…and He said, “So We gave him glad tidings of a forbearing son.”
That forbearing son is Ishmael. As for Isaac, Allah said of him, “We give you glad tidings of a knowledgeable son.” Isaac, moreover, was announced to Sarah when she grew jealous of Hajar. Allah also recounts his story after the story of the sacrifice, for once He had mentioned the sacrifice He continued: “And We gave him glad tidings of Isaac, a prophet from among the righteous.”
The point here is that Allah commanded the Friend to sacrifice his firstborn son as a test and trial, so that love for anything other than Allah might be purged from his heart, thereby perfecting his status as a Friend. That is true perfection.
Mere awareness of the Real, without doing what He loves and approves of, is not the kind of faith that saves a person from Allah’s punishment; still less is it the ultimate goal of the gnostics.
As for the one who sees nothing besides the Real—or who considers what he sees to be identical with the Real—this is the doctrine of the heretics who espouse wahdat al-wujūd (the oneness of being). Even if such a view stems from their absence of mind and turning away from created things, the person who beholds other beings as His creation, as signs that point to Him, and who perceives within them His signs, is more complete than the one who does not. Some of them even come to think that witnessing the Divine Essence stripped of all attributes is the loftiest station of witnessing. This is sheer ignorance, for an essence devoid of attributes has no actual existence outside the mind, and that is certainly not the Lord of all worlds. They have merely stripped Him of His attributes in their own thoughts and then “witnessed” a bare essence—just as a person might envisage, at one time, divine knowledge and, at another, divine power. What they witness, then, is a pure, attribute-less essence—an extreme deficiency in knowledge of and faith in Allah. How, then, could such a state be the ultimate goal? Some even deem it a necessary stage on the path, but it is not so. The foremost pioneers of this community were the most perfect of all people, and such a notion never even crossed their minds; had anyone mentioned it in their presence, they would have condemned and rebuked him.
The distinction between witnessing creation and witnessing the Law
Whoever among the Sufis regards this annihilation as the ultimate goal—claiming that it obliterates one’s perception of the Lord’s acts to the point that he no longer finds a good deed pleasing or an evil deed repugnant—is, in the view of the leading masters of the path, in error, as are those who themselves experience this very annihilation.