God has a House called the Kaaba in a town called Mecca, to which people make Hajj every year and around which they circumambulate.
Then this House is witnessed upon arrival with the sensory eye. Through the eye, its quality, configuration, and condition become settled within the self. This is the eye of certainty, which before witnessing had been knowledge of certainty. Through seeing it, the self gains through tasting what it lacked before seeing it.
Then God opens the eye of his insight concerning this House’s being related to God, circumambulated, and sought rather than other houses related to God. He knows its reason and cause through God’s making-known, not through his own consideration and exertion. His knowledge of this is a certain truth, settled for him and unshakable.
(Certainty and the Genitive Relation to It)
Not every truth has stability, nor every knowledge, nor every eye. Hence the genitive relation is valid. Were the knowledge, eye, and truth of certainty certainty itself, this relation would be invalid: one thing is not annexed to itself. Annexation occurs only between a term annexed and a term to which it is annexed, requiring multiplicity for its existence to be valid.
Whoever does not distinguish certainty from knowledge, saying knowledge is certainty though it occurs in God’s Book in a genitive construction, must seek an aspect that validates this relation, so he may believe what came from God.
He says: the meaning may be one, indicated by two different expressions. One expression is annexed to the other, since they are undoubtedly two distinct ones[78] in form, with oneness of meaning. The expression
Notes
[78]
(The wording “غير إن” was corrected to “غيران,” two distinct ones, by comparison with the new edition.)
