What Were You Before You Began?
from Kitab al-Tanwir fi Isqat al-Tadbir (The Book of Illumination) p.81
by Ibn ‘Ata’ Allah al-Iskanderi
You should realize that the real One has taken charge of caring for your every need through every stage of your development. God has undertaken to bring you through each stage into your worldly existence, and began this careful oversight on the Day of Destinies. This is the moment when God created all the souls that would ever exist and questioned them Am I not your Lord? All souls answered in unison, Indeed, we have testified.
It was from divine care for all your needs that, on that day, God allowed you to know the divine as your Lord – thus you first acknowledged God. At that time, God manifested to your senses and you were able to witness the divine. God urged you to speak for yourself and inspired you to pronounce your agreement with divine lordship – thus you pronounced God your single Lord. Then God made of your soul a tiny spermazoid safeguarded in the loins of your ancestors and fulfilled all your needs with divine concern while you rested there. God protected you, and protected all your ancestors who carried you as a spermazoid, dispatching divine nourishment and aid to support you by means of all those people who carried you within them, back to your very first forefather, Adam. Then God cast you into the womb of your mother and took charge of all your needs while you were there, making her womb accept you like fertile ground accepts a sprouting seed. God caused to join together two spermazoids [one from the father, and one from the mother] that became intimate and loved each other and melded into one. You exist from this union, built upon the divine wisdom that all of existence is based on the secret principle of bringing forth unity from duality. From a spermazoid, God transformed you into a mucus clot, soft and receptive to the qualities and destinies that God desired to transmit to you. After you became a clot, God transformed you into a fleshy lump. Then God divided and expanded the flesh, shaping shaping it into your likeness and establishing your physical form. Then God breathed into you the spirit and nourished you with the blood of the uterus in the womb of your mother and made flow to you your sustenance before you ever emerged into independent existence.
God kept you in the womb of your mother until your bodily organs were adequate and your supports were firm, in order to prepare you for your coming out into the world, the world consisting of all apportioned for you and against you. You emerged into a realm that you can come to know and experience through God’s bounteousness and even-handedness. When you descended into the world, God knew that you were incapable of eating the raw and rough food of the world, for you had no teeth or digestive powers to make use of what you might eat. So God caused breasts to flow with gentle and refined nourishment. God empowered the compassion harbored in your mother’s heart to incite the breasts: every time they stopped excreting milk, they were urged to begin anew by the compassion for you sparked in your mother’s heart. In this way, the flow of milk is ever renewed, never slacking, with fullness imbued.
Then God set your mother and father to work, procuring for you all you might need and looking after you with the eye of intimate parental care. What is this care except the care that God has poured out for you, as for all people, in the guise of mothers and fathers, in order that you come to know tender love? In reality, nothing has cared for you except God’d lordship. Nothing has raised you except God’s presence with you. God obliged your father to provide for you until you reached a mature age, in order that you might be cared for through him. Then the burden of of responsibility was suspended for you until the time when your powers of understanding are complete, at the time of puberty.
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