Conclusion

— he remains tormented by his own manifestation, pained by his own dissolute conduct; and when there blows upon him a breath from the breaths of mercy and gentleness, the torment turns sweet and the Merciful a Lord.

Conclusion. Have you not perceived, in what I have set down for you in these sayings, that peace has been made between the two great parties over the question whether acts belong to God alone or are by the power of the servants? For in truth there is no disagreement between them: God is agent inasmuch as the servant is agent, and the servant is agent inasmuch as the Lord is agent, and Being in all its degrees is a free chooser. And praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds, alone.

Its author said: the fair copy of it was completed on Wednesday, the sixteenth of the honoured [month of] Shaʻbān, in the year one thousand two hundred and ninety. End of quotation.

Here ends the Epistle of the Influxes (Risālat al-Wāridāt).

(Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā says:) In this epistle the Shaykh — God have mercy upon him and pardon him — gathered the gist of the opinions of the philosophers of the revealed religions and of the Sufis of the Muslims on the principles of religion: on the divine matters, on prophecy, on the raising of the dead and the return. For these are theories, each of which comes near to the minds of one class of men and draws them to the religion that sets souls right and qualifies them for the knowledge of God, for His worship, and for the pursuit of the good of His servants. It is followed by a creed of his after the manner of the Ashʻarī theologians. In the last years of his life he became firmly grounded in the creed of the forebears (al-salaf), after having been guided to it in outline, as he set it out in his gloss upon the ʻAḍudiyyah.

Were one to ask him today about his state, he would say what al-Junayd said to the man who questioned him in a dream: those allusions have fallen away, those expressions have come to nothing, and nothing has profited us in this matter save the guidance of the Sunnah and the Qurʼān; and nothing has brought us near to our Lord, after the discharge of the obligations of knowledge and of practice, save the remembrance of God and the supererogatory prayers — and above all those cycles of prayer (rakʻāt) we used to perform in the dead of night. As for his creed, what he set out in the Risālat al-Tawḥīd is its fullest exposition, together with what we published from him in the commentary on the Qurʼān; and it was for this reason that he had that work printed and taught it as a lesson at al-Azhar, and no other.