The modern world, also called “modernity,” as you know, is very proud of its “progress” and generally believes that it is moving forward, from worse to better, breaking with an unreasonable, dark past… But if we look at the Western civilization, which has already become global today, we will see that it develops somehow extremely one-sided, that it is built on a radical break with sacred perspective, with the highest dimensions of human existence. In all its aspects, it is aimed at the material, external, empirical world. Here, we have a social order focused on progress in the material things (“consumer society”); an economy preoccupied with increasing the production of wealth; a science that accepts exclusively data from material sensory experience, which can be measured and calculated.
That is, modern civilization is based not on some kind of expansion – for example, expansion of knowledge, rationality (as they usually think) – but on the contrary, on a limitation and truncation of the world picture. The object of attention here is the empirical world perceived by the external senses. Everything else is cut off mercilessly. But in return, we get a colossal increase in efficiency, precisely in terms of manipulating the forces of this world, of this limited area of reality. Why did this limitation happen? There are some reasons for this, and we will talk about them later.
So, there is actually no progress of knowledge but regression and limitation. If we ask, “Why did people, say, two thousand years ago, not have such a science with its nuclear facilities and hadron colliders?” then the generally accepted answer that we were taught in school would sound like, “Well, there were some savages, some undeveloped people who have not yet reached the required level of progress.” But in fact, in the ancient civilization, there was such a level of development, to which the Western world then again reached only in the 19th century, and in some aspects, it has not yet reached. It was not savages who built the Egyptian pyramids, which secrets have not yet been revealed…
The answer is that those people simply didn’t need this type of science. In their world, they did not feel it necessary to dismember and ruin nature to find out its secrets. They considered such methods in general as some kind of blasphemy, arrogance, and challenge to the forces of being. Some scary and despicable thing. That is, instead of listening, for example, to a bird singing – instead of this to kill it and dissect it under a microscope to study how its vocal cords are arranged there – it would seem to them wild sadism, no more. People who would do such things would be considered dark underground sectarians, a socially dangerous phenomenon…
Because the nightingale, for example, is connected along an eidetic chain with a rose, some star, or planet… Together they express the beauty of being and, therefore, the perfection of the Creator of this being… And it is clear that dissecting the nightingale under a microscope and dividing the rose into atoms requires a fair amount of blasphemy and hatred for the world. To do this, one must initially have a worldview built on sadism, disgust, and contempt for reality. Where did this worldview come from? We will answer in detail in the following parts.
If we look at the figure of a sage or a scientist in the traditional, premodern world, we will see that it was, first of all, a person with a kind of integral worldview. Such personalities as Avicenna, Sheikh Bahai, or Sheikh Ahsai in Islam were universal minds who simultaneously mastered theology, secret sciences, physical sciences, mathematics, rhetoric, poetry, medicine, etc. Sheikh Bahai wrote books on theology and, at the same time, designed the famous mosques in Isfahan. And his vision of theology was reflected in the architectural principles of these mosques …
That knowledge was wisdom, which started from some general foundations and then moved from the whole to the particular. But who is a “scientist” today? On the contrary, it is a narrow specialist working in a special institute and investigating an extremely limited range of issues. There are no more scientists, even in particular sciences, no “physicists” as a whole – there are specialists in quantum physics, nuclear physics, etc.
Such a person has nothing to say about the world. He does not understand anything going on in it. When they start to write some books trying to talk about the world or teach something, it gives an impression of narrowness, mustiness, and obscurantism… With some ridiculous nonsense like “the conquest of the moon,” “space exploration,” etc. But it is even worse when today’s “architecture specialist” begins to design houses in which people will live. Naturally, he will not create anything other than complete ugliness, like today’s glass boxes, because he has nothing to invest in this construction; there are no higher principles behind him. After all, he did not study theology like Sheikh Bahai…
True knowledge can only be holistic, starting from the foundations of being and ending with particular conclusions and consequences. Because if you don’t know the basics, how can you know the particulars? Based on what (I’m sorry for the tautology)? For example, if you were to ask a modern “scientist” about God, the most intelligible answer you can get is that this is “not a question of science.” Why not a question of science? “Because it goes beyond the experience.” How did the most basic question suddenly become “unscientific”? A question on which, no less than our entire fate in this universe depends! And how did it turn out that it “goes beyond the limits of experience” if all our experience points to God because everything our experience is filled with is His creations, His signs, His ayats…
So, positivist science is by no means the knowledge of the world. It is a decomposition of the world into nominal analytical parts that doesn’t increase knowledge but kills it. Cognition is possible only as a movement “from top to bottom,” from general world principles – to particular things included in these universal connections and only appear “known” in this capacity.
