Muslims/Islam/Salam: A Contemporary Semantics for Universal Peace

Neither we nor the world are at peace. We never have been and never shall be. This is a necessary feature of contingency. But we seek our reason and purpose in peace — in the world, in the self, or in both. The world and all its constituent elements, which include us, are thus agents of peace, connected through being-at-peace with absolute Peace, Who comprehends the conditional and contingent but Whom nothing comprehends.[[1]]  Being an agent of peace comes before self-realization—our own and everything else’s. This is what gives the following question its urgency:

How are we to realize our full humanity on the quest for absolute Peace, manifest in contingency and so existence, both as a whole and in every particle of it, given the varied perspectives that have unfolded in and through humanity over time and their linguistic expressions?

The human agent of peace, turned fully towards absolute Peace, al-Salam, is muslim. The conscious individual seeking peace in absolute Peace is in being-at-peace (islam), bearing witness and pursuing development of their highest capacity by loving absolute Peace and by offering obedience to the good alone.[[2]]

As we grow in knowledge, we remain contingent and dependent on God, the absolutely Knowing. In any action we take, we run a risk of being unjust, of deciding and acting out of ignorance, because what and how we know are conditional. Insisting on our knowledge without testing it against the absolutely Knowing undermines us and the world, which comes to seem lacking in harmony and incomplete. Supposing ourselves harmonizers and perfecters, we produce corruption on the horizons and in the self. 

Reified religion and anti-religious discourse share the modern tendency to misrecognise islam as based on a discourse of submission and so of subordination of the self rather than see it as what links the muslim to al Salam, namely full realization in and through being-at-peace with Peace.

Things and relations in the world are recognizably not what they were.  Let us consider seven such new things and relations. 

(1) Never has there been such accelerated movement of people in all directions.

(2) Or such accelerated de-ruralization and urbanization. Most people did not live in towns before. Now they do. 

(3) People of different historical and cultural backgrounds, languages, and racial identities now live closer together, physically and mentally, and in closer dialogue than ever before, cooperating more closely over common political frameworks. Clear differences exist between them, but so does an inherent need for unity. 

(4) Science and technology radically bridge space and time. With their help, virtuality has turned the world into a single stage on which we participate together. As digital structures and cyber technologies proliferate and complexify, our rights to privacy and intimacy are being steadily reduced and colonized by the lords of the market and capital, government, and the data companies. 

(5) The spread of mass education puts us in common possession of a great fund of scientific discovery and research, not least into the space-time and mass-energy profundities of matter and their cosmic horizons. This has transformed our view of the world and ourselves in wondrous ways. It can, however, also bring harmful reification that strips both the world and the self of their fundamental connection with the Real. 

(6) As the world and humankind have come into clearer focus, the differences between individuals and peoples have also become more evident. This underscores the need to recognize our common essence as human beings and our kinship with the rest of co-created existence. 

(7) Thanks to our loss of that sense of kinship, we are responsible for an oppression of nature unprecedented in scale and scope.

These new things and relationships in the world affect us in all our cultural, political, and economic ties — family, community, and peoples — without exception. These ties run the full range from vicious enmity to constructive cooperation and friendship. This gives the following questions their urgency:

Who or what is responsible for maintaining order across physical and metaphysical existence and its constituent elements?

How should those who identify as heirs to the prophet Muhammad and the admonition God sent down to him for all people respond to this question?

How can that legacy facilitate our understanding of these characteristics of the present age?

Everything in existence, in the heavens and on the earth, is our concern. Our knowledge of the horizons of the external world is knowledge of ourselves. And vice versa: knowledge of ourselves is knowledge of existence. But neither we nor the world are the principle of the self. We and the world are just signs, manifestations of that Principle, Which is both absolutely Transcendent of and absolutely Immanent to contingency. The Principle does not depend on us at all. We depend on It entirely. Losing sight of this axiom, we indulge in fantasies of gradual self-transcendence, through which even the self becomes increasingly redundant, as our activity takes on supposed independence.

In this fantasy, we deny the centrality of the self to revelation of the absolute Principle. We naturally want to survive (death) and enjoy happiness. But death and unhappiness cannot be evaded. They catch up with us no matter what, as others kill or impose suffering on us and we on them and even on ourselves. We speak of peace and may even seek to realize peace in ourselves and in the world, but that world and our fellow human beings continue to contain no lack of disorder, injustice, or corruption.

To be muslim (at-peace) is literally to be connected to God, al-Salam (absolute Peace), through islam (being-at-and-in-peace). Everything on the horizons and in the self, which together make up the teeming and constantly changing flow of self-revelation of the One, recall us to this connection. Multiplicity is contingent, Unity absolute. Unity reveals Itself without cease in multiplicity, in all of humanity’s languages, though which Unity’s prophets have conducted their discourse, and in the return of all things to Unity, as revelation and affirmation of the absolutely One.

Language is how conscious being expresses itself. It reflects everything on the external horizons and in the self. Its reason and purpose are to reflect unity and the disordering impact of contingent human will. Order has been reestablished again and again through God’s chosen prophets. Prophecy is connection with the Absolute and therefore universal, even if manifest in a particular time and place.

The prophets, known and unknown, all bear the seal of the perfection they were created for, of humanity as being that gathers existence in most beautiful uprightness. The tradition of prophecy is a constant, so long as there are people. It cannot be erased, but can fade from our reality into oblivion, heedlessness, and denial. Compare Muslims now and their condition with what our tradition was capable of in earlier ages or with its perennial purpose. That tradition has clearly long been on the wane, vanishing from our attitudes to ourselves, the world, and God.[[3]]

This waning of tradition takes place within the self. It is not, however, so precipitous as to remove at once from the scene all those whose growth in knowledge, faith, and gratitude tradition has informed. As God says in the Recitation: “Thus We appointed you a midmost community that you might be witnesses to the people, and that the Messenger might be a witness to you.”[[4]] To be a midmost community is to be a group of individuals connected with each other and ultimately with God, the absolutely Knowing, by knowing. Witness entails knowing without any doubt, in and through the self — bearing witness with all one’s being. Who and where are these witnesses in the present age? Can we identify them just by knowing how they refer to themselves and how others refer to them?

This conference addresses a challenging and relevant question, ‘How to strengthen the unity of Muslims?’, of significance to everyone and to existence as a whole. It deploys concepts of strength, unity, and Muslims. If Muslims need to be strengthened and led to unity, it is presumably because they are weak and divided. These are undesirable conditions. To overcome them requires that the Muslim sense of self develop an orientation of ascent out of weakness and division towards strength and unity. This undesirable weakness and division affects the sense-of-self both of individual Muslims and of all Muslims taken together as a constituent part of humankind. What are the limits to this weakness and division, on the one hand, and to strength and unity, on the other? Being strong entails a potential to become weaker or even stronger. Not so unity. The contingent partakes of duality and can be divided. Its principle, absolute Unity, is indivisible. Duality and divisibility — teeming multiplicity in irrepressible flux — are what manifest and affirm absolute Unity. 

What the horizons contain appears both as irrepressible flux and as order. Their unity is not externally imposed. Their reason and purpose lie in absolute Unity, at once wholly transcendent and wholly immanent to contingency. Humankind and individual human beings exist in relation to absolute Unity. The questions of strength and weakness and of the whole and the particular suggest two possibilities. The first is that coherence is only ever achieved in human communities by imposition from outside through force — an important element of every ideological image of the Real and one that signifies alienation from It. Humanity is currently in the throes of a project to impose such ideological unity at the expense of the individual and their sense-of-self. The second is that our individuality and the expressions of collective belonging — family, tribe, and people — are coherent precisely because grounded in the self and so in that uncreated and uncreatable essence that is our reason and cause. No unity, of people or world, is possibly that does not respect this.

The general question of how to strengthen and unite Muslims is that one for all seek connection with the sublime ideal of existence through that which the term muslim designates: How to replace what they experience as weakness and division with strength and unity? They seek answers everywhere, but find none, suggesting they lack the right protocols for their quest. Few are conscious of being seekers, however, or even of having any real connection with what they seek. They are named for something whose essence is obscured by ignorance, unbelief, and ingratitude, leaving them lost on their plane of being, until they ask themselves: Do I already possess at least some of what I’m looking for within myself? Is at least some of it independent of what is outside of me? 

This is a question for humanity, but it affects every individual. It always has and always will. When the consciously muslim pose it, they must ask at the outset, What does being muslim actually mean? It can seem that we already know the answer and that can make talking sensibly about it difficult. Difficult, because it all seems so obvious. But really, what does being muslim mean?

The search for strength and unity can reduce our awareness of dependence on the Absolute. Nothing encountered under such conditions of loss is likely to contribute to self-realization as muslim. The original and authentic meaning of the name “muslim” has been hollowed out. That is why addressing the conference topic requires us to engage with the form and content of what we have lost in the hope of rediscovering the universal theocentric image at the heart of all prophecy, rather than resorting to an idol of humanity in a world cut off from the absolute Principle. Reified religion and anti-religious discourse share the modern tendency to misrecognise islam as based on a discourse of submission and so of subordination of the self rather than see it as what links the muslim to al Salam, namely full realization in and through being-at-peace with Peace. This has resulted in a reified and reifying cult of Islam. It has taken the place of being at and in peace and so offering true worship to God as absolutely Praised through a universal economy of praise and glorification by modelling ourselves after the perfect example, the Praised. But that is the only path to full liberation and self-realization as muslims. 

when the absolute One ceases to be language’s First and Last, Outer and Inner, its ability to manifest, refer to, and connect with the One becomes obscured

Questions of strength and unity are intrinsic to all modern ideologies, which are teleological constructs that render the past and the future of humankind contingent on the will and on the physical (space-time and mass-energy) framework of their imaginary goal, which is ever greater power over the world. They entail an ever-greater need for power and its effects. Logically this leads to the so-called end of history. Those who fail to reach this utopian promise — and that is everyone — are humbled on the way. In less than two centuries, this obsession with maximising strength and unity has taken a grave toll in destruction, suffering, and human death. The phenomenon is undergirded by an image of the world and of humanity whose function is to support the pursuit of strength and unity and the highly developed political, educational, scientific, technological, biopolitical, and military systems that have followed in its wake, not to mention mass degradation of individual human beings in the name of collective promises made by the authorities these ideologies legitimate.

This vision continues to hold many in its thrall. There are three important preconditions for investigating and assessing this situation from a properly muslim perspective and image of the world and of humanity. First, we must insist that islam or being-at-peace is not an ideology. Second, we must resist any temptation to reduce it to one and so ape something it is not That is an act against liberation and the realization of our humanity and our proper relationship with God. Third, we must explore the question of how to strengthen and unite Muslims in terms of the metaphysical, cosmological, anthropological, and psychological assumptions inherent to islam.

There are individuals identified as Muslims living amongst all the peoples of the world today. They include the very poor and the very prosperous, the oppressed and the free, the persecuted and those at risk of mass killing or attempted genocide. Pretty much every language in actual use has adopted the term “Muslim.” Most language communities use it for both individuals and groups. Those who self-identify as or others identify as Muslims thus live across the full range of cultural and political environments, with their various understandings of history. Many of them resort to fantasy projections of overcoming their existential vulnerability: fantasies about individuals, groups, and peoples and the various utopias through which they are to be raised up out of weakness and division. They blame others for their condition of weakness, while remaining strangers to themselves, émigrés within a phantasy instead of at home in reality, yearning for “return” to a condition of strength and unity.

If they really do want a path worth travelling, they should know that one already exists within them, at least potentially. They will only discover the truth of their weakness and their strength, of dissolution and unification when they are already sure of where they are and how they got there, of their circumstances and their condition, of how they want to proceed, and, most importantly, when they are ready to speak truthfully about all this and to exercise appropriate judgement. Until they have discovered that in and through the self, they cannot be either knowers, connected by knowing with the absolute Knower, or faithful, connected by faith with the absolutely Faithful. The ground of their contingency, of being knowers and faithful, is the absolutely Knowing and absolutely Faithful. 

The absolutely One and Indivisible is manifest in contingency, as self-revelation in the space-time and mass-energy flux of coming into and passing out of existence (waxing and waning). The Absolute does not wax or wane. Encompassed by nothing, the Absolute encompasses everything, making Itself known as absolute Peace across the horizons and within each self. There are signs in all contingent things — on the horizons, in the heavens, on the earth, in everything in between, and in every human being that ever was or will be — signs of the One and so of our reason and purpose as muslims, which is to say as people-at-and-of-peace. 

Contingent things cannot be self-sufficient or independent of the One. Our only knowledge of the One comes from our selves and we know contingency as a sign through which the One self-signifies. We express this interplay of contingent and Absolute in various ways through speech, the linguistic medium of thought, itself dependent on consciousness. Increasingly aware of how the contingent relates to the Absolute, our higher levels of consciousness turn to the lower levels in the self, as subject to object, to set us straight, raise us up, and place us on the path of return to the absolutely Conscious. 

This reference to consciousness of consciousness should remind us of the two levels to our sense-of-self (self-consciousness): one that is conscious and the other of which it is conscious. Being conscious entails duality. We and our being conscious are contingent, asymmetrically symmetrical, constantly changing levels, manifesting and affirming within the self the absolute Is of the absolutely Conscious. This relationship can be represented as: cn-1 = cn.

The letter c signifies both the conscious level and that of which it is conscious. The index n reflects continuity of consciousness and its ad infinitum divisibility in either direction along the axis of the self from most beautiful uprightness to the lowest depth. God is absolutely Conscious, absolutely Third to all consciousness within the self — absolutely Transcendent and absolutely Immanent. We cannot determine the entanglement of these aspects of the absolute Self manifest in a contingency that itself is entirely dependent on the absolutely Conscious. 

The same holds for the inception of the Praised within the sense-of-self as our ever-present potential to be higher. This too can be represented symbolically: ḥn-1 = ḥn. 

