“You will not see Me,” and they believe that the word lan (never/will not) denotes absolute negation in the past, present, and future, yet it escaped them that the meaning of that is: “You will not see Me” 1 in [its] entirety, or “You will not see Me” in the reality upon which I subsist—since you are a creature and in a human image, while I am a light of pure divinity (lahut), not like the [created] lights; since you are limited in strength and contingency, while My Essence is absolute in power and penetration, and you cannot remain firm against the intensity of the radiation of My Essential light.
Footnotes
1Sheikh Salih bin Ali al-Numayri—may Allah sanctify his soul—said in his treatise Tadhkirat al-Arifin: “Indeed Moses—His might was mighty—requested the vision of Allah in His entirety upon the tongue of the seventy men who were with him, and openly—meaning a total vision, not a vision of witnessing—and that was so they might see the power of Allah and His grandeur. So when He, Glory be to Him, manifested Himself in His entirety, the mountain crumbled and Moses fell unconscious, meaning he prostrated, and the seventy men died when they saw Allah in the image of subjugation (surat al-qahr). And Moses grieved over them, so Allah brought them back to life as an honor to him.”