Various mirrors from water to air, air to ether, ether to similitudes, similitudes to spirits, spirits to time, time to imagination, and from imagination to thought, all represent the manifesting attributes. Turn your ear to the mirror of the air: a single word becomes millions!

The Pen of Power writes it out in extraordinary fashion, this mystery of reproduction.

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Representation Is of Various Sorts

Representation Is of Various Sorts

The image in a mirror may be of four sorts: either the identity alone; or the identity together with its particularities; or both the identity and the rays of the thing’s nature; or both its true nature and its identity.

The images in the mirrors of luminous spirits are living and connected; expansive lights which even if not the same as the spirits, are not other than them.

If the sun had been living and its heat had been life and light consciousness, its image in the mirror would have possessed these qualities.

The key to this mystery is this: Gabriel is both at “the Lote tree,” and in the form of Dihya, and in the Prophet’s company, and who knows in how many other places!

While God knows how many places Azra’il is present simultaneously, seizing the spirits of the dying.

At the same time the Prophet appears to his community both in the visions of the saints, and in true dreams,

And at the resurrection of the dead he will meet with all through his intercession.

The substitutes (abdāl) of saints appear and are seen in numerous places at the same time.

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All Those Qualified May Interpret the Law, But They May Not Be Lawgivers

All Those Qualified May Interpret the Law,

But They May Not Be Lawgivers

Everyone capable who is qualified to practise ijtihad, may interpret matters for himself which are not incontestable; and they are binding on himself but not on others.

He cannot make laws and call on the Umma to conform to them. His ideas are from the Shari‘a, but they are not the Shari‘a. He may be a mujtahid but he cannot be the Lawmaker.