رسالة الزناد والسبيل الواضح للطالب الرشاد
Praise belongs to our Lord al-Ḥākim through His own essence, separate from all He has originated, whose existence precedes that of every other thing. Every living believer speaks His praise. He brings creation into existence and brings it back again. He strengthens His ranks and servants through the Holy Spirit. Divine power belongs to Him alone, without any rival who can equal Him. He prevails over His servants, and no opponent can contest Him. He neither begets nor is begotten, and none is comparable to Him. The most profound thoughts cannot reach His identity; neither inward insight nor outward sight perceives Him; descriptions cannot encompass Him. He is the Living, the Self-Subsisting, whom neither drowsiness nor sleep overtakes.
He is the Originator of originated things, indicated in all tongues, the Creator of names and attributes. He knows what has been and what shall be; beholders’ sight cannot reach Him, and no thought or passing idea can encompass Him. He is the First and the Last. Minds are helpless to perceive His essence; tongues grow weary attempting to formulate His reality; reason recoils from grasping Him, and eyes fail to see Him.
He has appeared to creation as a trial, as a gracious gift, and as a test. For His friends the test and choice consisted in knowing and affirming His unity. They responded to His command and His Call, acknowledged His lordship, and affirmed His Word. Through His guiding servant He rescued them from darkness into light, punishment into reward, the abyss of fire into the exalted Garden, where neither exhaustion nor fatigue touches them. This is the party saved from the whole world.
He summoned the other parties to knowledge of Himself, but they turned away from His path. Seeing a likeness to their own kind in the form in which He appeared, they drew back in estrangement. Through disbelief and incapacity they returned to the inverted world; through ignorance and error they accepted it. There they remained in the fire, unable to know the Truth.
Because they imagined Paradise as a place perceptible to the senses, filled with fruit-bearing trees and running streams, their fancies attached themselves to that image. They sought a non-existent thing without reality or substance, because they were unable to understand intelligible meanings. Had they known the Garden, they would have hastened to it, remained in it, and realized that it already exists. The Creator has not referred them to nothingness; all that was promised to them exists through His existence.
They also say, “Paradise is as wide as the heavens and the earth,” without knowing what this statement means. If its width is the heavens and the earth, what would its length be? And where would the Fire fit beside it? Had they understood its length, they would have understood its width, for the length of everything exceeds its breadth.
When we return to the true meanings, we find Paradise to be the rightly guided and guiding Call. Its fruits are the genuine divine sciences through which Unitarians are freed from ignorance and the disease of associationism. Its length is the Universal Intellect, the Riser of the Age, Imam of the godfearing, who arises with the Truth and draws the sword of tawḥīd, bringing every stubborn tyrant to an end. Its breadth is like the receptive Soul, which accepts the blessings, intellect, and strengthening grace from which all spiritual forms emerge, as a child emerges from a mother. Just as the breadth of a thing is not separated from its length, the Soul is not separate from the Intellect in receiving divine nourishment.
Whoever feeds upon these two Origins' sciences and drinks his fill has truly eaten Paradise's fruits and drunk its water through knowledge and reality, without referring the promise to nothingness. This is the exalted Garden, whose breadth is the heavens and the earth.
Fire, in the world of the senses, is what burns bodily things. Some of its names are praised and others condemned. The greater Fire, the kindled fire “which rises over hearts,” is a likeness of the Intellect because it knows the secrets of the world and the inner beliefs of its inhabitants. The condemned Fire, the fire of punishment, the abyss, and Hell, are names for the religious law of which its followers have become adherents, in which they have strayed and found their punishment. Were they told to leave it, they would refuse, act proudly, and obstruct the path.
They abide in it, left in denial throughout the cycles and ages, because they chose error over guidance, blindness over insight, embroidered sayings over reasoned verification, and blind imitation over investigation into difficult false claims. Punishment surrounded them and the means of escape were cut off. Such was the consequence of their refusal, pride, and denial.
