God desires to be known. He effaces you from yourself so you do not stop with yourself, while your entity exists and the ruling appears from Him.
Thus God effaced God’s Messenger, God bless him and grant him peace, concerning the ruling of his casting, while casting existed from him. He said, “You did not cast,” effacing him; “when you cast,” affirming the cause; “but God cast” [8:17]. He cast only through God’s Messenger’s hand, God bless him and grant him peace. In the sound report, “I was his hearing, sight, and hand.”
Removing the cause in effacement concerns only the ruling, not the entity. Were the cause and causal means to disappear, it would disappear, and it does not disappear. Wisdom therefore includes preserving causes while effacing the servant’s reliance upon them, according to negating their effect within caused things. Causes are coverings and veils. Effacement occurs only concerning what has an effect; otherwise it is not effacement. “God speaks the truth and guides the way” [33:4].
Chapter Two Hundred and Fifty-Three: On Gnosis of Affirmation, Which Is Upholding Custom’s Rulings and Affirming Connections
Toward Affirmation’s Presence I set my aspiration,
from effacement, when its Imam called me.
When we came to a Presence we had never left,
with a guide and driver behind it and before it,
Notes
Translator’s note TN5554-1: The unexpressed subject of “it would disappear” is left as a pronoun in the supplied cause/removal clause. The heading’s aḥkām al-ʿādāt is rendered through upholding custom’s rulings, while iḥkām, making firm, is also suggested by the ensuing account of affirmation. Causes’ entities and the servant’s reliance upon them remain expressly distinguished.