In this case, ḥ signifies being praised. Being praised is a range along the axis of Being. The ḥn-1 and ḥn pair is present on this axis, representing our potential to ascend and descend along it towards and away from the absolute Is of the absolutely Praised.[[5]] That range has higher and lower levels. The higher levels are towards God, the absolutely Praised. “The Praised” is the literal meaning of the Prophet’s name, Muhammad, and we use it in this text to express his role in the economy of praise central to the vision of our place in God’s creation being put forward here. Our higher potential is expressed in the Praised, whom the absolutely Praised sent down to recall us to the axis of Being in his witness that none are praised but God, the absolutely Praised. As apostle, the Praised transcends any particular condition of the human self, while above him is the absolutely Praised. The Praised, sent down as a mercy to the worlds to recall us to the absolutely Praised, is the most beautiful example of entirely realized humanity. 

When the sense-of-self cannot ascend in consciousness and witness to no consciousness but the absolutely Conscious, it closes in on itself, within the narrows of contingency, in an access of self-sufficiency, to become a source of violence against others and the world. In the Recitation, God warns: “Hast thou considered the one who takes his caprice as his god?”[[6]]

Language reflects what the horizons and the self contain. The levels of consciousness in speaker and listener differ. The more realized our humanity, the more fully and clearly we see the horizons. From smallest to greatest, the particles our world is comprised of stand in a web of meaning that has neither surplus nor lack. Language, every language that ever was or shall be, does this. Integration of the external horizons and the self is reflected in the integration of this field of meaning and its contents. 

The flow of thought and consciousness is reflected in the elements of discourse — sounds and silences — as a flow of sentences within which words take on different meanings. Extracted from the field of meaning, no word express with clarity the reasons and purposes it potentially has. The sentence is the hinterland of the word. Only within that context can it live and connect us with the absolute Signifier and the absolute Signified. In isolation, stripped of connection with the absolute “Be!” (the Source of the Creative Command), the word falls quiet. In finitude, it becomes something onto which to project seemingly suitable attributes, as with the concepts muslim, islam, and al-Salam.

Existence is the contingent manifestation of the Unconditioned. A countless multitude in ceaseless motion, existence has order and structure only because the One is its principle. Absolute, the One is not limited to a single contingent manifestation, however. Excluding It from the observation of order and structure in the quantifiable world means excluding the higher levels of Being. What is left may then appear measurable, observable, contingent, self-sufficient, and its own cause. Similarly, when the absolute One ceases to be language’s First and Last, Outer and Inner, its ability to manifest, refer to, and connect with the One becomes obscured. This is why the concept of the person-of-and-at-peace (muslim) is common to everyone and all of existence and proper to all languages. Our task is to rediscover it, again and again, always and everywhere.

The question of Muslim weakness and disunity and how we generally engage with it reveal our imprisonment within an ideologized and reified understanding of islam. This understanding or rather systematic misunderstanding of the universal relationship of the muslim to al-Salam reinforces and serves Muslim self-undermining. We can free ourselves from this prison in one of three ways: by reconstituting and reestablishing the relationship in an authentic form; by renouncing our claim to be muslim; or by continuing to call ourselves muslim hypocritically without any real attachment to what that term properly denotes. To free and realize ourselves in the restored form of that relationship we must accept existence as the stage on which we — and that means everyone in all the traditions — are called upon to disclose our active possession of something Muslims today claim no longer to have, while fervently claiming to have had and lost. But it cannot be lost, only lost from sight.

God is the Principle of all things, Himself depending on nothing, though everything contingent depends on Him. ... The contingent announces Him and is indebted to Him in an economy of praise.

In the well-known tradition of the Prophet Muhammad meeting the Archangel Gabriel, the latter asks “Tell me, Muhammad, about Islam?” and the Prophet replies “Islam means to bear witness that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is God's apostle, to carry out the prescribed forms of worship, to pay the tax of purification, to fast during Ramadan, and to walk around the House, if you are able.”[[7]] Bearing witness is the fundamental and crowning factor in all this. Bearing witness, not faith. We bear witness only to what we know in and for ourselves, without doubt. Witness connects the bearer with that of which they bear it. We can know something without bearing witness to it but not bear reliable witness to something we do not know reliably. In the above response, witness was to something known — there is no god but God and Muhammad is His apostle. How can we know of ourselves something on which our witness depends?

Most people today see such acts of witness as based on transmission (tradition). We have learned the contents from external sources. They have been passed on for us to receive. These acts of witness depend on a chain of transmission going back to an individual who received it from God. Such knowledge cannot be certain or reliable or link us as knowing subjects with what we claim to know and bear witness to, no matter when or where we find ourselves. Even as learned knowledge, it can at best remind us of something we already know, something already present in the innermost core of the reminded self, in each and every one of us, everywhere, always and forever.

Gabriel’s question takes the concept of islam out of its proper field of meaning, the mass of sentences from which it takes on the facets of its meaning.  Muslim, islam, and al-Salam all belong to the same semantic field.[[8]] The response presents islam as the muslim’s connection to al-Salam. This connection with absolute al-Salam lies in contingently being muslim and in islam. It inheres in existence, in the individual, and in all languages, which are contingent. 

In space-time and mass-energy, which is to say in finitude, we do not accept the frontier between the known and the unknown as unchanging. We work stubbornly to erase it, without ever quite managing to. This means accepting, ignoring, or denying the unknown that lies beyond the frontier of the known. 

Accept it and the known becomes manifestation, signs strung across the horizons of the world and in the self, connecting us to the Signifier and the Signified. What lies beyond the frontier of the known is then the realm of faith. Contingent, we cannot put order upon it. If order is put upon it and it is made known, it is by absolute Oneness, who Alone can end the isolation of the known from the realm of the unknown and so render the unknown manifest in language and across Being.

If we ignore or deny the unknown as a higher level of Being, we limit ourselves to the apparently known as sufficient in and of itself, independent of anything beyond itself. For such a reduced view of the world and the self, the divisible and contingent neither manifest nor affirm the indivisible One. That means living with a fraud taken for a principle, supposing that everything in this world can be compared and measured and described in mathematical equations.[[9]] Even where we clearly see three — two measurable, comparable sides, left and right, and the Is, which is neither measurable nor comparable but without which there can be no duality in the first place — we ignore, deny, and either cannot or will not see that the Is is not the mere third of three. The Is is the absolute Third to every pair and all Its properties are reflected in existence and so in human language. Each language has levels of meaning that correspond to the levels of our ascent within consciousness. There is no movable boundary between the conscious level of consciousness and the level it is conscious of.  Nor could there be.

Let us repeat that as persons-of/at/in-peace (muslim) we gather and focus existence within ourselves in relation to absolute Peace (al-Salam) by being-at-peace (islam). Our ability to cross the boundary between known and unknown and to connect with absolute Peace discloses to us that the horizons and the self are forms of the manifestation of God. People-of-peace look to the self for life and happiness within the realm of contingency. Death and unhappiness belong to contingency and travel always with us, but life and happiness in any absolute sense are in God and of Him. Each person-of-peace sees clearly the signs on the horizons and in the self as they praise God because they have nothing they did not receive from the absolutely Praised Who Is absolutely. The world and we are thus indebted to the absolutely Praised. We and it are owed praise only contingently. That is why our praise of the absolutely Praised is connection with Him and a returning of our debt to Him.

Turning to our own selves and to the world, we discover our debt, that we are praised, and our alienation. We comprehend contingency, from full consciousness of God's nearness to ultimate unconsciousness of it, with all of our being. No matter how we try to realize ourselves after the absolutely Praised, no matter how high we ascend within the self, glorifying and revealing the Praised within ourselves as our connection with the absolutely Praised, we always fall short of the higher potential within us. The absolutely Praised reveals Himself to us in that ever-present potential within contingent being to be higher and better than we are. The Praised is perfect, our shared connection to God, the essence of our humanity, our universal seal. He was sent into existence and to us, as the reason and the purpose of everything that exists. This is something we know directly, within ourselves, and so can bear witness to. 

No matter how conscious and enlightened we may be, we still feel a need to transcend ourselves and become even more aware and enlightened. This links us consistently to that higher potential, the Praised, whom God sent as a mercy and a grace and as our maternal principle. As our higher possibility, the Praised is a continuous downward emanation of absolute Light into contingent manifestation. Only in and with him can we know ourselves in all our potential perfection, as our reason and purpose for being in the world. We do not enter the world or leave it of our own will. We are strangers here and sojourners, expected to become aware of ourselves and so come to know the Absolute as the homeland we are from and to which we shall return. The Praised is our guide, the perfect example of fully realized humanity, and our connection with God the Praised.

God is absolutely close to the world and to us, always and everywhere. He is Praised. This cannot be excised from any element or aspect of His creation. The Praised is the heart of His closeness to all that makes Him known, the perfect individual who affirms in and of himself that none are owed praise but the absolutely Praised. Neither he, the Praised, who was sent to remind us of and recall us to the absolutely Praised, nor the absolutely Praised can lose their purchase within our core humanity, as that is/we are the core of all that exists. 

Chosen for and sent to us, the Praised mediates for us with God, the absolutely Praised, on that axis by which we ascend internally from multiplicity to the One and from contingency to the Absolute. We have always known that there is no god but God. This knowledge depends on nothing outside of us. We are contingent, prone to self-forgetfulness and alienation from the absolute Principle of contingency. We fall into alienation from what is known and imagine other gods than God. Equally we betray the other tenet, that Muhammad is God's apostle, even though we know it in and of ourselves, independently of anything passed on to us. We are reminded of both these indisputable truths, which we know in and of ourselves, by the signs on the horizons and in the self.

Neither act of witness depends on anything outside the self. They can be expressed in every language. Everything we feel, think, say, or do bears the seal of this knowledge lodged at the core of our being.  Once we become conscious of this, we understand everything on the horizons and in the self in terms of it. There is no fissure or lack in creation or its contents.

Everything in existence can be separated off from the rest and from the whole. Duality is clearly not and cannot be its own beginning or principle. God is the Principle of all things, Himself depending on nothing, though everything contingent depends on Him. We know nothing as it really is. Confess this and it offers a reliable basis for deriving the rest. We know fully, in and of ourselves, independently of anything outside us, that none is praised but God, the Praised. The contingent announces Him and is indebted to Him in an economy of praise. Existence is linked to God, the Praised, through praise, as He reminds us in the Recitation:

“The seven heavens, and the earth, and whosoever is in them glorify Him. And there is no thing, save that it hymns His praise, though you do not understand their praise. Truly He is Clement, Forgiving.”[[10]]

That 'there is no god but God' and that 'the Praised is His apostle' are tenets independent of age, place, language, or tradition. We possess them always in the depths of our self and our being.  The prophetic call to remember them, as already present in every self and inherent to existence, does not entail their rebirth ab ovo each time they are invoked.  

Each of us can be fooled by our experience of being conscious into supposing consciousness an exclusively human property …(thereby) transforming ourselves from God’s worldly vicar into supposedly independent lord

Existence gathers in the individual. When the self brings awareness to being through knowledge of the names, it is complete manifestation of unconditioned God in His creation. His names are most beautiful. He reveals himself through them as Beautiful. He loves Himself in this revelation. The realized individual loves God as He is manifest in the beauty of the Praised whom He sent down to dwell within the self of each individual as our most beautiful potential. Our love of God is inseparable from our love of and adherence to the ever-present potential within us all to excel and reach higher. Ascending towards that potential, after the Praised, we free ourselves of the weaknesses that issue in sin. In the Recitation, God says to His prophet, the Praised, that he is to announce to all people: "If you love God, follow me, and God will love you and forgive you your sins. And God is Forgiving, Merciful."[[11]]

God loves the Praised, whom He sent down to be the fulcrum of our humanity and so of existence. The Praised loves God. Everything in existence discloses God, as absolutely Praised, to the Praised—divine Self-disclosure. This is why, to the person of faith, the Praised is a mercy unto the worlds and the most beautiful example, more precious than any condition of the self, because as Apostle he is the potential ever-present in us to be better and to attain a higher destiny on the path of self-realization and of return to God. On this path of ascent, the known is contingent, inseparable from the unknown. The known is useless unless it brings about a straightening up and ascent within the self.

We have intrinsic knowledge that there is no god but God and that the Praised is His apostle. We know nothing more reliably. But only when we make our own selves bear witness to it, out of our own will, so that our witness connects us with absolutely knowing and witnessing God, do we open up to self-liberation and self-realization as recipients and observers of what exists. All the worlds, in all their difference, and all people, in all their irreplicable originality, then stand in a matrix of unity, as a community through which the One reveals Himself. What determines and defines the person-of-peace is witness to no god but God and to the Praised as His apostle. This is the heart of unity and of responsibility for what has been received.

The signs on the horizons and within the self can appear independent of the absolute Signifier and absolute Signified, reducing the Truth they announce to contingence. Such existence would be self-contained, subsisting independently of any observer. But that cannot be the case. We are the reason and purpose of existence, but God is the absolute reason and the absolute purpose. There can be no contingency without the Absolute. To deny this, we must first exclude ourselves from observation, as we attempt to construct a deterministic image of a world of laws with no absolute Legislator. This reduces existence to the comparable and measurable. The frontier between the known and the unknown cannot be crossed. Faith, the connection of the faithful to Faithful God, is excluded from the territory of the known. 

But we do not accept any such confinement within the limits of the known. We are constantly trying to overcome those limits. As knowing subjects, we are involved in constant processes of change, especially regarding what we regard as known. Our connection with the external horizons and the self receives new impressions through the senses of hearing, sight, smell, taste, and touch. Names woven into webs of meaning embrace everything within reach of our senses. That web of language, meaning, and symbol incorporates everything within the boundaries of the known. The knower cannot magically eliminate the boundary between known and unknown. Each name caught up in these shifting webs of meaning is thereby linked to the unknown and so to the absolute Is. But these connections do not mean the known and the unknown are commensurate.

