And We placed a tie on their hearts when they stood up and said, “Our Lord is the Lord of the heavens and the earth.” “We bound them with the tie of sinlessness, kept them on the carpet of recognition, and firmed them up with the cord of love. We lit the candle of kind favor for them in the streambed of solicitude. We taught them the courtesy of companionship in the grammar school of the Beginningless and they set forth in holiness itself, busying themselves in the cave with the mystery of the Haqiqah.” Whenever something has an exaltedness, it is masked by the veils of exaltedness so that not just any non-privy may gaze upon it and not just any drudge may reach it. Those chevaliers were precious in the Threshold of Unity, for they were lit up by the light of faith and the limpidness of tawḤīd, but the eyes of the folk of those days were tainted with the ooze of unbelief and associa- tionism. The jealousy of the religion took them into the veil of the cave so that those eyes tainted by ooze would not see them. The command came from the side of all-compellingness,
