and the all-encompassing truth expressed by,

He is the First and the Last and the Outward and the Inward, and He is Knowing of All Things,(57:3)

and the proximity expressed by,

It was We Who created man, and We know what dark suggestions his soul makes to him; for We are nearer to him than his jugular vein,(50:16)

and the elevated truth indicated by,

The angels ascend to Him in a day the measure of which is fifty thousand years,(70:4)

and the all-embracing truth expressed by,

God commands justice, the doing of good, and liberality to kith and kin, and He forbids all shameful deeds, and injustice and rebellion.(16:90)

The Qur’an’s verses see and show in detail each of the six pillars of belief in respect of this world and the hereafter, action and knowledge. They see and show intentionally and seriously each of the five pillars of Islam, and all the principles which ensure happiness in this world and the next. They preserve their balance, perpetuate their proportion, and a form of the Qur’an’s miraculousness comes into being from the source of the beauty which is born of the mutual proportion of the entirety of those truths.

It is due to this great mystery that although the scholars of theology (kalām) are students of the Qur’an and one section of them has written thousands of works of ten volumes each on the pillars of belief, because like the Mu‘tazilites they preferred reason to revelation, they have not been able to express with clarity so many as ten of the Qur’an’s verses, or prove them decisively, or convince persuasively concerning them. It is quite simply as though they have dug tunnels under distant mountains, taken pipes with the chains of causes to the ends of the world, there cut the chains and then demonstrated knowledge of God and the existence of the Necessarily Existent One, which are like the water of life. The Qur’an’s verses, however, can all extract water from every place like the staff of Moses, open up a window from everything, and make known the All-Glorious Maker. We have actually proved and demonstrated this fact in the Arabic treatise Katre, and in the other Words, which flow forth from the ocean of the Qur’an.

It is also due to this mystery that since the leaders of the heretical groups who have passed to the inward nature of things (bātin) have not fol-