God desires only to put away from you filth, O Folk of the House, and to make you com- pletely pure. The Lord of the Worlds is laying a favor on MuṣṬafā the Arab: “Our wish and Our decree is for the folk of your house to be pure of all the defilements of createdness and the stains of mortal nature so that everything in the house will be like the lord of the house: The goodly women are for the goodly men, and the goodly men for the goodly women [24:26].” It has been said that here filth is vile acts and base character traits. Vile acts are indecencies, both the outward and the inward [6:151], and base character traits are caprice, innovation, nig- gardliness, avarice, severing blood relations, and the like. In their case the Lord of the Worlds replaced innovation with the Sunnah, niggardliness with munificence, avarice with contentment, and severance from relatives with joining and tenderness. Then He says, “And to make you completely pure:” And to keep you pure from admiring yourselves, or considering yourselves pointers to God's door, or gazing upon your own obedience and deeds. The Pir of the Tariqah said, “The gaze is two, the human gaze and the All-Merciful gaze. The human gaze is that you look at yourself. The All-Merciful gaze is that the Real looks at you. As long as the human gaze does not pack its bags from your makeup, the All-Merciful gaze will not descend into your heart.” Poor wretch, why do you look at your own tainted obedience? How can you measure that against the threshold of His utter lack of needs? Are you unaware that if you gather the deeds of all the sincerely truthful in the earth and the obedient acts of all the holy ones in heaven, these will not have the weight of a gnat's wing in the scales of the majesty of the Majestic? But He, in His unneediness, approves servanthood in the servants and shows them the road. God is gentle to His servants [42:19]. He says, “Look at My gentleness, consider mercy as coming from Me, and ask for blessings from Me. But ask God of His bounty [4:32].”