And therefore, contrary to the myths propagated by the same “science,” the medieval man knew much more about the world than the modern one. For he had a certain general worldview that modern people do not have. The consciousness of the modern man is filled with some scraps of “scientific” myths, such as “black holes” and “lunar flights,” fragments of false esotericism, some information from the Internet and movies. As a result, his consciousness is just a scrapyard, where heaps of badly chewed information are lying around without any connections. It contains no knowledge about reality at all. And hence the extreme manipulability of modern people. A medieval man wouldn’t have allowed himself to be manipulated so easily. If a person does not have an integral view of the world based on some general and unshakable principles, he is just dust in the wind. You can put any lie in his head.
So, it is impossible to know the world by moving “from bottom to top,” that is, by its decomposing into a pile of dead elements to collect such a pile into a big picture. It’s like trying to put together a new vase from thousands of pieces. Or heal some organ, abstracting from the whole organism. And this is actually what happens in modern medicine. Traditional medicine proceeded from the fact that the body is a holistic system that includes a physical and a mental substrate. So, treating one diseased organ will be in vain because the disease is rooted throughout the body. Therefore, traditional medicine was aimed at simply helping the body as a self-sustaining system to maintain health. And it did not cost a lot: you just needed proper nutrition, the right lifestyle, and a certain mental attitude…
This is a holistic view, according to which health is supported by the entire composition of bodily, mental, and spiritual components. Whereas if you look at modern, mainstream medicine, ruled by huge pharmaceutical companies, you will see that it doesn’t heal anything. If a person’s organ is ill (for example, the heart), they will prescribe him some medications that will temporarily relieve pain in the heart but at the same time poison other organs. As a result, in a few years, pain in the heart will return, and in addition to this, destruction will begin in other parts because the body’s overall health will be undermined. And since modern medicine is a gigantic business, it is not profitable for it to maintain self-healing of the body and natural health: after a while, a person needs to come back with his heartache and other problems and pay money to doctors and pharmaceutical companies – and so on until death…
So, what do I want to say? This science is built not on the development of knowledge, as is commonly believed, but on its regression, on the segregation of a very narrow layer of reality, resulting in an explosive increase in efficiency. For example, if I devote all my time to tightening the screws, the result in this area will be extremely effective. But just what benefit will I get from this for my life? It will simply become meager and dull, filled with some kind of “screws”… And no material compensations will replace my loss of meaning. The modern world has become the same, turning people into machines that work day and night for no reason.
Maybe they will say, “Well, life has become better and more comfortable, there are more benefits….” This is also an extremely dubious statement. Modern man, on average, lives much worse than two thousand years ago. If you look at the ancient cities of the Hellenistic period or the Roman Empire, then modern cities can’t even be compared to them in terms of the skill of the buildings and comfort. People lived there, in fact, surrounded by works of art; each stone was, as they say, handmade… There were excellent water supply systems with hot and cold water, and so on. In some places, Roman roads are still used.
And it is significant that when you talk with an adherent of the “modern world,” that is, adept of all this nonsense about “progress” and “development,” he immediately begins to refer to some exceptions and unsuccessful epochs in the history of mankind, saying something like this, “Oh, well, you want it to be like in the Middle Ages …”, “Oh, well, you probably want people to return to the digging stick and the primitive communal system….” In fact, the “primitive communal system” is another quasi-scientific myth. As for the Middle Ages – more precisely, not the entire Middle Ages, but its early period – this is the exception, not the rule. And if you take other eras and civilizations, in addition to this notorious “Middle Ages,” which they poke us in the eye, then you will see that people lived there much better than now. When archaeologists dug up the ancient Minoan civilization with its capital Knossos, they were amazed by the most complex water supply system, sewerage, ventilation, in no way inferior to the modern ones. But it was built four thousand years ago!