Knowing that there is no god but God and aware of two attributes, His being absolute Peace and absolutely Praised, we can discover our own highest self-potential, our perfectibility as human beings, a perfectibility manifest in the first of the people of peace, the Praised, who was sent down to be the most beautiful example and is therefore more precious to us than any condition of our own selves. This is the essence of the potential deposited as a treasure within the self, which we know independently of historical, geographical, or cultural context, as part of the ever now, the presence of the fully Real.

God, in His mercy, has sent His heralds to remind us, through their speech and presence, of what is already within us, of being-at-peace and of being praised, realized in the person of the first of the people of peace, the maternal prophet, the Praised. That we can be conscious of existence as a whole, the horizons and our inner world, and see in them the self-presentation of the One is due to our being on the axis between most beautiful uprightness and rectitude, the reason and purpose for which we and all things were created, and the lowest depth, towards which we descend when we reject what we know in and of ourselves. That most beautiful uprightness is the person of the Praised, our most sublime potential. It cannot be extinguished by any of the diverse states or conditions of the self. Through the Holy Spirit/the Spirit of Truth, God has sent down to the heart of His apostle, the Praised, seal and maternal principle of all His heralds, the essence of humanity, His Word, through which He made the nature of the Praised, our most beautiful example and a mercy to the worlds, perfected humanity, the telos and end of all existence.

The Word thus sent down is God's speech in human language and in everything on the horizons and within the self. It is His reminder to us of our reason and purpose. When it first appeared, it was, like any other word, in a specific language, but it was sent down to all people and so can be translated into all languages. In it, God says: "And among His signs are the creation of the heavens and the earth and the variety of your tongues and hues."[[12]] This variety of languages, which divides us into linguistic communities, does not in itself present an obstacle to our being reminded of the reason and purpose for which we are in the world. Each of us stands before God's Face, created in the same authenticity and capable of the same full self-actualization in what we have and are. Given God's absolute justice, no a priori advantage is offered to any select group based purely on linguistic, racial, or geographic difference or of the age into which they were born. 

So, all languages and all ways of using them are equally open to the person-of-peace (muslim), in the universal meaning of that term. As individuals, we may not understand them all, but they all already contain everything, all the signs on the horizons and in the self. Conscious of this, we rise up towards most beautiful uprightness, the reason and purpose for which we have been created. In the Recitation, God announced: “Every people has its Messenger; then, when their Messenger comes, justly the issue is decided between them, and they are not wronged.”[[13]] The plurality of languages puts no one at a disadvantage in pursuing the reason and purpose for which we were created. The Recitation makes this clear: “We have sent no Messenger save with the tongue of his people, that he might make all clear unto them.”[[14]]

These citations show that God has sent as many heralds as linguistic communities. God told them one and the same essential Truth in different forms, which they received and passed on. In the Recitation God says: “And We sent never a Messenger before thee except that We revealed to him, saying, ‘There is no god but I, so serve Me.’”[[15]] In this verse, ‘before’ may mean both before and after. As a prophet, the Praised is the capstone of existence, first in intention and last in execution.  The other heralds swore their oath to him as their paladin, and he affirmed them as having been announced and sent out into the world.

It may seem that we do not always know the linguistic community we belong to. Those sent as heralds to the thousands of such communities often originally came from other peoples and spoke in other languages. But all languages can convey the messages God uses to remind us of and recall us to the reason and purpose for which we were created.  No one is a stranger in his or her own tongue. When we become alienated from our own language, the self is darkened. Our true homeland lies in language, as God addresses us by His speech in it. None of us is ever deprived of the merciful and just potential to rise higher, to be better, and to attain a more beautiful selfhood. But we can mistake ourselves for lords of our own being and of what has been entrusted to us and placed within the reach of our will and our power. This egoistic misprision alienates us from the Real and distracts us from what is known, from what we know in and through and at the core of, our transcendent self. 

We did not create even a single particle of our being. Or speech. We may deludedly suppose our destinies to be entirely within our own power and authority—our selves sovereign. Though the absolutely Is speaks through everything on the horizons and the self, we nonetheless consistently forget, ignore, and deny that reality. But the heralds are those amongst us to whom the absolute Is has allocated the task of making clear, in speech and in language, the necessary presence and ineradicable authority of the One. Their examples in our heritage disclose the presence of God in consciousness, thought, and speech and in all they express. It bears repeating that God made us and everything we can feel, think, or do. He sent the Praised as His prophet, a mercy to the worlds, and so a mercy in all tongues. 

God is absolutely conscious and everything He has created, great and small, reflects this. All the signs on the horizons are conscious in their relations with God, as absolute Signifier and absolute Signified, and so of themselves as participants in His creation. Each of us can be fooled by our experience of being conscious into supposing consciousness an exclusively human property. Alienated from existence, which is itself conscious and has its claims on us, we turn our violence against the horizons, transforming ourselves from God’s worldly vicar into supposedly independent lord, in an illusion of power and strength. All we have done is oppress the world, the beings in it, and our own selves and so debase ourselves to our lowest rather than our highest potential. 

Every manifestation of the individual heart is dual. Its essence is Oneness or Unity, which is God and of God. This is also the case with Peace. 

Humanity has a single essence. As Inceptor, God’s sublime plan was to introduce us into Being as its purpose.[[16]] The prophets draw our attention to that ontological reality, which is the marrow of humanity, its maternal and sealing nature, and they realize it themselves in and through their oath to God. That oath is mentioned in the Recitation, the discourse God sent down to His prophet, the Praised, that he might bear witness to it and pass it on to all:

And when God made the covenant of the prophets: “By that which I have given you of a Book and Wisdom, should a messenger then come to you confirming that which is with you, you shall surely believe in him and you shall help him.” He said: “Do you agree and take on My burden on these conditions?” They said: “We agree.” He said: “Bear witness, for I am with you among those who bear witness.”[[17]]

God thus offered a covenant or contractual relationship to the prophets and to each of us. This is why we have free will. Otherwise, a contract or agreement would be meaningless. We can forget, ignore, or deny this contractual relationship, but know it innately, having been brought into Being through the love of God as Initiator. God comprehends everything by knowing. He has full knowledge of all things and judges our attitude towards the stake of that original contract. This is what trust or faith mean as the form of our relationship as faithful subjects with the Faithful. Without trust, neither the offer nor the acceptance of a contractual relationship makes sense. 

The apostle is the one self-identical essence of humanity. Each individual treasures their knowledge of that essence. As does every language. Each of us knows it and bears witness to it in the irreproducibility of our individual being. Manifest to us within history, in a given language, region, or way of life, that essence gathers within itself the archetypal force of exemplarity as criterion for judging our relationship to God and so to His creation. But contingent existence is not commensurate with the absolutely Steadfast.

Existence extends across ungraspable expanses of space, time, mass, and energy. It and humanity, which contains and focuses it, are at peace in and serve God, absolute Lord and Peace. God's absolute Lordship is expressed and affirmed by this service. That God is absolute Peace is expressed and affirmed by being-at-peace. This is how contingency relates to the Absolute. The contingent is not self-sufficient. It is nothing without the Absolute. All creation has is from Him, everything owed to Him. God says in the Recitation: “Unto God belongs whatsoever is in the heavens and whatsoever is on the earth, and unto God are all matters returned.”[[18]]

That all human hearts are as one between the two fingers of the all-Merciful[[19]] and that everything comes from Him and returns to Him show that the contingent cannot be extricated from the Absolute, duality from the One. Thanks to its dependence on the One, contingency, as a whole and in each thing, no matter how great or small, is dual and fully entangled. This entanglement involves every particle being “aware” of all others. Each particle reveals its dependence on the observer and on the time and place of observation. As such, each particle confirms the interrelationship of all things on the horizons and in the observing self, our awareness, and the absolutely Conscious and Aware. 

We have received all we have from the One. Our awareness of this means that existence is aware of its beginning and end in time and space. These are signs of the absolute Beginning and the absolute End, which cannot be distinguished or comprehended or encompassed by anything conditional. In the Recitation, God says of this interrelationship with the One: “Glory be to Him, Who created all the pairs of what the earth produces, and of themselves, and what they know not.”[[20]]

Everything creation has received from God recalls Him but is not to be equated with Him. Compared to God, everything is nothing. Compared to creation, God is God. He says in the Recitation: “There is none in the heavens and on the earth, but that it comes unto the Merciful as a servant.”[[21]] Given the contingency of free will, our striving and what we do clearly has no impact on God's chosen approach. 

Whether we wish it or not, contingency comes to consciousness in and through free will as manifestation of the absolutely Conscious. Everything in existence and existence as a whole make manifest and confirm absolute Peace and are in turn focused and affirmed within us and our awareness. In the Recitation, God says: “Do they seek other than God’s debt, while whosoever is in the heavens and on the earth is in Peace with Him, willingly or unwillingly, and unto Him they will be returned?”[[22]]

God addresses us all individually in every language. The heart, the essence of humanity properly understood, is the presence of the One both in and out of time, in and out of space. It is in us together and severally, “one between the two fingers of the all-Merciful”. As creaturely, it corresponds to duality under the absolute rule of the One. As uncreated, it is the same as Him, the One. This claim may seem questionable. Every manifestation of the individual heart is dual. Its essence is Oneness or Unity, which is God and of God. This is also the case with Peace. 

The one heart of all human beings between the two fingers of the all-Merciful, the One, is a clear reminder of the dual aspect of creation and its full and absolute dependence on the Creator. He cannot be divided but what has been created can. Even the most minute particle of the self-showing of the One within space-time and mass-energy, of the teeming flux on the external horizons and in each and every self, and of the constant processes of coming into and going out of existence can be further divided. Imagine or measure it as we will, every particle or quantum is connected, in its particle-wave duality, with every other particle, throughout existence. Consciousness within an observer is thus connected with all others, a sign of the absolute Is without Which there is no existence at all. This entanglement of contingent manifestation in duality is the One, the Third to every pair but never the third of three.

Judgement is the showing or demonstration of truth. Only in and through judgement is full justification possible. Each time we judge, we do so out of knowledge, as what connects us as knowing subjects with what we know. The only knowledge that can possibly be absolute is that there is no god but God and that the Praised is His apostle, though even here the knowing and witnessing subject remains contingent and so only contingently knowing and witnessing. Only God, Who comprehends all with His knowing, can judge entirely justly. And He shall do so:

"And, now you have come unto Us alone, just as We created you the first time, and you have left behind that which We had bestowed upon you. We see not with you your intercessors – those whom you claimed were partners. Now the bond between you has been severed, and that which you once claimed has forsaken you."[[23]]

Creation is a treasure deposited within us. In the Recitation, God says: “And He taught Adam the names, all of them.”[[24]] Those names are God's. They express the inexhaustible attributes of His oneness through their difference. All the obstacles in our path of ascent from one level of consciousness to another are removed in our consciousness or awareness of God, as the Possessor of the most beautiful names. The higher the level of consciousness, the clearer the names and their integration into fields of meaning. There is not and cannot be a level of being at which God’s names are not present. They are God’s and what connects the contingent with Him.

Our relationship with God is unmediated, as we are alone with the Alone. In the Recitation God tells us: “And be conscious of God. God teaches you, and God has knowledge of everything.”[[25]] And then: “Know, then, that there is no god but God.”[[26]] In and through our consciousness of God that we grow in knowledge. Our character depends on our awareness of God, Who has told us: “O mankind! Truly We created you from a male and a female, and We made you peoples and tribes that you may come to know one another. Surely the most noble of you before God are the most conscious of you. Truly God is Knowing, Aware.”[[27]]

This is God addressing us, together and individually. He is with us wheresoever we are[[28]], facing us with His Face no matter where we turn.[[29]] Each of us is aware of this to some degree, depending on where we are on the spectrum from most beautiful uprightness, in which we were created, to the lowest depth, as He says in the Recitation: “Truly We created man in the most beautiful uprightness, then We cast him to the lowest of the low, save those who believe and perform righteous deeds.”[[30]] Being most noble before God is the same as having been created in most beautiful uprightness and most conscious. It corresponds to the most beautiful example of the Prophet. All of us can potentially attain this, our innate reason and purpose. Ascending towards it requires we be faithful, have faith, and be connected to God, the Faithful, through faith, and by doing good deeds.

Individual freedom is an aspect of our relationship with God. That is what gives us both the strength and the responsibility to judge our relationship with society and transcend our dependence on it.

The most conscious are the most noble before God and in Him.[[31]] As most noble, they realize the manifestation of that name of God in their own selves and throughout existence. He commanded us: “Recite! Thy Lord is most noble.”[[32]] When we reach awareness through being faithful, God calls on us to persist in this: “O you who believe! Be conscious of God!”[[33]] Our own consciousness of being conscious manifests as an opening up of the path of ascent. The awareness through which we render ourselves and the world aware is ceaseless ascent. Once we have become aware of awareness, there is always a higher level of consciousness above that at which we find ourselves.

It is only by witness to no awareness but absolute Awareness that we can cross the boundary that confines us within space-time, mass, and energy. The same is true of the names deposited as treasures in the self. Attributes of God, they are His manifestation as absolutely Conscious at the various levels of being and consciousness. We cannot tackle any issue of self-realization in awareness and nobility without first acknowledging our contingency and its nullity in the face of the absolutely Unconditioned. The Recitation says of the names in contingency and their link with God that:

"He is God, other than Whom there is no god, the Sovereign, the Holy, Peace, the Faithful, the Protector, the Mighty, the Compeller, the Proud. Glory be to Him above the partners they ascribe. He is God, the Creator, the Maker, the Fashioner; unto Him belong the Most Beautiful Names. Whatsoever is in the heavens and the earth glorifies Him, and He is the Mighty, the Wise."[[34]]

These names are proper to God, uttered as part of His discourse in human tongues. We are contingent and these names are in us contingently and as intimations of the Absolute in contingency. Trying to realize them in ourselves without due recognition that they are part of God’s purpose and design means taking one or several little gods for God. Language and volition disengage from the self-evident truth that there is no god but God and that everything in heaven and on earth glorifies Him.

