Then, if that longing was eternal, He should have acted upon it in eternity past. If it arose anew, there must have been a cause that brought it about. Moreover, it may be said that longing is itself an attribute of deficiency; hence it has not been established as an attribute of Allah, Most High. It has been reported:

“The righteous have long yearned to meet Me, and I yearn even more to meet them.”

But this is a weak hadith.

The statement, “He therefore created Adam from His light and made him like a mirror; I am that light, and Adam is the mirror,” implies that Adam was created from the Messiah. This is contrary to what actually happened: Adam was created before the Messiah, the Messiah was created from Mary, and Mary was one of Adam’s descendants. How, then, could Adam have been created from his own descendants?

If it is said, “The Messiah is Allah’s light,” then this statement, although akin to what Christians say, is worse than their claim. Christians say that the Messiah comprises humanity and divinity, and that the divinity—the Word—is the substance of the Son. They say that the union of divinity and humanity came into being when the Messiah’s body was created. They do not say that Adam was created from the Messiah, since, for them, “the Messiah” denotes divinity and humanity together, and Adam could not have been created from these. Nor do they say that Adam was created from the Messiah’s divinity.

Furthermore, regarding the claim that Adam was created from Allah’s light, which is the Messiah: if the speaker means His light that is an attribute of Allah, then that is not the Messiah, who is a self-subsisting being. A self-subsisting being cannot be an attribute of another. If, however, by His light the speaker means a light separate from Him, it is well known that the Messiah did not exist as a separate being before Adam was created. Thus, on either interpretation, Adam could not have been created from Allah’s light understood as the Messiah.