disobey, between the righteous and the wicked, between the rightly guided and the misguided, between those given to perversity and those of sound judgment, and between the truthful and the liars.

Whoever witnesses “cosmic reality” without witnessing “religious reality” treats as equal these different categories between which Allah has drawn the clearest distinctions. Eventually, he comes to equate Allah with idols, as Allah Most High relates their words:

“By Allah, we were clearly astray”

“when we made you equal to the Lord of all worlds.”

Indeed, these people have gone so far as to equate Allah with everything that exists, making the worship and obedience due to Him a right belonging to everything that exists, since they identify Him with the very existence of created beings. This is among the gravest forms of disbelief and heresy concerning the Lord of all servants.

Their disbelief takes them so far that they no longer perceive themselves as servants—neither as those subjected to His dominion nor as those who worship Him. Rather, they perceive themselves as the Real, as their leading transgressors have explicitly stated, including Ibn ‘Arabī, author of al-Fusūs, and other heretical fabricators such as Ibn Sab‘īn and his like. They perceive themselves as both the worshippers and the worshipped.

This is not the witnessing of any reality, whether cosmic or religious. Rather, it is misguidance and blindness to cosmic reality: they identify the Creator’s existence with that of creation and attribute every blameworthy and praiseworthy quality to both Creator and creation, since, according to them, the existence of the one is the very existence of the other.