Free will was given to us as the condition of our contractual relationship with God. It can appear sufficient in itself. That entails a risk of associating others with God. When we do so, we undermine the foundations of self-liberation and self-actualization in most beautiful uprightness, which is the why and wherefore of our creation. We become confined on one level of Being to wander there or fall even lower. This contrasts with what is possible through prayer, namely continuity of ascent: “Guide us upon the upright path, the path of those whom Thou hast blessed, not of those who incur wrath, nor of those who are astray.”[[35]] This is a sign of the relationship of the measurable to the Immeasurable, of the known to the Unknown, and so of language and Being at all Its levels.

Existence is the stage on which we realize ourselves. In the Recitation God instructs the Praised as prophet to pray: “My Lord! Increase me in knowledge!”[[36]] Growth in knowledge can be in relation to God or to anything in existence. If knowledge does not bring us closer to God, however, it does not contribute to self-actualization, subordinating it instead to contingency as sufficient in itself and its own reason and purpose. The praised says “If a day comes upon me in which I do not increase in a knowledge that draws me nearer to God, may God not bless me that day.”[[37]]

It follows from this statement of the Praised that we can grow in knowledge. This should be what connects us as knowing subjects with absolutely knowing God. Nonetheless , we are prone to forgetting and denying the fundamental purpose of knowledge, namely self-liberation and self-realization in relation to God and return from the manifold to Him, the One. God encompasses everything with His knowledge.[[38]] We cannot. When we posit contingent existence as sufficient, then we apply a limitless transformation over space-time and mass-energy of cause into consequence and consequence into cause. The requirement of an absolute Third is denied or at least passed over in silence across duality. Such representations of existence also ignore the requirement of absolute Cause and absolute Consequence, present throughout duality. But the fluid manifold is impossible without the absolute One, Who holds it in order. 

When we take the signs on the horizons and in the observing self as enough in themselves and for realities apart from God, Who Alone is Truth, we confine ourselves to contingency. Then only the measurable world exists for us, with its countless phenomena, there for subjection to our will and power. We find gods to take for God both in the world and in the self. Even those who remain to some degree aware that there can be no god but God nonetheless associate their imaginings and acts to Him. The prophet, the Praised, prayed: “O God, I take refuge in Thee from knowledge that is of no use!”[[39]] He was referring to knowledge that does not link the knowing subject with God and so undermines return and ascent to Him. Consciously or not, we come to deny His signs on the horizons and in the self and as a result the immeasurable Spirit that has made us both the focus and the sum of creation, recipient of the stake of the wager of confidence and so of free will.

Seeing the world in the causal terms of the space-time and mass-energy phenomenal realm involves limits and boundaries. Everything can seemingly be reduced by comparison and measurement. What cannot is ignored or denied. The knowing subject sets as its goal within this picture what is known and within the boundaries of the contingent. We strive to maximise our power and strength within these limits. Such power and strength can be compared and measured. Nothing transcends or sub-tends as ground. Cut off from God, such maximised power and strength become the most exalted goal open to a humanity still intent on transcending its own ontological weakness. In the Recitation, God says: “O mankind! You are needful of God and He is the Self-Sufficing, the Praised.”[[40]] This need reflects our contingency and our consequent lack of self-sufficiency (our self-insufficiency). In the Recitation this is put in the following way: “God is the Rich, and you are the poor.”[[41]]

Our need, our insufficiency, and our poverty reflect that God is Sufficient, Rich, and Praised. Everything we do or have, we have received from the Unconditioned. This is why we can only realize awareness of the interdependence between our authentic weakness and our potential strength through the knowledge that there is no god but God and that the Praised is His apostle. In the Recitation, weakness and strength are what relate existence and humankind to God: “God is He Who created you from weakness, then ordained strength after weakness, then ordained weakness and old age after strength. He creates whatsoever He will, and He is the Knowing, the Powerful.”[[42]]

God’s strength and power have no measure, unlike strength and power in the contingent world, which are limited by space-time and mass-energy relations that are subject to measurement. In the Recitation, He says of Himself: “Truly thy Lord, He is the Strong, the Mighty.”[[43]] This is why being strong and mighty in contingency means little compared to Him. He is Unconditioned and nothing determines or defines Him. He is His Own, absolutely Free.  

Everything within contingency is a sign of Him. His presence in those signs is unconditioned. Signs do not confine us in relation to Him. We may think that what we have and might have belongs to us, but this is mere seeming. The relationship between contingent and Unconditioned has been obscured. In the Recitation, we are reminded of the danger that seeming represents: “Do you worship that which you carve, while God created you and that which you make?”[[44]]

That is God’s own discourse sent down to the heart of His prophet, the Praised, and then delivered to people. Its message is relevant to all of existence, every place, every time. And it is comprehensive: the world and humanity and everything that happens or may happen in them have meaning and purpose in God. Consciousness and thinking and silence and speaking and language and writing and doing and not doing, every voluntary and involuntary motion, all are of God in the full sense of the term.

As individuals, we are all within concrete social and economic environments. Prioritizing the unity of such structures and contexts over their role as enabling frameworks for human flourishing can delude us into viewing society as an organic unity, as a body or system that overrides the primacy of individual subjectivity as the medium of the human mode of being. A common consequence is that we offload our essentially individual debt to God onto society or the political and economic order, or some other projected supra-individual agency. Harmonious and healthy communities are only possible based on the free cooperation of liberated and fully realized individuals under God with the Praised as their perfect example. 

Individual freedom is not a product of participation in society or subordination to a social order — whether it considers itself liberal or repressive or is so considered by those subject to it. Individual freedom is an aspect of our relationship with God. That is what gives us both the strength and the responsibility to judge our relationship with society and transcend our dependence on it. Interpretations of the individual-society nexus based upon the ideology of progress invert this incontestable truth in the service of this-worldly lords instead of the only true Lord. They obscure and cover over the reality that all responsibility is ultimately that of the individual before God.

We fulfil our sublime potential to be most noble through being most conscious.

Trust, the relationship of the faithful to God, as Creditor or Indebtor, involves free will. That is how the absolutely Free renders Himself manifest within contingent creation. Nothing stands outside the limits of His will, however. To realize the contractual obligation we have accepted with God, we must show ourselves obedient in good and good alone. Witness that there is no god but God is also witness that there is no good but Him and that our most exalted potential lies in obedience (hearkening) to the Good. As He says to us in the Recitation: “O you who believe! Obey God and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you. And if you differ among yourselves concerning any matter, refer it to God and the Messenger, if you believe in God and the Last Day. That is better, and fairer in outcome.”[[45]]

Divergence between people is inevitable, as each of us was created from nothing and is irreducible to anyone or anything else. God's transcending sameness is set forth and affirmed in this difference. It follows that we are obligated, in the actualization of our capacities through being-at-peace and being faithful, to engage in dialogue over differences. God and His apostle shall judge us at all levels of existence in this regard. We are co-responsible for this — together and individually, as we realize our return from contingency and so from confinement within measurement to the Unconditioned.

Our relationships belong to us, as do the intentions that inform our choices of what to do and what not to do. We must preserve our clear understanding that there is no god but God Whom all the signs on the horizons and within the self signify. Otherwise, we will end up accepting, intentionally or through obliviousness, openly or covertly, one or more gods for God. Our growth as a knowing subject connected through knowledge to God, the absolutely Knowing, will be prevented. So too our growth in the reconciliation of difference.  And we shall not ascend to God by means of the most beautiful example within the self. 

When knowledge no longer serves to relate the knower with God, the absolutely Knowing, His presence in all things is neglected and denied. The manifold levels of Being are though collapsed within the conditioned consciousness of the observing subject. The very lowest, the measurable world to which multiplicity and quantity correspond, is taken for the only one, actual and sufficient. The higher levels of consciousness are obscured, and the question arises: “Does God not suffice His servant? Yet they would frighten thee with those apart from Him; and whomsoever God leads astray, no guide has he.”[[46]] We accepted a contractual relationship of free will with God. This allows us to approach the world we have been given by repressing and denying the reality that everything it contains is marked by God's presence and authority. It may not seem so. That is a mere seeming designed to alienate us from our capacity to return from and through the manifold to the absolute One, a capacity that is the reason and purpose of our introduction into existence.

We fulfil our sublime potential to be most noble through being most conscious. Being conscious is a scale that reaches down to the lowest level of being and up towards full consciousness in most beautiful uprightness. Each level involves conscious relationship with God, the Possessor of the most beautiful names, with varying degrees of realization, depending on progress on the upright path. At no point are we beyond His presence or His will. We cannot think or speak or do anything outside of His will. Only once we have become aware of this, are our consciousness, feelings, thoughts, and utterances, what we read and what we do, imbued with fullness of purpose and of reason, albeit never an absolute fullness. It can appear as though our thinking and speaking and acting are entirely our own, under our own authority, and independent of anything beyond our personal strength and power. This is impossible. Everything is of God and from God, as He reminds us in mercy for our obliviousness: “God it is Who created the heavens and the earth, and sent down water from the sky, then brought forth fruits thereby for your provision. He has made the ships subservient unto you, so that they sail upon the sea by His Command, and has made the rivers subservient unto you.”[[47]] Similarly in the Recitation: “Your Lord is He Who makes the ships sail upon the sea, that you might seek of His Bounty. Verily, He is Merciful unto you.”[[48]]

This statement that humankind is the dominant purpose and reason of all creation stresses the dependency of creation on God. All existence is given as a stage on which to affirm our conscious awareness through standing, praying, and prostrating ourselves. What we think, say, or do is useful only to the extent that it connects us with God. When we ascribe any of this power and purpose to ourselves, denying God as absolute Reason and absolute Purpose of everything, we forfeit our position as vicegerent in the world and shepherd of creation. We rebel against God and His Lordship and against ourselves. We reject awareness of having received His most beautiful names and of our potential to discover ourselves through the most beautiful example, our ever-present higher possibility, the reason and purpose of creation. Only consciousness of already possessing the most beautiful example allows us to realize our true potential in the most beautiful way, however, as beauty connected with the Possessor of the most beautiful names. When asked by the Archangel Gabriel to explain what he understood by ihsan or ‘doing what is beautiful,’ the Praised responded: “Doing what is beautiful means that you should worship God as if you see Him, for even if you do not see Him, He sees you.”[[49]]

By relating as poor, dependent, recipient, and servile beings to our Rich, Independent, Giving Master, we manifest the absolutely Real. Yet we remain contingent. What God has given us within the horizons of the world and within our own selves is but an image of the Real, an interpretation of It, and never to be equated with It. The horizons, the self, the prophet, and the Recitation announced to him are available to us in contingency and in interpretation. There is no interpretation, however, independent of our circumstances as individual recipients and interpreters of God’s self-expression. Connection with Him therefore requires we interpret His self-expression.

Every new interpretation involves overcoming a previous one, though not cutting all connection with what went before or closing off from what is to come after.[[50]] No interpretation can be imposed upon the Real. It is in an unceasing process of making otherwise known, but never without the presence of God, the Possessor of the most beautiful names. The beauty of the most beautiful example, our ever-present connection with the Possessor of the most beautiful names, does not fade in expression. 

The role of the Praised as prophet lies at the heart of humanity and so of existence, warning us against associating anything with God, no matter the age or circumstances in which we live.

We can feel bound by one of these inherited interpretations of reality. What we have inherited as our tradition can take on novel elements, but no interpretation can take away from the fact that the signs on the horizons and in the self and a fortiori in any language, including those constructed to support the supposed independence of epistemological fields, all ultimately designate God, Who sees and hears all things. Our only access to the past or any of the inherited interpretations of the revealed books or any imagined future is in and through our own present, which is fully real and inseparable from the absolute Real. When we turn to observe the horizons of the external world or look within the self, we find ourselves facing God. Every contingent phenomenon reveals and affirms Him. Only He is absolutely Real.

To realize oneself through being muslim (at peace), mumin (faithful) and muhsin (a doer of what is beautiful) is to accept that being known is itself a degree of growth in knowledge. Given awareness of God, it reinforces our sense of our dependence on the absolutely Rich and absolutely Independent, the absolutely One, the Cause and Purpose of the manifold as Its manifestation. When this is forgotten or denied, we search in vain for unity amongst people. There can be no unity without the Absolute One and His self-revelation through creation and the Praised, as His prophet and perfect epitome of existence.

The signs in the self and on the horizons are of God. He reminds us of them in the Recitation, which was revealed in language. He comprehends everything in His knowledge and mercy, so one language is the same as all languages. He has warned us of the reason and purpose for which we are in the world, of His unity, of our potential and capacity as human beings, and of our inevitable return to Him. To be actively muslim is to accept our responsibility to existence in its entirety and to counter the unjustified compartmentalization of awareness and knowledge into mutually exclusive ways of life based on closed systems of metaphysics, cosmology, and anthropology.

Powerlessness and division, suffering and error have their root in withdrawal from the whole into the phenomenal realities through which God manifests Himself. We are strangers and sojourners. Only awareness of return to God frees us from alienation and allows us to rejoice in a journey every part of which connects us with the Possessor of the most beautiful names. We are indebted to God for everything we do or have. Our claim and right to be redeemed into perfection stems from this, so long as we meet our contractual obligations. We owe a debt to and for everything in existence, because it all belongs to God. The prophet, the Praised, told us that everything has a claim on us but must also accept and recognise our claim on it in return.[[51]]

God designates Himself as the Unconditioned in the contingent flux of existence through the signs on the horizons and in the self — in everything that partakes of consciousness.  The things on the horizons owe their existence to God and have a claim on us. To meet that debt we must first meet our debt to ourselves, that is towards God. Inverting the ontological perspective that derives the contingent from the Unconditioned as befits the prophetic tradition into one that derives consciousness from the manifestation of the One in matter-energy and space-time has resulted in a reification of the horizons and a de-deification of the self. We have imprisoned ourselves on a single level of existence from which we have moreover excluded spirit and the angels and ultimately God. 

