…upon Him. Otherwise, if you affirm that He alone deserves worship while your own self still looms before your eyes, you have not truly borne witness to the words, “You alone we ask for help.” And if you genuinely testify that He is the One who acts in all things, yet you do not testify that He alone is worthy of worship and that worshipping Him is by obeying His Messenger, you have not truly borne witness to the words, “You alone we worship.”
But when you realize the full import of His statement,
“You alone we worship, and You alone we ask for help,”
you have attained the state of annihilation in tawḥīd for which Allah sent His messengers and revealed His scriptures. Allah the Exalted says:
“Remember the name of your Lord, and devote yourself to Him with total devotion—Lord of the East and the West; there is no god but He, so take Him as your trustee.”
He also says:
“So worship Him and rely upon Him.”
And He says:
“Whoever is mindful of Allah, He will grant him a way out and will provide for him from places he could never imagine. Whoever puts his trust in Allah—He is sufficient for him.”
And He says:
“Say: He is my Lord—there is no god but Him. In Him I place my trust, and to Him I turn in repentance.”
When Ibn ʿArabī, Ibn Sabʿīn, and others travelled down this corrupt path, it led them to a kind of annihilation that denies the very existence of anything other than the One. They declared that all being is one and that the existence of every creature is identical to the existence of the True Reality. For them, the essence of annihilation is that nothing is perceived but the Truth: He is simultaneously the seer and the seen, the worshipper and the worshipped, the rememberer and the remembered, the penetrator and the penetrated. The commanding Creator is the commanded creature; He possesses every quality that may be ascribed to existence, whether praise-worthy or blame-worthy. Even the idol-worshippers, they claim, never worshipped anyone but Him; in their view, no entity whatsoever exists apart from Him. This is the final destination of these atheistic wanderers.
In substance, their doctrine is the very utterance of Pharaoh. Pharaoh knew inwardly that what he proclaimed was false; he denied the Maker altogether out of a craving for supremacy and corruption. These people, by contrast, are ignorant and misguided, imagining that their words constitute genuine affirmation and exaltation of the Lord, when in reality they are merely repeating Pharaoh’s claim. Pharaoh did not deny the existence of the world, nor that created things share in the common term “existence.” What he denied was that this existence has a Creator distinct from it. Hence he ordered a structure to be built so that he might, in his view, disprove Moses’ claim that the universe has a deity above him. Allah the Exalted says:
“And Pharaoh said…”