Then surely thy Lord-toward those who emigrated after they were tormented, then struggled and were patient-surely thy Lord after that is forgiving, ever-merciful. The reality of emigration is that you emigrate from your own makeup, you abandon yourself and your desires, and you place the foot of nonbeing on top of your own attributes. Beginningless love may then lift the curtain and endless passion may show its beauty. How beautifully that chevalier spoke! Endless passion has nothing to do with a heart that stays firm in its own attributes. [DS 209] The paragon of the world and master of Adam's children, who was the goal of existent things and the center point in the circle of newly arrived things, always used to recite this supplication: “'O God, do not entrust us to our own souls for the blink of an eye, or less than that!' Lord God! Re- move from before us this makeup stamped by createdness and the relationships of opposition! Lift the burden of our souls away from us so that we may travel in the world of tawḤīd!” The command came, “O master, before you wanted, My want took care of your work and put aside the burden of you-ness from you. [Did We not] lift from thee thy burden? [94:2]. O MuḤammad! If anyone came by his own selfhood, you did not come by yourself, because I brought you: Who took His servant by night [17:1]. Nor did you come for yourself, because you came as a mercy for the world's folk: We sent thee only as a mercy to the worlds [21:107]. The state of Abraham was the same. Adam was still in the concealment of nonexistence when the Exalted Lord inscribed the stamp of bosom friendship on that paragon. He placed the fire of yearning for Him in his inwardness, and the beauty of beginningless passion toward him. He al- ludes to this with His words, “We gave Abraham his rectitude from before” [21:51]. Then, when he came into existence, on the day when he stood in the desert of bewilderment, his heart was lit up with love for the Eternal and his spirit was drunk with the wine of nonbeing. At the moment of the morning draft of the passionate, the shouting of the drunkards, and the uproar of the heart-lost, he was driven by craving the wine of nonbeing to say with the tongue of helplessness concerning whatever he looked upon, “This is my Lord” [6:76]. He saw himself consumed in witnessing the Real's majesty and beauty and was unaware of creation's being and his own being. Hence the Exalted Lord increased His caressing of him and counted him as one community:
