you would say, “You have divided the Children of Israel”’—and thus make me responsible for their division. For worship of the calf had divided them: some worshipped it, following and imitating al-Sāmirī, while others refrained from worshipping it until Moses returned so that they could ask him about it. Aaron feared that their division would be attributed to him. Moses understood the matter better than Aaron, because he knew what the calf-worshippers had worshipped, knowing that Allah had decreed that none but Him should be worshipped. Whatever Allah decrees necessarily comes to pass. Moses therefore reproached his brother Aaron for rejecting what had occurred and for the narrowness of his understanding. For the knowledgeable person sees the Real in everything—indeed, he sees Him as the very essence of everything. Moses was thus educating Aaron in knowledge, although he was younger than him.

“Accordingly, when Aaron said what he did, Moses turned back to al-Sāmirī and said to him: ‘What, then, was your purpose, O Sāmirī?’ He meant what you had done in turning specifically to the form of the calf.”

He continued his discussion until he said:

“Thus Aaron’s inability to restrain them through action—to prevail over the calf-worshippers by exercising authority over the calf, as Moses exercised authority over it—was wisdom from Allah made manifest in existence, so that He might be worshipped in every form. Even if that form subsequently passed away, it did so only after assuming divinity in the eyes of its worshipper.

“For this reason, no kind of thing remained unworshipped, whether through deification or through subjection. This is inevitable, as anyone with understanding will recognize. Nothing in the world has been worshipped without first being invested with exalted status in the worshipper’s eyes and coming to occupy a rank in his heart.