64:1 Everything in the heavens and everything in the earth glorifies Him. His is the kingdom and His is the praise, and He is powerful over everything.
The meaning of glorification is to declare holy and incomparable. Declaring holy is that you know that God is incomparable with and hallowed beyond unworthy attributes and the descriptions of newly arrived things; pure of defect, far from imagination, outside of intellect, and hallowed beyond reasoning. He is described but not caused, recognized but not intelligible, apparent but disregarded. His howness is not known, intellect in Him is dismissed, and understanding in Him is bewildered. His being is to be seen, His Essence and attributes to be accepted but not perceived, and His howness to be heard but not known.
He is saying, “The seven heavens and the seven earths and everything within them glorifies God and praises Him for purity and peerlessness.” From creatures, He asks for acceptance and firm fixity, for they do not perceive and know that. Have you not read that God says, “But you do not understand their glorification” [17:44]? You do not perceive the glorification of heaven and earth, water, fire, wind, and earth, mountains and seas, and all animate and inanimate things. He has made faith in it mandatory but He has made the creatures despair of perceiving it. Since you do not perceive the created things with intellect, how will you determine God’s Essence and attributes with mere intellect? Accept the outwardness, give over the inwardness, leave it with what God desires, and remember to stay safe.
Know also that in twenty attributes, God is incomparable with and pure of twenty attributes. In unity He is pure of associate and partner, in self-sufficiency, He is pure of being grasped, in firstness, He is pure of the beginning, in lastness, He is pure of the end, in eternity He is pure of the new arrival, in existence, He is pure of encompassment, in witnessing He is pure of perception, in self-standing, He is pure of change, in power, He is pure of weakness, in patience, He is pure of incapacity, in withholding He is pure of niggardliness, in vengeance He is pure of rancor, in all-compellingness He is pure of iniquity, in magnificence, He is pure of rebellion, in wrath, He is pure of annoyance, in artisanry, He is pure of need, in guile, He is pure of delusion, in shame, He is pure of regret, in deception, He is pure of contrivance, in wonder, He is pure of not knowing, in subsistence He is pure of annihilation. These are the attributes of the Creator, who is without opposite or peer, without similar or likeness.
The attributes of the creatures are those linked with their opposites: with life, there is death, with power incapacity, with strength weakness, with withholding niggardliness, with wrath annoyance, with deception contrivance, with vengeance rancor. Thus you may know that the enacted is not like the Enactor, the attributes of the Creator are not like the creature, and God has no like or similar in Essence, attributes, magnificence, and exaltedness. Nothing is as His likeness, and He is the Hearing, the Seeing [42:11].
64:2 He it is who created you. Among you are unbelievers and among you are faithful.
The work is what He did in the Beginningless, the decree is what He issued in the Beginningless, the robe of honor that He bestowed in the Beginningless. The apportioning was made, not to be increased or decreased. One was washed with the water of solicitude, another fastened by the nail of rejection—a decree without bias, a judgment without iniquity. The name of one was recorded in the ledger of the felicitous and accepted for beginningless bounty, without any cause in the midst.
Ibrāhīm Khawāṣṣ said, “Once I was walking in the desert for the sake of disengagement. I saw an old man sitting there, a hat on his head, and he was weeping in lowliness and misery. I said, ‘Who are you?’ “He said, ‘I am Abū Murra [the Father of Bitterness].’ “I said, ‘Why are you weeping?’ “He said, ‘Who is more worthy of weeping than I? For forty thousand years I was serving that threshold, and in the Highest Horizon, no one was placed before me. Now look at the divine predetermination and the unseen decree—what days have been brought for me!“
Then he said, “O Khawāṣṣ! Be careful not to be deluded by your own effort and obedience, for the work is done by His solicitude and choice, not by your effort and obedience. A command came to me that I prostrate to Adam, and I did not. A command came to Adam not to eat from the tree, but he ate. In the work of Adam, there was solicitude, so He excused him, saying ‘He forgot, and We found in him no resoluteness’ [20:115]. In my work, there was no solicitude.”
64:16 So be wary of God as much as you are able.
In another place, He says, “Be wary of God as is the rightful due of His wariness” [3:102]. One of these verses is the abrogator, the other the abrogated. One alludes to what is necessary by the command, the other alludes to what is necessary by rightful due. What is necessary by the command came and abrogated what is necessary by rightful due. This is because when the Real calls the servants to account, He does so by what the command makes necessary so that He may then pardon their acts. If He were to take them to task for what is necessary by rightful due, then a thousand years of obedience would have the same color as a thousand years of disobedience. If all the prophets, the friends, and the limpid, and all the recognizers and lovers, came together, which of them would have the capacity to undertake His rightful due or to answer to His rightful due?
His command is finite, but His rightful due is infinite. This is because the command subsists as long as the prescription of the Law subsists, but the prescription of the Law pertains to this world, which is the abode of prescription. The rightful due subsists through the subsistence of the Essence, and the Essence is infinite. Hence the subsistence of the rightful due is infinite. What is necessary by the command will disappear, but what is necessary by the rightful due will never disappear. This world will pass away, and the turn of the command will pass away along with it. But the turn of the rightful due will never pass away. Today everyone has a fervor in his head because he is looking at the command. The prophets and messengers look at their own prophethood and messenger hood, and the angels look at their own obedience and worship. The tawḥīd-voicers, the strugglers, the faithful, and the purifiers look at their own tawḥīd, faith, and self-purification.
Tomorrow, when the pavilions of the lordly rightful due are thrown open, the prophets, despite the perfection of their state, will speak of their own knowledge of the Subsistent: “We have no knowledge” [5:109]. The angels of the Dominion will strike fire to the monasteries of their obedience, saying, “We have not worshiped You with the rightful due of Your worship.” The recognizers and tawḥīd-voicers will say, “We have not recognized You with the rightful due of Your recognition.” And God knows best what is correct.
