Original content

English translation

This discourse has no end; rise, O Zayd: put a bridle on the Buraq of speech. Since speech, when it exposes the fault, tears the veils of the Unseen, the Unseen is what God desires for a time. Drive away this drum-beater; block his road. Do not gallop; pull in the reins: concealment is better. Each person is better pleased with his own imagining. God wants those who despair of Him not to turn away even from this worship. With hope they are ennobled, and for a few days they run at His stirrup. That mercy wants to shine on all, on bad and good, through universal compassion. God wants every lord and captive to remain in hope and fear, watchful and wary. This hope and fear exist behind the veil, so that behind this veil they may be nurtured. When you tear the veil, where are fear and hope? The pomp and splendor of the Unseen become manifest. A young man beside the stream formed a suspicion that our fisherman is Solomon. If it is he, why is he alone and hidden? If not, why does he have Solomon’s features? He remained two-minded in this thought until Solomon became king and firmly established. The demon left the kingdom and fled from his throne; the sword of his fortune shed that devil’s blood. He put the ring on his own finger, and the armies of demon and peri gathered. People came to watch; among them was the one who had held that fancy. When he saw the ring on his finger, thought and conjecture left him completely. Fancy exists only when the thing is hidden; this searching is for what is unseen. The image of the absent one grows great in the breast; when he is present, his image departs. If the sky of light has not rained, neither has the dark earth grown without it. “They believe in the Unseen” is what I require; for that reason I closed the window of the perishing house. When I split the sky open in manifestation, how could I say, “Do you see in it any rift?” So that in this darkness they may spread out their searching, and each one may turn his face toward a side. For a while affairs are reversed: the thief brings the constable to the gallows. Thus many a sultan and high-aspiring one becomes, for a while, the slave of his own slave. Service in absence is fair and pleasant; keeping faith in absence, in servitude, is pleasing. Who is there who praises the king in his presence, such that in his absence he would be shamefaced? A fortress-keeper at the border of the realm, far from the sultan and the shadow of sovereignty, guards the fortress from enemies and does not sell it for boundless wealth. Absent from the king at the frontier, he keeps faith as though present. Before the king he is better than others who are present in service and lay down their lives. Thus half an atom of guarding the task in absence is better than a hundred thousand in presence. Obedience and faith are praiseworthy now; after death, in open vision, they are rejected. Since the Unseen, absence, and covering are better, bind the lips; silent lips are better. Brother, withdraw your hand from speech; God Himself will make knowledge from His presence manifest. The sun’s face is its own witness: O thing whose greatest witness is God. No, I shall say it, since in expression God, the angels, and the learned are joined: “God bears witness, and the angels and the people of knowledge, that there is no lord but the One who endures.” When God has borne witness, what is the angel, that he should share in witnessing? Because the rays and presence of the sun cannot be endured by ruined eyes and hearts. Like a bat that cannot bear the sun’s heat and cuts off hope from it. So regard the angels, like us, as helpers who manifest the sun in the sky: “We received this radiance from a sun; like a caliph, we shone on the weak.” Like the new moon, or the three-day moon, or the full moon, each angel has perfection, light, and rank. From wings of light, three or four, each angel has that radiance according to its degrees, like the wings of human intellects, among which there is much difference. Thus the companion of each human being in good and evil is the angel that resembles him. When the bleary eye could not bear the sun, the star became its candle so that it might find the way.