All human activity, all of existence, presents itself as a giving and receiving of power, as motion and work, within finitude. Even when the limits shift, they remain. This confirms that their principle is the Unlimited and Illimitable. In the world and observing both it and ourselves, we affirm those boundaries in their changeability and in their inseparability from the unknown as derived from the Unlimited and the Illimitable. The world and we, all the signs on the horizons and within us, all languages and all activity are of God from Whom they have their reason and cause and purpose. With God seemingly excluded from this perspective and so from our own consciousness, the self is alienated from itself and from its capacity to know and bear witness to no god but God and to the Praised as His apostle.

Everything contingent partakes, collectively and individually, of duality. The absolute Third makes Itself known and affirms Itself through this duality. Duality can be compared, measured, and determined. The absolute Ternary cannot. Duality does not and cannot exist without the Ternary. Its manifestations and signs can be measured, but only as contingent. To suppose we can assign measurability to the absolute Third and not just to the phenomenal horizons of the contingent world is to associate another to It, subjecting It to comparison and no longer measuring It against Its true criterion, immeasurability. God speaks of this in the Recitation, warning against those who would impose the measurability of contingency on the Unconditioned and so against any reduction of unity to the confines of contingency: “They did not measure God with His true measure. The whole earth shall be but a handful to Him on the Day of Resurrection, and the heavens will be enfolded in His right Hand. Glory be to Him, exalted is He above the partners they ascribe.”[[52]] 

God’s warning against becoming obsessed with assigning attributes to the world and the self and so making them partners to God is crucial to His reminder that there is no strength or power but His[[53]] and that the signs on the horizons and in the self are there to remind us precisely of that reality. 

The mercy to the worlds, the most beautiful example, the Praised, declaring what he as prophet had received from God, said: “I have no power over what harm or benefit may come to me, save as God wills.”[[54]]  God also commanded him to say: “I call only upon my Lord, and I ascribe none as a partner unto Him.”[[55]] And: “So remember the Name of thy Lord and devote thyself to Him with complete devotion. Lord of the East and the West, there is no god but He, so take Him as a guardian.”[[56]] As prophet, the Praised, in the fulness of his humanity, is both the most beautiful example and the maternal archetype, receiving from and giving to every individual and so existence as a whole. He knows our highest potential while also conscious that strength nor power are only in God and that we receive them in complete poverty, dependence, and weakness. Fantasizing otherwise, we become oppressors of our own selves, of others, and of the world, which was offered to us to remind us of God, the absolute Reason and absolute Purpose of all things.

That is why the Praised is a witness for each of us, always and forever, of how we must relate to our own self as the sum of all creation and to God as Creator. Those who follow him in loving God know everything pertinent to humanity and bear witness for all. No circumstances, place, or time offer us escape from relationship with God and His apostle. God is with us wherever we are. The role of the Praised as prophet lies at the heart of humanity and so of existence, warning us against associating anything with God, no matter the age or circumstances in which we live. We are reminded in the Recitation of the consequences of taking our will as itself enough. God told the Praised to say as his prophet: “Journey in the Land, then behold how was the end of those that were before; most of them were idolaters.”[[57]]

Has God’s law on the majority and the minority run its course in what has already been? God says explicitly: “Thou wilt find no alteration in the wont of God, and thou wilt find no change in the wont of God.”[[58]] We belong to the multitude to whom the One makes Himself known. The multitude may seem sufficient to us in itself, with inherent reason and purpose. In the Recitation, God speaks of this seeming and of being caught up in it: “Gross rivalry diverts you, even till you visit the tombs. No indeed; but soon you shall know. Again, no indeed; but soon you shall know. No indeed; did you know with the knowledge of certainty, you shall surely see Hell. Again, you shall surely see it with the eye of certainty. Then you shall be questioned that day concerning true bliss.”[[59]] In The Message of the Qur’an, Muhammad Asad considers this revelation an anticipation of the circumstances of the present age. Interpreting the meaning of the concept of takāthur, he points out:

‘The term takāthur bears the connotation of ‘greedily striving for an increase’, i. e., in benefits, be they tangible or intangible, real or illusory. In the above context it denotes man’s obsessive striving for more and more comforts, more material goods, greater power over his fellow-men or over nature, and unceasing technological progress. A passionate pursuit of such endeavours, to the exclusion of everything else, bars man from all spiritual insight and, hence, from the acceptance of any restrictions and inhibitions based on purely moral values — with the result that not only individuals but whole societies gradually lose all inner stability and, thus, all chance of happiness.”[[60]]

For the person-of-peace bearing witness to no god but God and the Praised as His apostle, this revelation is God speaking. Its arrival in the world, sent down into the heart of the prophet, is not and cannot be limited in place or time. It belongs authentically to all ages and all places and all languages. In it is the way that brooks no change. That is why it remains relevant to us, as human beings, always and forever, to each and every one of us, everywhere. When we become obsessed with multiplicity, forgetting the One, Whom it makes known, then we forget ourselves and consequently the reason and purpose for which we are in the world. 

This division of humanity into two – the majority who do not know, have no faith, and are not grateful, on the one hand, and the minority who do know, have faith, and are grateful, on the other – is a universal divine law.

It can seem at times that most people are beguiled by multiplicity and have forgotten or deny its underlying role as a sign of the One. There is also a minority who know and believe and actualize themselves by relating to God. How these two groups of humanity relate to each other changes from age to age. That does not alter the fact of their existence. The minority includes some who guarantee awareness of existence as the manifestation of God, the absolutely Aware. Humankind’s central role within creation reveals itself in and through them, individually and together; so do the reason and purpose for creation and how they appear on the horizons of the external world and in the depths of self. In the Recitation, God says about this:

Your creation and your resurrection are as naught but a single soul. Truly God is Hearing, Seeing.[[61]]

(…) whosoever slays a soul — unless it be for another soul or for working corruption upon the earth — it is as though he slew mankind altogether, and whosoever saves the life of one, it is as though he saved the life of mankind altogether.[[62]]

Say: “Shall I seek a lord other than God, while He is Lord of all things? No soul does evil, save against itself, and none shall bear the burden of another. Then unto your Lord is your return and He will inform you of that wherein you differed.”[[63]]

Individual responsibility cannot be transferred. This guarantees the fullness of our self-realization through what our inception into absolute Being by God’s will and mercy as the Inceptor gave us. No matter where we are on the arc of withdrawal from and return to Him, we cannot annul our uncreated and uncreatable essence, that single heart of all between the two fingers of the ever-Merciful. The minority are aware of this undeniable connection of humanity with God, Who is absolutely present and without compare. They are witnesses that multiplicity, the manifestation of the One in space-time and mass-energy through the signs on the horizons and within the self, is substantially One. Phenomena manifest the reality of the absolutely One, the Lord of the worlds. The horizons and everything within them speak to us of ourselves and of God, as we speak to them. When this multi-directional relationship is broken off, we lose consciousness of ourselves as in service through which God reveals His lordship. 

Humankind and so existence are the stage for that minority to bear witness that there is no god but God and that the Praised is His apostle. The minority are alone with God, facing His Face, conscious of Him and His signs. They are a part of humankind, but their primary responsibility is to themselves and to God, as they know and believe in God and are grateful for all that He has given them. They are witnesses for God before all humankind. God is enough for them. They do not seek redemption other than from God or to be saved by anyone but Him. He reminds them of the danger of being caught up in multiplicity with the majority:

"Judgment belongs to God alone. He commands that you worship none but Him. That is the upright debt, but most of mankind know not."[[64]]

"How many a sign is there in the heavens and on the earth by which they pass; yet they turn away from them! And most of them believe not in God, save that they ascribe partners unto Him."[[65]]

"Truly God is Possessed of Bounty for mankind, but most of them do not give thanks."[[66]]

The opposites of knowledge, faith, and gratitude are ignorance, infidelity, and ingratitude. Knowledge connects the knowing subject with what is known; faith connects the faithful subject with the object of faith; and gratitude connects the grateful subject with what they are grateful for. But God is the only worthy object of knowing, faith, and gratitude. The unknowing, faithless, and ungrateful are not conscious of their condition. They are cut off from the constant possibility in them to be grateful, faithful, and knowing and so can be subordinated to false gods.[[67]] This does not indicate a flaw in creation or in their selfhood or in the world into which they have been introduced. Whether they are in the condition they are willingly or unwillingly, as a result of denial or obliviousness, their potential to be recalled has not been withdrawn. They can turn to greater consciousness and through it towards God and so towards that version of selfhood that is rising on the path of increasingly conscious return.

This division of humanity into two — the majority who do not know, have no faith, and are not grateful, on the one hand, and the minority who do know, have faith, and are grateful, on the other — is a universal divine law. The majority and the minority can change in numbers and strength, but there is no change in the wont of God, which encompasses all of human existence. People of both parties have a stake in our fundamentally important capacity for being-at-peace, of being connected through being-at-peace with God, absolute Peace. One may apply terms like muslim or person-of-peace to name a person without that individual necessarily developing in themselves what is essential to that term, as we are reminded in the Recitation. God says to us: “Truly the debt in the sight of God is being-in-peace.”[[68]] Again, He says: “Whosoever seeks a debt other than being-in-peace, it shall not be accepted of him and in the Hereafter he shall be among the losers.”[[69]]

Amongst the minority — those who know, have faith, and are grateful — are witnesses to no god but God and the Praised as His apostle. Only once they have realized in and through the self their status as knowing, faithful, and grateful subjects can they bear witness to that fulness of potential that is their reason and purpose. Then, it is the prophet, the Praised, the most beautiful example and the mercy to the worlds, who bears witness for them. In the Recitation, God says to them: “You are the best community brought forth unto mankind, enjoining right, forbidding wrong and believing in God.”[[70]] God guarantees their wholeness. They are unique in their connection with God and His apostle. God announces Himself in and through them. Individually and collectively, they are the telos of existence and it was of them that God said: “Truly this community of yours is one community, and I am your Lord. So worship Me!”[[71]] These are the good who bear witness in and through their selves that there is no good but God the Good. It is in the uniqueness of this community that all the differences constitutive of humanity meet and actuate themselves in good. More than that — all of existence comes together and to consciousness in them. 

God announces to those who believe in the Recitation: “O you who believe! Betray not God and the Messenger, and betray not your trusts knowingly.”[[72]] Why are these three, God, His messenger, and trust connected here and susceptible to betrayal by the faithful? It is only by having faith and being connected by faith to the Faithful that we can ascend beyond the boundary of the known and see in what exists a manifestation of God. That is how we grow in knowledge and responsibility towards God’s call: 

"O you who believe! Be steadfast maintainers of justice, witnesses for God, though it be against yourselves, or your parents and kinsfolk, and whether it be someone rich or poor, for God is nearer unto both. So follow not your caprice, that you may act justly. If you distort or turn away, truly God is Aware of whatsoever you do."[[73]]

The known is derived from what is not known which is unlimited, because the known is simply the lowest level of Being in and through which God makes Himself known in the irrepressible flux of multiplicity. The signs take on full meaning in the believing subject, connected through belief with God. Free will is the precondition for being a believing or faithful subject suited to enter into relations with God. It is only through this faculty that God announces Himself in absolute indetermination, while nonetheless being present in all phenomena, in every sign in contingent existence, absolutely near in all things, in every particle-wave quantum, and in their linguistic or meta-linguistic representation. 

The signs in the self and on the horizons are manifestations to us of absolute Will, to which we have access everywhere and always despite the occluded lens of our contingency. The signs are complete manifestations of God. It may seem to us that there is some discord in the things on earth and in the things in the heavens and between them. That this is a necessary consequence of our contingency. But it is not the case. Existence is in fact linked through being-at-peace with God, absolute Peace, Who is in conversation with humanity in the multiplicity of languages. Each of us has an irreducible inner need to realize ourselves through being-at-peace by following our ever-present higher potential, the perfect person, the first of the people of peace, in hope of attaining to peace. All the levels of existence, including being-at-peace and believing, remind us of the link between humanity and absolute Peace. In the Recitation God says: “No disproportion dost thou see in the Merciful’s creation. Cast thy sight again, dost thou see any flaw? Then cast thy sight twice again; thy sight returns to thee humbled and wearied.”[[74]]

No disproportion or flaw is possible in creation. Nor any rift.[[75]] But human beings are contingent. This affects our vantage point on the horizons and on the self. God created us and what we do or can do. The images we come up with as we become aware of our horizons and of the self are contingent manifestations of unconditioned God. It is only by accepting that we are nothing without God and that His being Merciful lies within us that we can discover ourselves in the reason and purpose assigned to us for being in the world. 

Such images of the world and of its reason and purpose always reflect the condition of the observing subject. This is also true of the revealed Book. No image or interpretation can be fully fixed from individual to individual, generation to generation. Our images of the world and our interpretations of them change. They are associated with what went before. The process also always involves new content. The reach of the vision may be broader, but its dependence on God, the One and Mighty, is never excluded. 

No matter how cruel the world may sometimes seem to us, as a place or time of suffering and victimization, our contingent reality is maternal both in origin and purpose. Everything in it is embraced by God’s mercy.

We are creatures and our contingent status reverberates in everything we do. But our contingency is not absolute because our creaturehood means connection with the uncreated and uncreatable Creator. Whether we want to be or not, we are involved in constant change, in our own selves and in everything that surrounds us. We can't influence most of that flux. The reverse does not hold. The general flow of change does influence us. The claim that we cannot influence most of that flux presupposes an ability to affect to some degree the flow in which we have been placed regardless of our will. We entered this world without our willing it. And this world affects us. We assign names to things on near and remote horizons and connect them in a linguistic web of meanings. Thinking is the foundation for this inter-linking of horizons and self and their ceaseless reflection in language and speech. Consciousness is the foundation of thinking. 

