…“O Hāmān, build me a lofty tower so that I may reach the routes—the routes of the heavens—and look upon the God of Moses; yet I am sure he is a liar.” Thus Pharaoh’s evil deed was made attractive to him and he was kept from the right path, and Pharaoh’s scheming ended in nothing but ruin.

The Exalted Lord also says:

“Pharaoh said, ‘O council, I know of no god for you but me. So, Hāmān, fire up the clay for me and build me a tower that I may look upon the God of Moses; for I am certain he is one of the liars.’ He and his hosts waxed arrogant in the land without right and thought they would never return to Us. So We seized him and his hosts and cast them into the sea. Look, then, at the end of the wrongdoers! We made them leaders who call to the Fire, and on the Day of Resurrection they will not be helped. In this world We caused a curse to pursue them, and on the Day of Resurrection they will be among the despised.”

Most of the atheists who champion the doctrine of wahdat al-wujūd (the oneness of being) even claim that Pharaoh was more perfect than Moses, and that Pharaoh spoke the truth when he declared, “I am your lord, the Most High,” arguing that existence has higher and lower degrees and that the superior is entitled to lordship over the inferior. Some of them go so far as to say that Pharaoh died a believer and that his drowning was simply his ritual washing upon entering Islam.

Although they insist that all existence is one, some of them still maintain—as Ibn ʿArabī and others do—that thubūt (fixed ontic reality) is distinct from existence, that the essences of contingent things possess a fixed reality, and that the existence of the Real envelopes them. Others, such as Ibn ʿArabī’s disciple al-Qūnawī, try to draw a line between the Absolute and the particular; Ibn Sabʿīn advances a view close to this. I have discussed their doctrines at length elsewhere; they are mentioned here only because they represent the final rung of the Sufi philosophers—those who style themselves the people of realization and gnosis, regarding everyone else as deficient in comparison. I have met more than one of them.

They grade people in tiers: the lowest, in their eyes, is the jurist; then comes the theologian; then the philosopher; then the Sufi—by which they mean the philosopher-Sufi—and finally the muhaqqiq (the Realized One). They place Ibn Sīnā and his peers among the philosophers in the second rank, Abu Hāmid (al-Ghazālī) and the like among the Sufis in the tenth, and they reserve the rank of “Realized One” for a single, solitary figure.