But today, we live in horrible concrete boxes that cannot be bought without lifelong debt bondage, and we call it all “progress.” And to pay for this slavery, a person is forced to work day and night until a ripe old age at absolutely pointless, stupid work. Whereas the ancient man practically did not work at all (or worked several hours a day) and spent his whole life in the agora or forum, in various ceremonies and festivals. And at the same time, we think that we live in some kind of “progressive” and “developed” society …
Add here such wonderworks of modern civilization as environmental pollution, so soon we will be at war with each other simply for clean air… Today ordinary, normal products, the so-called “biologically pure,” are becoming a luxury available only for the wealthy people. We have dirtied all the rivers, cut down forests, gutted the bowels of the earth… The majority of modern cities suffer from neuroses and psychosis due to the senselessness and unbearableness of their lives. We are constantly afraid of some “viruses,” atomic bombs, explosions, “black holes,” and other unpleasant things that this wonderful progressive “science” has awarded us with. In cities, thousands of cameras are spying on us each second. We are being watched from space, eavesdropped on our phones, forced into medical procedures; for each of our actions, we must take some kind of “permission”… And even more terrible things are on the way, such as chipping and human cloning…
Then we will understand that those people whom these notorious “scientists” call “undeveloped” or “primitive” lived much better than us. And that this “science” has generated a wave of forces over which man no longer has power.
How did we get to this?
Monotheism is sometimes accused of this. There is such a theory that the Abrahamic paradigm prepared the preconditions for the birth of modern Western civilization with its desacralization, rationalization, “profanation” of man and the world. After all, Monotheism transfers all emphasis to the Only God, in relation to Whom the world appears as creation, devoid of divinity in itself. The famous German sociologist Max Weber spoke about the “disenchantment of the world” by Monotheism.
This hypothesis is constantly mentioned here and there. Usually, this theory is spread by groups of Neo-pagans. Representatives of this worldview castigate the Monotheistic paradigm for the modern world’s troubles. The pagan world was supposedly integral, alive, multidimensional, permeated with sacred forces, but Monotheism destructed all this, killed the gods, killed the world, made the reality one-dimensional…
Let me give you some quotes from the cycle of lectures by Alexander Dugin entitled “The philosophy of traditionalism.” I will refer precisely to this cycle where this view is given consistently and clearly so that it will be easier for us to analyze it with this example.
So, Dugin says:
“In short, the scheme is as follows. – The Abrahamic Semitic tradition is based on a creationist approach, which assumes at the basis of being a radical difference between the Creator and the Creation… Non-Abrahamic traditions, and especially brightly Indo-European one, assert, on the contrary, the essential unity between the Divine and the world (man), between which the difference is only in degree or the realization of the ʻSupreme Identityʼ (the Hindu formula ʻAtman is Brahmanʼ). This is manifestationism. Ethics and metaphysics here differ sharply from Abrahamicism. In a sense, these positions are polar.”
(“Philosophy of Traditionalism,” lecture 14).
Let’s make some clarifications here. The cumbersome terms “creationism” and “manifestationism” refer to the two extreme forms of relationship to the Divine and the world. The deity of manifestationism (or, in other words, the pagan tradition) appears as the top of a huge ladder of the great cosmos, which implies a gradation of energies and forms descending from top to bottom and rising from bottom to top. That is why the deity is “spilled” here, manifested in all things and beings. Everything is woven from the divine principle, and therefore each thing passes into any other thing. Of course, we immediately recognize here the familiar Sufi heresy “wahdat al-wujud,” which entered Islam precisely from this pagan, manifestationist continuum.
This perspective, according to Dugin, is opposed by “creationism,” that is, the Monotheistic paradigm, one way or another represented in the three great Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He says about it:
“In this perspective (i.e., in Abrahamic religions), the world is deontologized. Being is attributed only to God. The being of everything else, that is, creations, is rented, alien, extraneous. Every created thing is something mechanical, fundamentally inanimate, unontological. Such a reality, animated by a source external to it, has only a ʻshellʼ existence, has no essence”.
And further:
“… The world is loaded with a completely different meaning. It does not contain direct ontological roots. It grew out of nothing; it is called to be out of nothing. This ʻcreation out of nothingʼ puts this world in a unique position. The world for the first time becomes local and free – free from that ʻgolden threadʼ that would connect it directly with the Divine. It is free from its own spiritual self. It is not that it is illusory (maybe it is not illusory); the most important thing is that it does not have an inner being. If we elevate its genealogical trajectory to the realm of immanent causes, we will not get any ontological reality. We will face a unique insurmountable line beyond which there is nothing.”
