The Seas and Great Rivers

 إِحَاطَةِ حَقِيقَةِ التَّسْخِيرِ وَالتَّدْبِيرِ

وَالفَتَّاحِيَّةِ وَتَوْزِيعِ البُذُورِ وَالمُحَافَظَةِ وَالإِدَارَةِ وَالإِعَاشَةِ لِجَمِيعِ ذَوِي

الحَيَاةِ وَالرَّحْمَانِيَّةِ وَالرَّحِيمِيَّةِ العَامَّةِ الشَّامِلَةِ المُكَمَّلَةِ بِالمُشَاهَدَةِ

There is no god but Allāh, the Necessary Being. The earth, along

with all that is in it and on it, demonstrates the necessity of His

unitary existence, by the testimony of the sublimity of the

all-encompassing reality of subjugation, direction, and opening,

and the distribution of seeds, protection and organisation, and

His giving sustenance to all living creatures, of the quality of being

merciful and compassionate, that is witnesses as being universal,

all-inclusive, and perfected.

Then, every time the contemplative traveller read one of the pages, strengthened was his faith - the key to happiness. Expanded was his knowledge - the key to spiritual ascension. Unveiled was a new level of the reality of faith in Allāh (al-īmānu billāh), the foundation and source of all perfections - and through this, every time the many further spiritual tastes and experiences were bestowed upon him, his curiosity increased very much, even though he had already listened to the masterful, conclusive lessons given by the sky, the weather and the earth. As he was repeating هل من مزيد ‘Is there no more?’, he suddenly heard the ecstatic sounds and hooroosh of the surging seas and great rivers, and their Divine remembrance (dhikr), with their melancholic and sweet voices.

In the language of their states and tongues (lisānu’l-ḥāl wa’l-qāl), they are saying ‘Look at us too, and read us too!’ So he looks and sees: the seas always vigorously surging and merging,

with their propensity to pour forth and break up whatever they encounter, encompass the earth - but they do not break anything up, nor do they pour forth, and although they are made to journey at high speed with the earth, in a single year, within a sphere the compass of which is twenty-five thousand years [at a walking speed], they do not overstep the limit onto their dry-land neighbour. Thus, they halt, proceed and are protected through the command and the strength of one who is consummately Powerful and Sublime.

He then looked into the depths of the seas and saw that besides its superlatively beautiful, decorated, well-ordered pearls, the sustenance, management, births, and deaths of thousands of species of animals proceeded in tremendously perfect order. He saw that their provisions and nourishment, that come from simple sand and bitter water, are perfect and integral, such that it becomes self-evidently proven that this all comes to pass through the direction and sustenance of the Almighty, Possessor of Majesty (Al-Qadīru Dhu’l-Jalāl), and the Compassionate, Possessor of Beauty (Ar-Raḥīmu Dhu’l-Jamāl).

This guest then looked to the rivers and saw that their benefits, tasks, tributaries, and estuaries all come to pass with wisdom and mercy. It becomes established self-evidently, then, that all streams, sources, brooks, and great rivers stem from the treasury of the mercy of the Merciful, Possessor of Majesty and Bounty (Ar-Raḥmānu Dhu’l-Jalāli wa’l-ikrām), and flow out. They are stored and used up to an extent that is out of the ordinary, as is related in the tradition ‘Surely four rivers gush forth from Paradise’. (a)

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a Ṣaḥīḥu Muslim 1/389, Sunanu’n-Nasāī 2/225, Musnadu Aḥmad 15 / 270 

This means that, in actual fact, their gushing forth is only possible from a treasury in a spiritual paradise, and from the emanations of an inexhaustible unseen source - for these rivers flow to an extent that is beyond the capacities of apparent causes.

For example - the blessed Nile, that transformed the sandy desert of Egypt into a paradise, flows continuously from a mountain named ‘the Mountain of the Moon’ in the south, without ever being used up, quite as if it is a little sea. If its estuaries were gathered together over a period of six months in the form of a mountain, and frozen, they would be bigger than that mountain - whereas the locus and repository particular to it within that mountain is less than a sixth of its size. Its incoming water is insubstantial, for rainfall in that hot region is negligible, and the thirsty earth quickly absorbs the water - and the river is therefore unable to uphold that vast balance. That being so, the narration that betokens that it gushes forth from an unseen paradise, transcending the laws of this earth, expresses a singularly meaningful and beautiful reality.

Thus did the traveller see what was merely one of the thousands of oceanic testimonies and realities of rivers and seas. He realised that by consensus all of them say لاَ إِلَهَ إِلاَّ هُو (there is no god but Him) with a power proportionate to the immensity of the seas, and that the seas reveal as many witnesses to this testimony as there are creatures in the sea. With the intention of expressing the meaning of the testimony of all of the seas and rivers, in ‘The Fourth Level’ of ‘The First Station’, the following was mentioned:

لاَ إِلَهَ إِلاَّ اللهُ الوَاجِبُ الوُجُودِ الَّذِي دَلَّ عَلَى وُجُوبِ وُجُودِهِ فِي وَحْدَتِهِ جَمِيعُ

البِحَارِ وَالأَنْهَارِ بِجَمِيعِ مَا