You make the night pass into the day and You make the day to pass into the night; You bring forth the living from the dead and You bring forth the dead from the living You provide whom You will without reckoning. You make the night pass into the day such that the authority of the light of unity tawḥīd prevails and nothing remains of the traces of the lower self and its darknesses. You make the day pass into the night so that it is as if the suns of the hearts were eclipsed or as if the night continued and the morning never came. You bring forth the living from the dead such that it is as if listlessness was no more and the pledge of union returned as a youth and the prom- ises of hearts became young and fresh. You bring forth the dead from the living such that it is as if the tree of discontent sprouted and blossomed thorns and as if the hopeless found nothing good and could not smell [the fragrance] and their hearts and eyes were confounded just as they did not believe in it the first time [6:110]. You provide whom You will without reckoning such that there is no labor kadd no exertion jahd no sweat on the brow jabīn and no toil of the right hand yamīn. His night is refreshment and repose rāḥa and His day is joy and delight bahja. His hours are special gifts karāmāt and His moments are ways of drawing near qurubāt. The different kinds of acts of His favoring cannot be enumerated by the tongue lisān and the inquiry into their full depth cannot be given expression or explanation bayān. But in the glimmers we have given here there is some indication of how to speak of this. It is said that when He said “and seize the kingdom from whom You will” [3:26] anyone who thinks that he is a king [experiences] a rude awakening from [his] drunken intoxication because he now sees [that] his kingdom is vulnerable to extinction and [he] knows that abasing himself to [God] in preserving His kingdom is worthier than vainglorious delusion and pomposity. It is said that the king-in the true sense of the word-is someone who is not distracted by anything from witnessing the One who is the real King.