We are conscious of being conscious. The very fact of our being conscious of being conscious is a clear indicator of the arc in the self on which we discover in and of ourselves the necessity of Truth. Each of the perspectives (traditions) allows ascent to Truth in the self, through awareness that the truth of universal creaturehood follows from knowing no creator but the absolute Creator and no truth but absolute Truth. Truth, absolutely Close and Indivisible, is present in everything contingent, in every pair or duality, no matter how simple or complex. Truth is Third to every pair, the Being of everything in contingent being, divisible into the multitude of beings.

Our awareness of this consequential capability for thinking and speaking and so for acting derives from the absolutely Aware. That we can bring awareness to the horizons and to the signs on them and think and talk about them and, what is more, act within ourselves and in the world that surrounds us only makes the following question even more urgent: Are the horizons outside of us and within our own selves also conscious and do they think, speak, and act? This interdependence of humanity and its world is largely ignored. This world has, within the limits of its measurability, been given to us as a temporary residence, while consciousness, thought, and language correspond to the signs on the horizons and within the self. We have fallen into supposing ourselves masters of our own consciousness, thought, and discourse, while supposing those external horizons and our own selves unaware, thoughtless, and mute, on the basis of our highly limited will. Instead of a vicar responsible equally for the horizons and our own selves, we have become a bully and an overweening master.

The reality of Paradise is a balance of the external horizons and the individual self in which multiplicity is uniquely contingent being and so in the highest degree of closeness to absolute Being. There everything is edible except the fruit of one tree. Against it stands Hell, in which all connections between the self and the horizons are broken off and our consciousness, thinking, and speech are transformed into suffering. Humanity has been placed in this world, between Paradise and Hell. We can ascend and return to God or descend further into suffering.

In the Recitation, God speaks of a world where nothing lacks meaning except human action out of ignorance and so out of mistaken thinking ungrounded in the knowledge that there is no consciousness but absolute Consciousness: “And with Him are the keys of the Unseen. None knows them but He; and He knows what is on land and sea; no leaf falls but that He knows it, nor any seed in the dark recesses of the earth, nor anything moist or dry, but that it is in a clear Book.”[[76]]

It is worth remembering that knowledge is what connects the knowing subject with what he or she knows. God is absolutely Knowing. This makes everything in existence, even a leaf, conditionally aware with knowledge. Clearly both the leaf and all that exists are knowing, thinking, and conscious. Can we respond to the issue of how we, the people of peace, and the world at peace relate to absolute Peace, without acknowledging the claims of what exists? That claim is to be of and from God and to return to Him.

God made us and our language. We encompass all of creation within ourselves and in language. We have, however, denied that the things on the horizons and in the self are also conscious of us and think and speak of and to us. In the present age, most people have confined themselves to the lowest level of existence, to a world of comparison and measurement in which everything beyond the self has been reduced to mere objects for us to rule over as subjects of knowing and of might. We have separated ourselves off from the horizons through which the Lord of the worlds makes Himself known to us, reminding us of the all-embracing capacity of the self. 

In How Forests Think, the anthropologist Eduardo Kohn writes: 

“I have been trying to say something concrete about something general. I have been trying to say something about a general (sic) that makes itself felt in us ‘here’ at the same time that it extends beyond us, over ‘there.’ Opening our thinking in this way might allow us to realize a greater Us — an Us that can flourish not just in our lives, but in the lives of those who will live beyond us. That would be our gift, however modest, to the living future.”[[77]]

There are two key ideas in this quote — realization and flourishing. How are they connected to the key concepts of our own standing debt — oneness, prophethood, and return? Is it possible to free ourselves of the obstacles on our path of return to the self in most beautiful uprightness and yet fail to understand multiplicity in the flux and in the world and in the self as a manifestation of the Absolute One? Can we not discover in our language the reflection of all of existence and so the order that God renews through the medium of His prophets? Can we fail to recognise, in our own being, the stranger and the sojourner returning from abroad to their authentic homeland, to the house of absolute Peace?

The answers to these questions depend on our capacity to engage in service, being-at-peace, and the offering of praise that connect this world and us to God, as Lord, Peace, and Praised. Being so connected commits us to recognising the claims and rights of everything in existence and so their exercise of consciousness, thinking, and speech in the praise and glorification of God. No matter how cruel the world may sometimes seem to us, as a place or time of suffering and victimization, our contingent reality is maternal both in origin and purpose. Everything in it is embraced by God’s mercy. Everything comes from that mercy and everything returns to it. In the Recitation, God’s own discourse sent down by the Holy Spirit/the Spirit of Truth to the heart of His prophet, the Praised, God gives us his maternal opening: “In the Name of God, the all-Merciful, the ever-Merciful. Praise be to God, Lord of the worlds, the all-Merciful, the ever-Merciful.”[[78]]

It is worth noting the phrase “Praise be to God, Lord of the worlds” placed between the two instances of the pair of divine names, the all-Merciful, the ever-Merciful. Praise of God, the Lord of the worlds, connects us as praising with our own maternity, which as a womb is a place of mercy, because it receives the manifestation of the all-Merciful, the ever-Merciful. This beginning in contingency is equally an end and return. Everything comes from the all-Merciful, the ever-Merciful, and everything returns to Him. He is Praised and has placed all of creation in His debt. Consequently, all of creation and everything in it is maternal or receptive. When it returns what has been received to God, its absolute Lord, its receiving of being praised shows itself in the being praised of God, the Praised. This is a return of our debt to the absolute Indebtor. Creation gathers in us. This is why we are connected in and through our highest capacity, the Praised, with God, the Praised, by praising. Through this perfection, and to the extent to which we realize ourselves in it, we are all maternal prophets, the most beautiful examples to all of humanity, always and forever. The prophet, the Praised, comprehends within himself all the levels of Being. Which is why he is an admonisher unto the worlds. 

There are countless worlds, imaginable and unimaginable, of which God is the Lord, and all praise Him in their own ways. These worlds are encompassed within human language, individually and altogether. That is true of all the worlds and everything and everyone in them. Their reason for existence and their purpose are One. 

We are all authentically and originally receptive – maternal – but the Praised is the principle, the starting point, and so the most beautiful archetype of this. 

The claim that our shared essence as human beings is being-at-peace cannot be refuted logically. Were that essence divisible or changeable, it would not be essence, or the manifestation and affirmation of Truth, indivisible and unchangeable. Perfected humanity is maternal. In and through it, the horizons and the self are revealed as a whole by which God makes Himself known. Consequently, we cannot consider what it means to be a human being in isolation from whether our essence lies in knowing no god but God and the Praised as His apostle?

God, Living and Steadfast, is absolute Giver and absolute Receiver. The contingency of His self-revelation through creation is maternal, receptive. Everything it has it has received from the Giver. By returning what it has received, it realizes, in its contingency, a manifestation of the Giver. This interlinkage is metaphysically represented by the relationship of male and female or father and mother. The very complex semantic field of the Recitation centred on the verbal root ’-m-m is related to this.[[79]] Let us recall that the Praised is a maternal prophet.[[80]] The adjective “maternal” or ’ummīyy appears twice in the Recitation, as a descriptor of the Praised:[[81]]

“I cause My Punishment to smite whomsoever I will, though My Mercy encompasses all things. I shall prescribe it for those who are reverent, and give alms, and those who believe in Our signs, those who follow the Messenger, the maternal Prophet, whom they find inscribed in the Torah and the Gospel that is with them, who enjoins upon them what is right, and forbids them what is wrong, and makes good things lawful for them and forbids them bad things, and relieves them of their burden and the shackles that were upon them. Thus those who believe in him, honor him, help him, and follow the light that has been sent down with him; it is they who shall prosper.”

Say, “O mankind! Truly I am the Messenger of God unto you all – Him to Whom belongs Sovereignty over the heavens and the earth. There is no god but He. He gives life and causes death. So believe in God and His Messenger, the maternal Prophet, who believes in God and His Words; and follow him, that haply you may be guided.”

There are also four uses of ’ummiyyūn, normally translated as “unlettered”, “who does not know how to read”, or “pagan”. Often taken as dogma, these interpretations cannot be reconciled with the words of the Recitation. Maternity, our authentic and innate fitness to receive, is an attribute shared by every human being, regardless of gender. No condition or act, including writing and reading, can erase this maternal aspect So, the question remains: How are we to realize this maternal aspect within the totality of self and world? Aware of the revealed writings but having lost our connection with the maternal principle in language and so in memory and thinking, we can nonetheless still discover the maternal prophet present in all prophethood and so in every language and age within our own sense of self. In the Recitation, God announces: 

"So if they dispute with thee, say, “My face is in peace with God and so too those who follow me.” And say to those who were given the Book and to the maternal ones, “Are you in peace?” Then if they are in peace, they will be rightly guided, but if they turn away, then thine is only to convey. And God sees His servants."[[82]]

Here the translation we have argued for, “maternal” rather than “unlettered or illiterate” is justified semantically. The Praised as prophet is first of the people of peace. This is confirmed by an expression sent down by God into his heart: “My face is in peace with God and so too those who follow me.” This interlinkage of the Praised and others expresses the original fellowship of all the prophets and so of all human beings. Moreover, in his very primacy as prophet, the Praised is a mercy to the worlds. God comprehends all in His mercy. The Praised is the first recipient and so the first giver in all of creation. Just as a womb enfolds the child within a place of mercy, which is the proper translation of the Arabic noun for the maternal uterus, so the prophet, the Praised, enfolds (comprehends) and realizes all of existence. He is that most exalted potential in all of us. We are all authentically and originally receptive — maternal — but the Praised is the principle, the starting point, and so the most beautiful archetype of this. 

Being literate or illiterate does not affect being maternal. All of existence, everything in the heavens and on the earth and between them, corresponds to language, every language, always and forever. Conversely, each language corresponds to all of existence. In the Recitation, God says: “We shall show them Our signs upon the horizons and within themselves till it becomes clear to them that He is the truth. Does it not suffice that thy Lord is Witness over all things?”[[83]] This showing or disclosure is for everyone. The Book through which God calls us to Himself, as absolute Giver, and to our own maternal receptivity is spoken forth and written for us in the signs on the horizons of the world and within the self. The role of the scriptures, mediated by fixed linguistic imagery; it is the same as that of the maternally embracing horizons and the self. Symbolic speech may be particularly human, but it is not the only form. When God reminds us of the signs on the horizons, they include the immediate images (icons and indices) through which He announces Himself in such a fashion that it is mutually translatable, symbolically, with all the other forms of His revelation. 

God’s all-mercy and His ever-mercy are the reason and purpose of creation. All this is maternal. At the heart of it is the maternal prophet. Nothing in creation stands outside that maternity. In the Recitation, God announces: “There is no creature that crawls upon the earth, nor bird that flies upon its wings, but that they are maternal like yourselves – We have neglected nothing in the Book – and they shall be gathered unto their Lord in the end.”[[84]] This reference to everything living being maternal, just as all people are maternal, relates to all of existence. Everything in the heavens and on earth glorifies God, the Praised, with praise.[[85]] He says: “Hast thou not considered that God is glorified by whosoever is in the heavens and on the earth, and by the birds spreading their wings? Each indeed knows its prayer and its glorification, and God knows that which they do.”[[86]]

Everything in existence glorifies God. And everything knows the forms of worship and glorification: “And there is no thing, save that it glorifies His praise, though you do not understand their praise.”[[87]] Existence itself and all the phenomena it contains relate to God by what they have, by moving or being-at-peace, by giving voice or remaining silent. The ways in which they can worship God and glorify Him through praise are countless. It behoves us to recognize and understand this and to maintain our participation in that glorification of God through praise. The horizons and our own selves speak to us of this in different ways. 

While the limitations to human life and indeed to everything contingent are obvious, by the very fact of existence being focused within and through our selves we do not acquiesce in the ending of life in death. For us, death, no matter how near and inevitable, is not and cannot be the end. Death is contingent, the merely apparent absence of the absolutely Living. We do not live on (survive past death) and we are not happy in contingency, but we want both of these in their absolute sense — full and unlimited life in full and unlimited happiness. In his consideration of this question and of how humanity and nature relate to each other under conditions where nature’s rights and claims are not being denied and neither is humanity’s debt, Eduardo Kohn stresses the interdependence of human and other living beings: 

“These are finitude, semiotic mediation (the ‘cane’ we living beings all use as we feel our ways through our finite lives), and — I can now add — a peculiar sort of ‘thirdness’ unique to life. This kind of thirdness is the general quality of being in futuro, which captures the logic of life’s continuity and how this continuity is made possible thanks to the room each of our individual deaths can make for the lives of others.”[[88]]

In fact, this thirdness, sought within the deepest core of our humanity, is nothing but the incepted knowledge that death and life are not and cannot be in balance. It follows from our knowing and bearing witness that there is no god but God that there is no life but absolute Life. Everything returns from contingent life to absolute Life and all forms of death are mere seeming. Contingency, as duality overall and in every quantum, makes known, reveals, and affirms absolute Life. 

Within this split in the self, an uncovering or apocalypse is unfolding that entails the potential ruin of the world. We, the capstone of all creation, have brought down this devastation upon ourselves. … How shall we relearn the skills required to restore wholeness to the horizons and the self and to restore the dialogue between them?

