The Essence of Islam – Volume I — Page 413
The Holy Qur'an 413 humility, nothingness and meekness. They appreciate as their true reality humility and poverty and indigence, and being full of faults and mistakes. They deem the excellences that are bestowed on them like the temporary light which the sun casts upon a wall, and which has no real relationship with the wall, and is subject to decline like a borrowed garment. They confine all good and excellence in God, and deem His Perfect Being as the fountainhead of all good. By the observation of Divine qualities, their hearts are filled with the certainty that they themselves are nothing, so that they are wholly lost to their own existence, desires and designs. The surging ocean of the majesty of the Divine so envelops their hearts that they experience a thousand types of nothingness, and they are wholly cleansed and purified of the least suspicion of associating anything with God. . Another bounty is that their understanding and recognition of God are carried to completion and perfection through true visions, inner knowledge, clear revelation, converse with God and other supernatural experiences, so much so that between them and the second world is left only a thin and transparent veil across which they behold the facts of the other life in this very world. Other people cannot arrive at this perfect stage because their books are full of darkness and pile up hundreds of other veils on top of their own veils and cause their disease to grow till they arrive at death. Even the philosophers, who are in these days followed by the Brahmū Samājists and the whole of whose religion depends upon reason, are deficient in their way. Their deficiency is disclosed by the fact that their understanding, because of a hundred types of mistakes, does not travel beyond perceptible reason and conjectures.