On the day when the Guide calls to them, he will say, “Where are those partners of Mine whom you claimed were intercessors among you? The bonds between you have been severed, and what you imagined has vanished.” This means the day when the Qāʾim, master of the Resurrection, rises with the sword. His question, “Where are My partners?”, means: where are the leaders of the people of the outward and their devils, who misled them without knowledge and brought them into the dwelling of perdition—that is, the religious law and the prescribed obligations to which they had grown accustomed?
In reason these very obligations are the true Fire. As for the ornaments and falsehoods of the people of ignorance in which they took pride, they will be unable to offer any answer except to say, “Our Lord, our wretchedness overcame us; we were a people who transgressed.” Then punishment will descend upon them: their men killed, their children and women taken captive, and the poll tax exacted from men who remain and escape the sword, made to pay it in humiliation. They had wandered and been conquered by wretchedness and the inclinations of the bodily, animal soul. Its characteristic pursuits are natural appetites, and ignorance predominates in it.
Now the human being contains a substance that acts but is not acted upon; another substance that acts and is acted upon; and an accident that receives action but does not act except by means of its instrument. A mover is therefore required to draw knowledge of substance out of accident.
The substance that acts and is not acted upon is the Intellect united with the noble Soul. It is perpetually active and does not passively receive action. The substance that both acts and is acted upon is the noble Soul, which is rational, knowing, living, substantial, transparent, and receptive to forms. It can receive ignorance just as it can receive reason. The accident that is acted upon but does not act is the body, which the limbs employ in accordance with their wishes and inclinations.
Because the noble Soul can receive ignorance as well as reason, it looks toward both conditions. It inclines toward whichever of the two prevails. Its substance is concealed in it as fire is concealed in tinder. If tinder lay for all eternity without a striker or stone to set it in motion, no fire would emerge from it. Fire is brought forth from the tinder only by the striker and stone.
So too the Soul: when it is deprived of remembrance through the spiritual sciences—which constitute its nourishment, maintenance, and growth—it inclines toward ignorance as its sensory and animal nature gains power, and returns to ignorance. But when it does not lack the discipline of wisdom and nourishment by the divine sciences, and is receptive to what joins it from the effects of Intellect, it becomes refined and clear and attaches itself to its own world. Just as the striker, when moved, draws a spark out of tinder which can become a blaze of immeasurable size, although the fire began as the smallest spark, so knowledge's blessing and increase grow from the first spark into an ever-greater fire. Knowledge is an effect of the Intellect which unites with the noble Soul. The Soul receives it, becomes purified and grows, until it takes on a spiritual form.
Consider how the drop of generative fluid passes from one condition to the next until the figure of the embryo is completed and a child emerges with a complete body. At his birth he does not know that he was once a drop; he comes to know it when he acquires reason and reaches maturity. Likewise, the seeker does not know his former state of ignorance, nor the station of knowledge to which he has come, until he attains knowledge, knows himself, and rises in rank.
We return to the tinder and stone and their meaning in wisdom. Fire lies hidden in tinder, but tinder cannot produce fire by itself. The stone must come upon it and move it before the fire appears. The stone too cannot produce fire by itself or from anything else without the striker. Thus the tinder and stone form a joined pair, male and female. Fire is begotten between them as offspring arise from a union, through the striker that moves the two.
The stone therefore signifies the Intellect, and tinder signifies the Soul. The emergence of fire from tinder through stone and striker signifies the emergence of spiritual forms from the Soul through the Intellect and the Creator's support. Their action is made complete by that support, just as fire is not manifested without the striker.
May our Lord make you, Unitarians, among those who have taken a flame from the blessed Fire, so that their fire shines brightly and increases in strength. May He not make you like the person who kindled a fire, and when it had illuminated what surrounded him, God took away his light and increased his wandering in darkness. May He ward off the designs of devils, protect you against doubt after certainty, and lead you along the path of those who follow right guidance.
Praise your Lord for the favors with which He has singled you out and the portion He has granted you, for He guided you to obey Him and His friend, the guide to knowledge of Him, who leads you along the path of His mercy.
Praise belongs to our Lord alone, and thanks to His servant, the Riser of the Age. Our Lord suffices me.