And in the 6th lecture, he says:
“Here such a fantastic for the Hyperborean ensemble idea about the transcendence of the Creator arises: that God creates the world out of nothing – not out of Himself but out of something fundamentally absent, nothingness, nothing. And this strange nothingness unknown to manifestationism is brought to a special quasi-being by some all-powerful gesture of the transcendent Creator. In the Abrahamic context, the world as a creature does not have an independent being. Being is given to the world from the outside, as if on loan.
ʻDig a thing deeper, you will find death in itʼ – this is the principle of creationism… This is the idea of God as absolutely different from the world. This is the whole pathos of the creationist view.”
But is this really so? Let’s see. It is clear that historically there have been many versions of Monotheism. However, what do we know if we take Abrahamic Monotheism as an “ideal type,” as a paradigm? Yes, the world here is deprived of divinity in the substantial sense. But it is not “separated” from God! The fact is that people who talk about Monotheism usually make such a fundamental mistake that crosses out all their reasoning: they cannot distinguish the essence of God from His actions. Yes, the essence of God is “completely different” from the world. But His actions fill this world from beginning to end. For all the things of this world are nothing more than the result of God’s action. And since the action of God created the whole creation, then all of it points to Him. Creation as a whole is a “pointing finger” towards the Creator; all things are His signs, His ayats.
In Saduq’s “Tawhid” it is narrated from Abu Basir:
I asked Imam Sadiq (A), “Enlighten me about Allah, the Mighty and High. Will the Believers see Him on the Day of Judgment?”
He responded: “Yes. In fact, they have even seen Him before the Day of Judgment.”
So I enquired: “When?”
He answered: “When He said to them: Am I not your Lord? They said: Yes! (7: 172)”.
Then he was quiet for a while and then spoke: “Verily, the believers see Him in this world before the Day of Judgement. Do you not see Him at this moment?”
I said to him: “May I be your ransom! Can I narrate this on your authority?”
He replied: “No. If you narrate this, the ignorant denier will argue with you regarding its meaning. He will assume that the Creator is like creation and will disbelieve. The vision of the heart is not the same as the vision of the eyes. Exalted is Allah from what the anthropomorphists and apostates attribute to Him!”
“Seeing” here does not mean beholding the essence of God (that is, God Himself), but beholding the traces of His action and created design, His Volition, in every thing. If you see the actions and effects of fire, can’t you say that you see the fire itself? Imam Husain (A) says in “Dua Arafat,” “The eyes that do not see You are blind” – this means: “The eyes that do not see Your action in all things,” and not “Your essence.”
God manifests Himself not by His essence but through His actions. The one who is manifested through actions is more obvious than the actions themselves. Just as a person manifested through sitting is more evident than sitting itself, although you cannot comprehend him otherwise than through this sitting. Therefore, you say, “You, who is sitting!” However, if you concentrate on the sitting itself, then the sitting person will be hidden from you.
And in the same way: when you concentrate on creation, the Creator will become hidden from you. However, as soon as you start looking not at action but at the One Who is revealed through action, He will become more obvious to you than all things. And therefore, Imam Sadiq (A) says, “Do you not see Him at this moment?” And therefore, Imam Hussain (A) says, “The eyes that do not see You are blind.”
So, the meaning of seeing God is seeing His ayats, signs, and traces of His action. For example, in a hadith from Imam Reza (A), it is said that whoever sees Muhammad (S) in his high position in the future world will see Allah. This means that by the greatness, splendor and power of this position, we will understand the greatness, splendor, and power of Allah Himself. Therefore, the vision of this position will be the vision of Allah. And in the same way, “Visiting Imam Hussain’s grave is like visiting Allah’s Throne.” This means that the grave of Hussain (A) is such a great sign of the Most High that visiting it is like visiting the Most High Himself.
