hunger gives you disappears when you are full.” Likewise, the former group’s general knowledge may fade when the heart becomes inattentive to those theoretical syllogisms.

There is no doubt that syllogistic reasoning leads to knowledge corresponding to what it entails, and that spiritual discipline and devotion lead to knowledge corresponding to what they entail. But this is general knowledge arising from a cause that may persist or disappear. It very often leads to union, indwelling, and permissiveness. This is because they detach devotion from what is indispensable to human well-being; when they need those things, they turn away from devotion. Thus, they are either gods in their own eyes, or heretics or sinners. For this reason, I was told by the shaykh