The Messiah, Jesus, Mary’s son, supported by the Holy Spirit, said: “The kingdom of God is within you.”[[89]] This “within you” disturbs those who seek to interpret the sending of the Messiah in terms of the social order, as they project a higher value onto political organization than the individual self. So, they have altered the term “within you” to “amongst you”. This leads to an obscuring and denial of the anthropocosmic unity within which the individual human being serves as capstone of existence.[[90]] In the Recitation, His revelation sent down by the Holy Spirit/the Spirit of Truth to the heart of the Praised as His prophet, God states: 

"And know that the Messenger of God is within you. Were he to obey you in many matters, you would suffer. But God has caused you to love faith and has made it seem fair in your hearts, and He has caused you to despise concealment, iniquity and disobedience – such are the rightly guided—as a bounty from God and a blessing; and God is Knowing, Wise."[[91]]

In this passage too, “within you” is generally translated as “among you”. The linguistic justification for the former interpretation is indisputable. Moreover, the prophet, the Praised, the maternal, the seal of all the prophets, the mercy to the worlds, and the most beautiful example, is, above all, a sign or symbol of the reason and meaningful purpose for which humanity was created and so of the essential core to each individual self, our ever-present archetypal potential. Revealed at the lowest level of our descent into the worlds, he is to be our guide on the ladder of ascent and return to that most beautiful uprightness that is our reason and purpose and so to God. There is no social order or order of the worlds without that central core, irreducible to an I in which God’s We is not revealed — nor can there be. 

In these quotations, both the kingdom of God and the prophet, the Praised, are already within each of us, and only then in existence as a whole. Rising up within and through the self, by loving God and following the Praised, we free ourselves and realize ourselves through embodying the knowledge that there is no god but God and that the Praised is His apostle. The prophet is our connection with God, the Praised.

That is why he is ever present as that higher potentiality of the self, our better and more beautiful self. So, we cut ourselves off with determination from whatsoever obscures Truth. We spurn obfuscation (covering) and injustice and disobedience (refusal to listen or hearken). Our true goal is in fact to be obedient and listen to God and to His apostle. When obedience is ascribed to anyone or anything, it is subject to the principle that it will only be a hearkening in good and that judgement belongs to God and to His apostle. We are obliged by our most beautiful potential to do everything we do in the most beautiful way and to do it in witness that there is no god but God.

God is the Creator. Nothing limits Him. In order that His absolute Oneness in every present moment and place be shown in creation, connecting Him with every creature and every creature with Him, He makes Himself known in a different way. Everything through which He makes Himself known passes out and comes back into existence in relation to Him. For, He is the Living and the Steadfast, unaffected by coming into or going out of existence or by dying. In the Recitation, he says: “To God belong the East and the West. Wheresoever you turn, there is the Face of God. God is All-Encompassing, Knowing.”[[92]] He also says: “And call not upon another god along with God. There is no god but He! All things perish, save His Face. Judgment belongs to Him, and unto Him will you be returned.”[[93]]

God speaks of Himself through the consciousness, knowledge, and belief, as well as through the unconsciousness, ignorance, and unbelief of people of all languages. This includes through His names and the pronouns, I, Thou, and He, with their declined forms. Moreover, God announces Himself using the pronoun We and its forms, Us, and to or for Us. This is interpreted in various ways. Here we shall focus on one of the possible meanings that contributes to the need for an ecological ethics and for the associated freeing of ourselves from reification of the external horizons and their reduction from consciousness. 

Announcing Himself as We, God confirms that He comprehends within Himself all of creation and that it is both living and conscious, knowing and thinking, hearing and seeing, feeling and speaking. Were anything without those attributes, that would mean that God — Living, Conscious, Knowing, Thinking, Hearing, Seeing, Willing, and Speaking — does not actually comprehend everything in His knowledge and mercy. Then, that would not be God, Who is not like or equal to anything. Precisely because all the things and especially the signs on the horizons and in the self are comprehended in His We, in terms of their full reason and purpose. They all share the same foundation or ground — the same “Be!” of the Creator, the Word that is with and of Him as Truth. And so everything is under a debt of obligation to being-at-peace and to praising. Everything gathers and is focused within us as individuals through our ever-present higher potential, the prophet, the Praised, who is within us. 

In the liberation of the self from its self-confinement and its discovery that God’s We encompasses everything on the horizons and in the self, there appears a realization of truth precisely in and through that We and in the flourishing of that part of humanity that follows the prophet, the Praised, in loving God. How has modern humanity broken up that integrity of the external horizons and the self? How have we succeeded in denying that the world and everything in it know and think humanity too? We have rendered ourselves ignorant and raised up one side of the self at the expense of the other and of existence as a whole thanks to that split in the self, but the gates of return are not closed to us, return to the arts of listening and looking and walking and of acting out of knowledge that is therefore both justified and merciful. Within this split in the self, an uncovering or apocalypse is unfolding that entails the potential ruin of the world. We, the capstone of all creation, have brought down this devastation upon ourselves. 

In the Recitation, God says: “Truly those who deny Our signs and wax arrogant against them, the gates of Heaven shall not be opened for them, nor shall they enter the Garden till the camel pass through the eye of the needle.”[[94]] But the signs on the horizons are always before us. God makes Himself known through them without cessation. We have a standing capacity to reverse our denial of them. When we do, the gates of heaven open and we can cross the boundary between the known and the unknown to rediscover that everything in the horizons and everything in the self are interrelated and in their respective languages express their knowledge of the same essence, the revelation that there is no god but God.

The opposite of denial is human perfectibility. Existence is conscious of this. It knows and speaks to it. That is because existence praises God, the Praised, serves Him, is at peace in relation to Him, and falls in prostration before Him. This relationship of everything in existence, visible and invisible, to its being gathered within perfectible humanity is revealed to us in the call issued to the faithful in the Recitation: “God and His angels bless the Prophet. O believers, do you also bless him, and pray him peace.”[[95]] Ali the son of Abu Talib bore witness to this connection between the prophet, the Praised, and God, the angels, and people and so all of existence: “I went out with the Prophet through the environs of Makkah. Every rock and tree welcomed him, saying, ‘Peace be upon thee, O Messenger of God.’”[[96]]

The signs in the world and in the self spoke to the prophet in the languages native to them and Ali passed on his understanding of what they said to us through the language in which human beings converse with themselves and with each other. Thus we see that these languages are different in nature but mutually intelligible, so long as we are ready to listen with the right ears and see with the right eyes. The connection of all things in existence with prophetic maternity, which is intelligible and present in liberated, realized, and flourishing humanity, has faded from the view of a humanity confined within a deterministic image of the world, a world reified and deadened, despiritualised and rendered numb and dumb. How shall we relearn the skills required to restore wholeness to the horizons and the self and to restore the dialogue between them? How shall we rediscover in the Scripture, sent down with the Holy Spirit/the Spirit of Truth to the heart of the prophet, the Praised, that redemptive reminder of the worlds through which God speaks to us and of a humanity that speaks to those worlds, always and everywhere, as a way of relating to their Creator?

We cannot flourish unless all of creation and everything in it do too.

The question of how to strengthen Muslim unity depends on another even more fundamental one: What does it actually mean to be human, a human individual, and can we discover in ourselves knowledge that relates us as knowing subjects to God, the absolutely Knowing, and to the Praised, the perfect human individual, God’s apostle? Both these aspects of knowledge, expressed as witness, depend entirely and exclusively on the self of the witnessing individual. That is the heart of our being the epitome and sum of all of creation, of which we are conscious, which we know, and of which we think. But that too, whatever is first and last, outside and inside, is a manifestation of God, the absolutely First and Last and Outer and Inner.

Everything on the horizons is conscious and knowing in relation to us as conscious and knowing human beings, because there is nothing God has not given creaturehood and guidance to. All of existence and everything in it is praised and under a debt of conscious creation placed upon them by the absolute Praised. Existence and everything in it are authentically poor. Recognising this in consciousness and through knowing, they expiate their debt by praising God, from Whom that debt comes.

That is why the prophet, the Praised, is the heart of creation, present in every individual thing and in all of them together. He is the central phenomenon in history, but much more than that. He is present in every individual, always and forever, with people and amongst them wherever they are, but more crucially as the essence of every individual human nature, for whom he represents our ever-present higher potential and he is therefore closer and dearer than any condition of the self on the ladder of ascent and return to the absolute Praised.

The external horizons, which is to say the heavens and the earth and everything between them, and to the boundaries beyond them, in the irrepressible flow of God’s signs, all gather in the self of the human observer. As we become conscious of our own selves, as we become our own and therefore free, we open up to self-realization, realization in truth in relation to God, the One and True. This is ascent from the contingency of the depths towards most beautiful uprightness and flourishing within the framework of God’s knowledge and His mercy. The end of this ascent is the self of the Praised, praised and praising, in his relationship with God, the absolutely Praised. The nature of the Praised is immeasurable in its magnitude.[[97]] The worlds are united and unified in its flourishing. There is nothing on the horizons whose imperilment would not equally threaten the self in its attainment of most beautiful uprightness, its reason and purpose. In our freedom, self-realization, and flourishing, we are the vicars of the all-Merciful. We hear and see His revelation of mercy in all things and so we are merciful ourselves in all things. 

The prophet, the Praised is a mercy to the worlds. He unites in and through himself the fullness of human potential, from the lowest depth, signified by the inviolate or sacred mosque in the desert valley of Bekka, all the way up to most beautiful uprightness, signified by the furthest mosque around the Rock in Jerusalem. God announced regarding this: “Glory be to Him Who carried His servant by night from the Sacred Mosque to the Furthest Mosque, whose precincts We have blessed, that We might show him some of Our signs. Truly He is the Hearer, the Seer.”[[98]]

The possibility of return from exile to the House of Peace, to Paradise, or to the self as equivalent to everything within the horizons, to the Is-ness of everything, is shown in this experience of ascent. In reality this is returning, hearing, and seeing the signs on the horizons and in the self which contain the discourse of the Debt and its inscription sent down by God into a human heart. 

Remembrance is the connection of the remembering subject with the thing or person remembered. There is nothing on the horizons or in the self that is not in itself a sign through which the absolutely Conscious and Knowing signifies Himself. While every sign, in its contingency, receives that absolute Consciousness and is consequently contingently conscious both of itself and of existence as the whole in which it is placed, we, forgetful of God, have reduced the world of the external horizons to mere matter and to life of less value, subordinate to us. We are active in that reified world, forgetful, and denying of the fact that everything in existence is itself conscious and knowing and that it signifies the absolute Signifier and Signified in different ways. One consequence of this is the science of the reified world, in whose considerations, measurements, and experiments, logic, language, and descriptions there is no place either for Spirit or for God, and even less for the Day of Judgement and what follows it. 

To be a physicist, biologist, geologist, mathematician, linguist, or neurologist, as those terms are currently understood, and to write papers and books in those fields is to ignore or deny any place or role for Spirit or God. Even when the scientist cleaves to a personal connection with Spirit and God and to traditions in which those concepts are central, the rules of the community in which he is active exclude them as unquantifiable. While knowledge, the connection between the knowing subject and the measurable world, has grown at an accelerated pace, the respect for Spirit and God has been reduced practically to extinction. This is the contemporary condition of humankind including its Muslim components. God sent down the Recitation (the Qur’an) by the Holy Spirit/the Spirit of Truth to the heart of His prophet, the Praised. And, it bears repeating, the hearts of all people are as one heart between the two fingers of the all-Merciful. In our knowing all the names, the Holy Spirit/Spirit of Truth comprehends all of existence and ties it, gathered into the individual self, to the prophet, the Praised, and so to God. 

All of existence and every individual thing in it is in constant change, which is to say in an asymmetric symmetry or an unbalanced balance. The two sides of contingency through which the One and Truth makes Himself known cannot attain a condition within change whereby the one entirely overcomes the other. In any given condition, both sides are entirely dependent on God. His prophet, the Praised, says: “The heavens and the earth are founded upon justice.”[[99]]

Having learned all the names, including the name of the Faithful, which is the precondition for fitness to enter into contractual relations with God, we have attained free will, limited by our contingency, but nonetheless free. We can undermine the limits of asymmetrical symmetry throughout existence and disturb the harmony of creation. In the Recitation, God says to us: “Heaven He has raised and the Balance He has set, that you transgress not in the balance. So set right the weight and fall not short in the balance.”[[100]]

This balance has to do with the interdependence of the individual and existence. This interdependence is essentially complete: there is no existence without the individual and no individual without what is on the horizons. Thanks to the individual’s being a conscious, knowing subject, existence and everything it comprises are also aware and knowing. They speak to each other, reminding each other of God, the One, and Truth. To the extent that we deny or undermine the signs on the horizons, we also deny and undermine them in the self. We undermine ourselves. God has told us: “Remember Me, and I shall remember you.”[[101]]

Oblivion is the opposite of remembering. When we forget God, we forget ourselves, as He is the foundation for all duality and so for everything human. The Recitation says the following about the interdependence of forgetting God and forgetting the self: “And be not like those who forget God, such that He makes them forget themselves. It is they who are the iniquitous.”[[102]]

The world, from the furthest boundaries of the heavens all the way down to the skin of the individual, and everything in that world are relevant to this forgetting of the self on the part of humanity. This is because, our being conscious and knowing, thanks to God’s inspiration of Spirit into our bodies, means that all of existence, which partakes of that same Spirit, is conscious and knowing. Just as every individual is a subject facing the world as its object, so that individual is an object to the world, as a conscious and knowing subject.  In the Anthropocene, this has been ignored and denied. The world has been stripped of its living subjectivity. It seems to humanity that it alone is the subject and everything else its objects. And so, under the influence of this seeming, humanity wreaks havoc on itself and on the world.  We deny the claims of the world, thinking to strengthen our own by doing so. 

In the end, we cannot answer the question from the conference title by a focus on the condition of Muslims, understood as a sub-group of humanity, in a particular part of the world, with access to certain resources, and under a particular geopolitical configuration. After all, why should Muslims, understood as just a socio-political grouping, be particularly strong or united compared to other ethno-religious communities or peoples? The only justification for promoting the strength and unity of Muslims is if we understand being Muslim in terms of our individual acceptance of God’s universal call to being-at-peace and its role in providing the basis for building plural communities within which all are free, empowered to seek self-realization, and to flourish in relations that recognise the value of all of creation as that which we were ourselves created to gather and bring to consciousness. In other words, for the Muslim, strength and unity are of importance as means to the ultimate end, living in right relations with each other and the rest of creation so that we can exercise our free will in pursuit of our relationship as people-of-peace with God, absolute Peace, through being-at-peace. 