Therefore, with the same reason that we say that God is “on the other side” and “absolutely transcendental,” we can also say that everything is filled with the presence of God. His great and beautiful names permeate everything, and He maintains the world’s existence at any moment. The great figure of the Omnipresence is created through the action of Allah and His attributes, expressed in this action. The “inside” of the world is woven from the light of God, which carries His thunderous words, His sparkling letters, His eternal thought about creation. All creation is a collection of verses, ayats, signs pointing to God. Their purpose is to simultaneously manifest and hide Him. Billions of pointing fingers from all sides are directed to the Great and Hidden, Which will forever remain behind the veil. And yet, by virtue of this very indication, He is at the same time as open and obvious as nothing else…
Maybe someone will say, “Well, this is only in your Islamic version of Monotheism, but we are talking about a certain ideal paradigm, about Monotheism in general.” In fact, there are great suspicions that what Dugin is talking about is not Monotheism at all, but its particular distorted form, infected with what I call “the Black Myth.” This is the form in which Monotheism appeared in the West. But more on that later…
For now, let’s say that if we really investigate Prophetic Monotheism, then in all its authentic versions, we will not find anything that Neo-pagans assert about. Let’s take literally any quote from the prophetic books of the Bible, from the Hebrew “Old Testament.” For example, chapter 45 of Isaiah says: “I am the Lord, and there is no other; apart from Me there is no God. I will strengthen you, though you have not acknowledged Me so that from the rising of the sun to the place of its setting people may know there is none besides Me. I am the Lord, and there is no other. I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lord, do all these things. You heavens above, rain down My righteousness; let the clouds shower it down. Let the earth open wide, let salvation spring up, let righteousness flourish with it; I, the Lord, have created it.”
Or let us open the 10th chapter of Jeremiah: “But God made the earth by His power; He founded the world by His wisdom and stretched out the heavens by His understanding. When He thunders, the waters in the heavens roar; He makes clouds rise from the ends of the earth. He sends lightning with the rain and brings out the wind from his storehouses.”
What do we see here? All this – the sun, light, darkness, heaven, and earth – are signs, ayats of the Almighty that point to Him. These are all imprints of His will and His action. His action, not some “nothingness”!
And the fact that this hypothesis about the Abrahamic paradigm as the origin of modern Western civilization is not true is easily proven historically. If we look at the Islamic world, where the Monotheistic principle was carried out most consistently, we will not see anything like it. There was no secularism, experimental mathematical science, technocracy, and individualism in the Islamic world – nothing like modern Western civilization.
So, this is not the case, as this primitive scheme says, that the Abrahamic paradigm “divides” between the Creator and the creation, and the pagan one “unites” them (“creationism” and “manifestationism”). Yes, perhaps, in some first approximation, at some initial primitive level, one can say so – for the external public, for people who cannot go further in their comprehension. But in fact, this scheme, like other such primitive schemes, does not describe reality. It’s much more complicated. The one who seeks the truth must always “enter through the narrow gate.” What is publicly available, easy and simple, lies on the surface – all this always turns out to be a lie. All simple answers, all easy and self-evident generalizations, lead to a dead end. This should always be borne in mind by those who make some efforts to build a certain view of the world for themselves and draw their own conclusions – not to take something ready, but to fathom something ourselves, so that it becomes one with you; your flesh and blood…
It should be noted that the notorious “creation from nothing” is not emphasized at all in the fundamental texts of the Abrahamic tradition. In the Bible, this expression occurs only once, in the historical Book of the Maccabees, which possesses a secondary character from the standpoint of doctrine. And there is no such expression in the Quran at all. Yes, it can be used, it is legitimate and present in our sources, for example, in the dua “Jaushan Kabir”: khalaqa kulla shai-in mina l-‘adam – “He created all things out of nothing.”
But why is this topic not emphasized? Because the Almighty did not create things out of nothing in the substantial sense – so that first there was some kind of “nothingness,” and then He would have created them out of it. This expression itself has nothing more than a figurative meaning: “He created all things out of nothing” in the sense that they simply did not exist before He created them. And if you look at the matter from a substantial point of view, then the Almighty, of course, created all things not out of nothing, but out of His created Will, Mashiyya, which is nothing more than His action and the very process of creation. Imam Sadiq (A) says, “Allah created Mashiyya (Volition or Will) by itself, and then He created things according to this Mashiyya.”
That is, in the Abrahamic perspective, there is not some mythical nothingness “behind” the things but His Light – the fiery stream of the Will of the Almighty, from which the waters of being are pouring out on the “barren land” of possibility: “Have they not seen that We drive the water to barren land?” (32: 27).
Or, to put it more clearly: the Almighty created being, and then from the radiance of the lights of this being, He created all things. And the each next level was created from the radiance of the light of the previous level. Thus, all things are created from being, not from nothingness.
