T R T o

98 AN INTRODUCTION TO SUFI DOCTRINE

there corresponds a Divine aspect. This is expressed in
the sacred utterance (hadith qudsi): “He who adores
Me never ceases to approach Me until I love him, and,
when I love him I am the hearing by which he hears,
the sight by which he sees, the hand with which he
grasps and the foot with which he walks.”

In so far as it is united to the Divine Spirit, man’s
spirit knows all things principially since henceforward
nothing is outside his own essence, but this essential and
global knowledge only becomes differentiated in so faras
the light of intellect falls on individual things. On the
other hand the individual subject of the Divine Man
inevitably subsists in a certain manner: it no longer
subsists in the sense that it is only in his identification
with the Divine Intellect that this being, who still bears
the name of man, really feels that he is “himself’”;
nevertheless, if the individual subject did not subsist in
any sense whatsoever, there would be no “subjective”
continuity linking together his human experiences.
Now every individual subject is under certain limitations
inherent in the realm in which it exists. Ibn ‘Arabi
expresses this by saying that the Seal of Sanctity!
(khatim al-Wilayah), who is both the prototype and the
pole (Quitb) of all spiritual men, is both “the knower and
ignorant” and that seemingly contradictory qualities
can be attributed to him: *. . . in his essential Reality
(Hagiqah) (in as much as his spirit is identified with the
uncreated Spirit) and in his spiritual function (which

1. Sanctity, in the sense of the Arabic word wilayah is a permanent state
of knowledge of God, a state in which there are, however, different degrees,