more appropriate for this one to circumambulate that one than the reverse. Indeed, this would entail circumambulating dogs, pigs, disbelievers, impurities, filth, every vile thing, and every accursed thing, since universal indwelling and union encompass all of these.

Their shaykh al-Shīrāzī once said to his own shaykh, al-Tilimsānī, on passing a dead, mangy dog:
“Is this, too, of Allah’s essence?”
He replied:
“Is there anything outside Him?”

Al-Tilimsānī was once passing a dog with another person, who kicked it. He said:
“Do not kick it, for it is of Him.”

Besides being among the gravest forms of disbelief and falsehood, invalid both rationally and religiously, this is contradictory: the one kicking and the one being kicked are one and the same, as are the one issuing the prohibition and the one addressed by it. Thus, none of these is more entitled to command and prohibit than any other. Multiplicity is inconceivable alongside oneness. If they speak of “loci of manifestation and self-disclosure,” the reply is: if these have an existence distinct from that of the being who manifests and discloses himself, then multiplicity is established and oneness is disproved. But if the existence of the one is the very existence of the other, no distinction remains between what manifests, what makes it manifest, and that in which it discloses itself.

If, by saying, “Allah has never left it, even for the blink of an eye,” he means a particular indwelling—as Christians maintain concerning the Messiah—then this indwelling must have been present in him from the moment he was created, as Christians maintain concerning the Messiah. It would therefore not have come about through his knowledge, worship, realization, or spiritual insight. In that case, there would be no difference between him and other human beings. Why, then, should indwelling be established in him rather than in others?

This is worse than the Christians’ claim, for Christians claimed this concerning the Messiah because he was created without a father. These shaykhs, however, were not distinguished in the manner of their creation; rather, they were distinguished only through worship, knowledge, realization, and affirmation of Allah’s oneness.