Further, Dugin says:
“This Abrahamic nothingness represents a kind of seal of the absolute death of the world since for the first time it is something radically and totally different from the nature of the deity. No other manifestational tradition recognizes this category. How can there be something absolutely different from the deity? … The base of this existence is not some deep, hidden reality but nothingness. The being is a projection of nothingness caused by the external will of a transcendent, external Creator. It receives a complex impulse, a certain initial click, it spins like a mechanical object, like a complex machine, a smart construction. When this external impulse is depleted, exhausted, and ends, it falls somewhere and dissolves as an unnecessary wheel. Nothingness goes to nothing.”
In fact, everything is completely different. Yes, the world is in no way identical to the Creator’s essence. Yes, we do not know and will never know what this essence is in Itself. But at the same time, the world is a manifestation of the Creator’s action, which means that the qualities of His action are reflected in it. This is similar to how we know fire by its effects. Suppose we do not know the essence of fire and assume that this essence is completely inaccessible to our knowledge, absolutely different from everything we know and can know. But nevertheless, the actions of fire are available to us: we know that it burns, and therefore call it “burning”; we know that it heats, and therefore call it “heating”… And if we know this, if we know fire not by its essence, but via its actions and effects, then can we say that we are “absolutely alienated from fire”? Or, conversely, through these actions, fire becomes more obvious to us than anything obvious?
And in the same way, we know that God has created a beautiful world, and therefore we call Him “the Beautiful.” We know that the ignorant one does not establish a wise creation, and therefore we call Him “the Wise.” We know that someone dead does not create life, and therefore we call Him “the Living.” And we know that the one who does not exist cannot create being, and therefore we say that He is “the Existent.”
In other words, we know that He is good because His actions are good, and the actions of one who is not good are also not good. We know that He is wise because His actions are wise, and the actions of the unwise cannot be wise. And so on… But we do not know what He is in Himself. All attributes (sifats) of God are His understanding by us through His actions and the results of these actions.
This is similar to how “standing” or “sitting” is the manifestation of such and such a person (Zeid) through his actions. If you want to know this person, you must know his actions, such as “standing,” “writing,” “looking,” “speaking.” And this person (Zeid) is what is manifested for you from these actions and attributes. However, all this is not himself, in his essence.
Therefore, in the perspective of Monotheism, creation doesn’t go to nothing, as Dugin tries to convince us, but returns to its limit – to the Will of the Most High. It ontologically rests not on the nothingness but on the fire and light of the Creator’s Mashiya (Will), which is nothing more than the totality of His actions. This is its source, its limit, and its return.
In other words, the Creator has manifested Himself for the creatures not by His essence but through these creations themselves. Therefore, for these creatures, there is nothing more evident than Him. As Imam Ali (A) said: “Thoughts do not comprehend Him, but He manifested for them through them.”
All this means that this language is not suitable for describing Monotheism. Abrahamic Monotheism, the religion of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Muhammad, Ali, Husayn, and Mahdi (peace be upon them all), is not manifestationism and not creationism. It cannot be squeezed into these narrow frames. Why? Because, as we have already said, in genuine Monotheism, the Creator is more obvious, more “manifested” for creatures than the supreme deity in the so-called “manifestationism.” “We are closer to him than jugular vein” (50: 16). And at the same time, He is infinitely far from this creation.
Therefore, we should not play these games, discard the language of these primitive classifications and understand that one can speak about the Creator only in the language of paradoxes. He is infinitely distant and at the same time infinitely close, and in His closeness He is distant, and in His distance He is close, and therefore “closeness” here means “distance,” and “distance” means “closeness.” To isolate only one side of the paradox and declare God “only distant” or “only close” means distorting the logic of Monotheism.
In contrast to creation, the Creator is described through the unity of opposites and their removal, while for creation, this is called “contradiction to the rules of logic.” For it is impossible in relation to any created thing to say that it is simultaneously “near” and “far,” “high” and “low,” “hidden” and “obvious.” However, Allah is Far and Near, High and Low, Hidden and Obvious, First and Last. And “unity of opposites” in relation to God means that He is Far and Near at the same time, and “the removal of opposites” means that in reality, He is not far and not close, because He is close just as well as far, and far just as well as close, and therefore “Far” here means “Close,” and “Close” means “Far.” And this is a special logic that contradicts the logic of creation and applies only to the Eternal. Allah is described through the unity of opposites in the sense of the removal of opposites and the removal of opposites in the sense of the unity of opposites.
The first volume of Amin Ramin’s “Man in Islam” can be purchased on Amazon at this link.
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