On the Couch and the Crown (al-Sarīr wa-l-Tāj)

The Couch is the rank of the Sultan / it is His Throne, at the place-rank of the All-Merciful.

His sitting upon the Couch is His appearing / in His glory and His sovereign loftiness.

It is what is expressed as the Glorious Throne / and as the Mighty, by the firm text of the Qurʾān.

And the Throne, [in] its absoluteness, is by His creatures / and the establishing (istiwāʾ) is a Lordly entrenchment.

Know -- may God grant us and you success -- that the Prophetic hadith in which it is mentioned that he saw his Lord in the form of a beardless youth upon a couch of such-and-such, and on his foot such-and-such -- the hadith in its entirety -- the unveiling gave us, in it, that it occurs [both as] form and meaning.

As for form:

it is the self-disclosure of the Real (glory be His and exalted) in the mentioned, specified, delimited form, upon the specified couch, in the mentioned two sandals of gold and the particular crown -- because He (glory be His and exalted) discloses Himself by what He wills, how He wills.

So He is disclosed in every [thing] transmitted, intelligized, understood, imagined, heard, and witnessed.

So He may disclose Himself in the sensory form, and He is its very self and its inward; and He may disclose Himself how He wills, so He is disclosed in each of them, and He is its very self and its outward.

And He discloses Himself in the imaginal form, and He is its very self and its outward; and there is, in the imaginal, only this appearing -- that He is its very self and its witnessed entity. But He (glory be His and exalted) has, beyond that, what is without end.

And this imaginal self-disclosure is two kinds:

a kind upon the form of [one's] belief, and a kind upon the form of the sensibles. So understand.

But the absolute formal self-disclosure -- its wellspring and origin is the imaginal world (al-ʿālam al-mithālī).

And it, when its appearing intensifies, is witnessed by the fatty eye as a sensible; but in reality it is the very eye of insight (al-baṣīra) that is the witness.

Except that, when [the witness] became wholly an eye, his sight became the place of his insight in this witnessing.

And as for the meaning[-aspect]:

I mean, of what the unveiling gave us in the hadith that it occurs [as] meaning -- each of the things mentioned in the hadith is an expression for a divine meaning, as we expressed [it] in the Rafraf, that it is the divine place-rank.

And in the Couch, that it is the All-Merciful rank which is in the divine place-rank.

And as for the Crown, it is an expression for the absence of finitude, and it is what is expressed by the form of a youth -- because the form entails finitude, and He has no end.

So the mention of the Crown, which is above the head, is a pointing to the quiddity of the Essence, which has no end; so He (glory be His), when He discloses Himself, is witnessed by what He discloses Himself with.

And every witnessed [thing] is finite; but He appears, in the self-disclosure of the finite, without end -- so He, from the standpoint of His finitude, is without end.

And He, from the standpoint of His Unity (wāḥidiyya), is a single thing, and the One has no multiplicity in it; so it is not said of it that it has no end, because the absence of finitude is of the conditions of multiplicity, and He is transcendent above multiplicity.

And He, from the standpoint of His Essence -- exalted above limit, restriction, and apprehension -- has no end; so He gathered the two contraries in the very [point] of His Unity, in which there is no doubling.

So look at this wondrous, marvelous matter, and ponder this delectable report -- that perhaps you may be guided to what is right; and to Him is the return and the homecoming.