Praise be to God [alone], Who has revealed to His servant the Book: God, exalted be He, praises Himself by the tongue of differentiation in consideration of the union insofar as He is described as revealing the Book which incorporates the meaning of the union into the form of the differentiation. Hence He is the Praiser and the Praised at the level of differentiation and that of union. Praise is the manifestation of the divine perfections and the attributes of beauty and majesty upon the Muḥammadan essence considered from the perspective of the ascension after singling him out for Himself by [His] pre-eternal solicitude alluded to in the genitive construction in His saying '[to] His servant' (ʿabdihi). That [singling out] entailed making his [Muḥammad's] entity pre-eternally receptive to nondelimited perfection from His effusion and the depositing of the all-comprehensive Book in him in potentiality, which is the perfect preparedness. The revealing to him of the Book is the exteriorisation of these realities from what lies latent within the union of the [inclusive] unity onto that human locus of manifestation. In reality the two are reflections of each other when considering the descent, the ascension and the sending down [of the revelation] as praise from God, exalted be He, to His Prophet, since the significations that are latent in the unseen of the Unseen, that which has not been revealed to his heart, he is not able to praise God in the way that He ought to be praised and so what God has not praised does not praise God, but His praise praises Him, as he [the Prophet] said, 'I cannot enumerate praise of You in the way that You praise Yourself'. First, He praised Himself at the source of the union, considered from the point of view of differentiation, then reflected that by saying, 'Praise be to God'; and He has not allowed for him, that is, for His servant, any crookedness, that is to say, any deviation or inclination to the other, as He has said [elsewhere]: The eye did not deviate, nor did it go beyond [the bounds] [Q. 53:17]. In other words, he [Muḥammad] did not see the other during his presential vision.