The Day of Judgement is not just to determine whether we shall be saved or damned. It is a call to live now as through we were already saved. This life is not a sacrifice, a discipline that will be relaxed after death so that we may enjoy then what we have denied ourselves here and now. It is already potentially what salvation promises and we are called to realize that promise here and now, in our relations with each other, with the signs on the horizons and in the self, and so with our own selves. Muslim unity therefore cannot be a unity in strength to be deployed against others but unity in mutual service, because it is in service that true strength is developed and shown. That service is universal because it is to God and through God to His creation and so to all our fellow human beings, of all traditions, all of which lead to being-in-and-at-peace, and ultimately to ourselves, whom we shall save not by a focus on our selves but by a focus on service to the Lord and through Him to His creation. 

Service can only be embraced by the individual. To impose service on others or even on the self is to choose to oppress the other — human or non-human —band that ultimately leads to a forgetting of the self, whose value lies in its receptivity to the world and others, not its potential to lord over them. That is why we can only relate to each other through the presence of the Third, Who is the Guarantor of good faith in our relations with each other and with the world. 

Our unity and strength can only be increased by an increase in knowledge that acknowledges the universality of His authority, not ours, and the need for a restorative approach to the world, an approach that does not mistake rapid change for progress, but that does not reject change either, as the natural condition of a world based on flux and duality. Engaging with change through openness must be based upon an unwavering commitment to realization of His beautiful names not merely in ourselves but through the reestablishment of harmony and dialogue between the signs on the horizons and those in the self, so that they are restored and flourish in a process of mutual enrichment. This is the precondition for our flourishing, for building up our strength, and attaining a unity that draws upon and celebrates the complex richness of God’s creation as a way of praising Him. 

We are here in the world. So long as we are here, our reason and purpose are to gather and focus creation. We cannot flourish unless all of creation and everything in it do too. To suppose anything else is a flight from reality based on a phantasy of mastery that leads us down into the lowest depths. Our turn back onto the path of self-liberation, self-realization, and flourishing as Muslims can only be based on understanding that as Muslims what relates us to al-Salam is our commitment to being-at-peace. That must be based upon constant interrogation of conditions in the world and our responsibility for them. We must recognize our debt, the obligation this places upon us to practice a living politics of restoration — restoration of the worlds, of our environments, of our societies, and above all of our own selves by following the Praised and realizing our highest potential in him.

[[1]]: The Prophet Muhammad, whose name is the Praised – Peace be upon him! – said to God: “O God, You are peace and from You is peace. Blessed are You, Majestic and Noble!” (Imam Muslim, Șaḥīḥ Muslim, 1–4, trans. ‘Abdul Ḥamīd Ṣiddīqī, Riyadh: International Islamic Publishing House, no date, 1:292).

[[2]]: The Prophet said: “Obedience is required only in what is good.” (Imam al- Bukhārī, Sahīh al-Bukhārī, 1–9, trans. Muhammad Muḥsin Khān, Beirut: Dar al-Arabia, 1985, vol. 5, 441).

[[3]]: See further: William C. Chittick, Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul: The Pertinence of Islamic Cosmology in the Modern World, Oxford: Oneworld, 2007.

[[4]]: Qur’an, 2:143. The Qur'anic translations draw on the following versions, with certain adjustments to reflect the author's preferences regarding the translation of certain terms and words, intended to make clear meaningful connections in the text of the Recitation: Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Caner K. Dagli, Maria Massi Dakake, and Joseph E. B. Lumbard, eds., The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary, New York: Harper One, 2015, and Arthur J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980.

[[5]]: The degrees of consciousness correspond to the degrees of self-realization. On the Qur'anic representation of this, see further: Lings, Martin, Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, Rochester: InnerTraditions International, 1983, chapter “The Degrees”, 326–28.

[[6]]: Qur’an, 25:43.

[[7]]: Muslim, 1:1–2. See further: Sachiko Murata and William C. Chittick, The Vision of Islam: The Foundations of Muslim Faith and Practice, London/New York: I. B. Tauris, 1996, xxv–xxvi.

[[8]]: For the semantic fields associated with the verbal root s-l-m, see: Elsaid M. Badawi, and Muhammad Abdel Halim, Arabic-English Dictionary of Qur’anic Usage, Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2008, 450–53.

[[9]]: We cannot speak of science, in any real sense, without mathematics. But mathematics is not itself formal logic or science. Nor can it be separated from them. It is important to remember the premise that God created us and what we do and that we realize ourselves in service to God through our own selves and what we do. Nothing in existence is worthy of our service, in and of itself. Mathematics, like any other product of our consciousness, thinking, or action, can be a connection or link to God or a way of denying or breaking that connection. See further Hempel, Carl G., “On the Nature of Mathematical Truth,” The American Mathematical Monthly, 52/10 (1945): 543–56, and Cheng, Eugenia, Is Maths Real? How Simple Questions Lead Us to Mathematics’ Deepest Truths, New York: Basic Books, 2023.

[[10]]: Qur’an, 17:44.

[[11]]: Ibidem, 3:31.

[[12]]: Ibidem, 30:22.

[[13]]: Ibidem, 10:47.

[[14]]: Ibidem, 14:4.

[[15]]: Ibidem, 21:25.

[[16]]: The name of the Inceptor (al-Fāṭir) and the concept of inception (fiṭra) belong, in the Qur’anic revelation, to the semantic cluster centred on the verbal root f-ṭ-r. See: Badawi, Arabic-English Dictionary of Qur’anic Usage, 716–17.

[[17]]: Qur’an, 3:81.

[[18]]: Ibidem, 3:109.

[[19]]: See: Muslim, 4:1397.

[[20]]: Qur’an, 36:36.

[[21]]: Ibidem, 19:93.

[[22]]: Ibidem, 3:83. The Arabic original uses the verb aslama, which is derived from the same root, s-l-m, as muslim, islam and salam.

[[23]]: Ibidem, 6:94.

[[24]]: Ibidem, 2:31.

[[25]]: Ibidem, 2:282.

[[26]]: Ibidem, 47:19.

[[27]]: Ibidem, 49:13.

[[28]]: See: Qur’an, 57:4.

[[29]]: Ibidem, 2:115.

[[30]]: Qur’an, 95:4–6.

[[31]]: The epithets “most noble” and “most conscious” originally belong to the semantic fields associated with the root k-r-m (See: Badawi, Arabic-English Dictionary of Qur’anic Usage, 803–804) and w-q-y (Ibidem, 1042–43).

[[32]]: Qur’an, 96:3.

[[33]]: Ibidem, 59:18.

[[34]]: Ibidem, 59:23–24.

[[35]]: Ibidem, 1:6–7.

[[36]]: Ibidem, 20:114.

[[37]]: In Abu’l-Qāsim Sulaymān ibn Aḥmad al-Lakhamī al-Ṭabarānī, Al-Mu‘jam al-awsaṭ, eds. Abū Mu’ādh ‘Awḍ Allāh and Abu’l-Faḍl al-Ḥusaynī, Cairo: Dār al-Haramayn, 1415/1995, 6636; cited in: Nasr et al, op. cit., 804–805.

[[38]]: See: Qur’an, 20:98.

[[39]]: Muslim, 4:1425.

[[40]]: Qur’an, 35:15.

[[41]]: Ibidem, 47:38.

[[42]]: Ibidem, 30:54.

[[43]]: Ibidem, 11:66.

[[44]]: Ibidem, 37:95–96.

[[45]]: Ibidem, 4:59.

[[46]]: Ibidem, 39:36.

[[47]]: Ibidem, 14:32.

[[48]]: Ibidem, 17:66.

[[49]]: Muslim, 1:2.

[[50]]: While science, in the sense of relating to the quantifiable world, is not infrequently construed as a form of knowledge independent of (unrelated to) an observing self or absolute Uncontingent, it nonetheless changes its interpretations in accordance with prevailing (temporal) conditions and proving/testing of the known with regard to the presentation of the Real. See, e.g. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. In his presentation of the changing paradigms of knowledge/science, he accepts independence of the developing horizontal dynamic vis-à-vis the presence of the absolute One.

[[51]]: For traditions presenting this content, see: Arent J. Wensinck et al., Concordance et indices de la tradition muslimane, 1–8, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1936–1969, 1:486.

[[52]]: Qur’an, 39:67.

[[53]]: See: Qur’an, 10:49 i 18:39. The Prophet said: “There is no power and no strength, save in God.” (Muslim, 1:210 and 1:293).

[[54]]: Qur’an, 10:49.

[[55]]: Ibidem, 72:20.

[[56]]: Ibidem, 73:8–9.

[[57]]: Ibidem, 30:42.

[[58]]: Ibidem, 35:43, cf. 48:23.

[[59]]: Ibidem, 102:1–8.

[[60]]: Asad, Muhammad, The Message of the Qur’an, Gibraltar: Dar al-Andalus, 1980, 973.

[[61]]: Qur’an, 31:28.

[[62]]: Ibidem, 5:32.

[[63]]: Ibidem, 6:164.

[[64]]: Ibidem, 12:40.

[[65]]: Ibidem, 12:105–106.

[[66]]: Ibidem, 10:60.

[[67]]: This darkening of the clear knowledge that there is no god but God, incepted in every self and on all the horizons, is often considered only in terms of the representation of gods as images and statues. In such cases, the fraud is blatant. Far more complex and difficult to unravel are those cases in which we think we know the truth and express our relationship with it formally, but we are in fact serving gods we have difficulty recognizing as such. In this age of complex market forces, of selling and buying shaped by the owners of capital, and of the invisible capture of human privacy, we are all exposed as individuals to de-privatization. Data on every aspect of our persons and lives, from our most intimate inner states to our positions on politics, culture, and the economy, are gathered and converted in commodities to be sold and bought by those who now own it instead of us to whom it properly belongs. In this way, most people's identities are shaped after the wishes of the managers of capital. We are imprisoned by this magic of the market within the confines of a power we cannot influence. We are subjected to supposedly impenetrable walls of technological determinism. Our human rights, including supposedly the rights of faith, are hedged in by limitations within the multi-dimensional space of the ideologically constructed ethics of capitalism. Privacy, which as noted above depends on and is guaranteed by our relations as responsible individuals with God, is being impoverished and even entirely done away with under the prevailing ideological fantasy of building a new world of progress based on a reified understanding of science and its handmaidens, information technology and artificial intelligence. See further, e.g.: Zuboff, Shoshana, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: the Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power, London: Profile Books, 2019.

[[68]]: Qur’an, 3:19.

[[69]]: Ibidem, 3:85. In both these cases, the word din is translated as debt rather than as religion. This is because the concept of religion has been highly reified and removed from the semantic fields to which it originally belonged. As a result, the translation “debt”, as expressing the relationship of the endebted individual to God as the Creditor/Endebtor, gets across the concept of din as it is used in the Qur'an more clearly.

[[70]]: Ibidem, 3:110.

[[71]]: Ibidem, 21:92.

[[72]]: Ibidem, 8:27.

[[73]]: Ibidem, 4:135.

[[74]]: Ibidem, 67:3–4.

[[75]]: See: Qur’an, 50:6.

[[76]]: Qur’an, 6:59.

[[77]]: Kohn, Eduardo, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013, 228.

[[78]]: Qur’an, 1:1–3.

[[79]]: See: Badawi, Arabic-English Dictionary of Qur’anic Usage, 47–50.

[[80]]: See: Qur’an, 7:157–58. The form ’ummīyy is an adjective and noun found in the Qur’an twice. It is normally given the meaning of “illiterate, incapable of reading”. There is no evidence for the currency of this interpretation of its meaning when the Praised was physically present on earth or during the first centuries immediately after that. See, e.g., Goldfeld, Isaiah, “The Illiterate Prophet (Nabi Ummi): An inquiry into the Development of a Dogma in Islamic Tradition”, Der Islam, 57/2 (1980): 58–67.

[[81]]: Qur’an, 7:156–58.

[[82]]: Ibidem, 3:20, cf. 2:78, 3:75 and 62:2.

[[83]]: Ibidem, 41:53.

[[84]]: Ibidem, 6:38. The form “maternal” is a pronominal adjective.

[[85]]: See: Qur’an, 17:44.

[[86]]: Qur’an, 24:41.

[[87]]: Ibidem, 17:44.

[[88]]: Kohn, How Forests Think, 222.

[[89]]: Luke, 17:21. See: Hart, David Bentley, The New Testament: A Translation, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018, 148.

[[90]]: See further: Mahmutćehajić, Rusmir, “Tesavuf bosanstva”, forthcoming.

[[91]]: Qur’an, 49:7–8.

[[92]]: Ibidem, 2:115.

[[93]]: Ibidem, 28:88.

[[94]]: Ibidem, 7:40.

[[95]]: Ibidem, 33:56. In the translation, “bless” corresponds to ṣallā/yusallī in the original. It is from the same root as ṣalāh, which is “worship”. A number of possibilities regarding the interpretation of this relationship follow from this. See further: Patton, Kimberley Christine, Religion, of the Gods: Ritual, Paradox, and Reflexivity, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

[[96]]: Tirmidhī, al-, al-Jāmiʽ al-ṣaḥīḥ aw Sunan al-Tirmidhī, 1–5, ur. Kamāl Yūsuf al-Ḥūt, Bayrūt: Dār al-kutub al-ʽilmiyyah, 1987, 3626.

[[97]]: See: Qur’an, 68:4.

[[98]]: Qur’an, 17:1.

[[99]]: See: Ibn Hanbel, Ahmed, Musned, 1–50, Bejrut: Mu'essesetur-risala, 2001, 23: 210.

[[100]]: Qur’an, 55:7–9.

[[101]]: Ibidem, 2:152.

[[102]]: Ibidem, 59:19.