hood – saw through the clear expositions of the Qur’an is both extremely elevated, and shows both the maximum level of dominicality and creativity, and that all the divine names are real. It preserves the Qur’an’s principles and does not spoil the balance of the decrees of dominicality. For they say that together with the oneness of His essence and His being free of space, with His knowledge Almighty God encompasses and determines directly all things together with all their attributes, and through His will He chooses and specifies them, and through His power He creates them. He creates and directs the whole universe as though it were a single being.
He creates the huge spring with the same ease as creating a flower. Nothing obstructs anything else. There is no fragmentation in His regarding things. He is present everywhere at the same instant through the disposal of His knowledge and power. There is no division or distribution in His disposal. This mystery has been expounded and proved completely in the Sixteenth Word and in the Second Stopping-Place of the Thirty-Second Word. Since, according to the rule, “Comparisons are incontestible,” no attention should be paid to defects in comparisons and allegories, I shall set forth a very faulty comparison so that the difference between the two ways may be understood to a degree.
For example, let us imagine a huge, matchless, and wondrously adorned peacock which can fly from east to west in an instant, and opens and closes its wings, which stretch from north to south, are adorned with hundreds of thousands of fine patterns, and in every single feather of which are included brilliant arts. Now, there are two men observing it; they want to fly up with the wings of the intellect and heart to the elevated qualities of this bird, to its wondrous decorations. One looks at the peacock’s appearance and form and the marvellous inscriptions of power on all its feathers; he loves it with extreme passion and ardour; he in part abandons his attentive reflective thought and clings on to love. But then he sees that every day those lovable decorations change and are transformed. Those objects of his love, which he worships, disappear and are lost.
While he should have said that through true divine unity, which he could not encompass with his mind, and absolute dominicality and the oneness of the divine essence, they were the artistic decorations of an Inscriber possessing universal creativity, he said instead – in order to console himself – that the spirit of the peacock was so sublime that its maker was within it, or that the peacock had become Him, and that since its spirit had become one with its being and its being had combined with its outward appearance, its spirit’s perfection and being’s exaltedness displayed those manifestations, displaying every moment a different inscription and beauty;