without doubt.
He is neither truthful nor lying in saying that he saw his form and did not see his form. What, then, is that seen form? Where is its locus, and what is its status? It is negated and affirmed, existent and nonexistent, known and unknown.
God, glory be to Him, showed His servant this reality by way of an example so that he might know and realize that if he is incapable and bewildered when it comes to grasping the reality of something in the cosmos and has acquired no knowledge of it, then with regard to its Creator he is more incapable, more ignorant, and more bewildered. By this He alerted him that the self-disclosures of the Real to him are more delicate and subtle in meaning than this thing about which intellects have been bewildered and whose reality they have been incapable of grasping. Their incapacity reaches the point at which they ask whether it has a quiddity at all. They cannot class it with sheer nonexistence, for sight has perceived something, nor with sheer existence, for they know that there is nothing there, nor with sheer possibility.
(The Forms of Sleep, Death, and Unveiling)
It is to a reality of this kind that the human being passes in sleep and after death. He sees accidents as self-subsisting forms that address him and that he addresses, bodies about which he has no doubt. A person given unveiling sees while awake what the sleeper sees in sleep and the dead person after death. Likewise, in the Hereafter he sees the forms of deeds weighed, though they are accidents. He sees death as a mottled ram that is slaughtered, though death is a relation of separation after conjunction. Glory be to Him who is unknown and therefore not known, and who is known
Notes
Translator’s note TN1226-1: “Accidents” renders aʿrāḍ, properties or events ordinarily understood as subsisting in a subject. The examples here concern the apprehension of deeds and death as forms in their own right.
