the All-Knowing, the Wise, majestic and mighty is He.
For these men, through a divine particular favour, there is opened within the inward meanings of the revealed Books, the purified scriptures, the speech of the whole world, and the arrangement of letters and Names considered in their meanings, what is opened to no others.
(The Men of the Limit and the Heights)
The men of the limit are those who possess disposition in the world of fiery spirits, the world of the intermediate realm and compelling power, for it is under compulsion. Do you not see it subdued beneath the authority of the tailed ones, who are a group among them, of piercing flames? It is thus subjugated only through its own kind. These men possess the power to bring down their spirits and summon them into presence. They are the men of the Heights.
The Heights are a wall separating the Garden and the Fire, an isthmus whose inward side contains mercy and whose outward side faces torment [al-Hadid 57:13]. It is a boundary between the abode of the felicitous and the abode of the wretched, the abode of those who see and the abode of the veil. These men are the most fortunate in knowing this wall. They witness the imagined lines between every pair of opposites, as in His saying: “Between them is an isthmus that they do not overstep” [al-Rahman 55:20]. They do not transgress the limits.
They are the men of the Mercy that “encompassed all things” [al-Aʿraf 7:156]. They have entry into and oversight of every Presence, and they know the attributes by which every existent is distinguished from the other—
Notes
Translator’s note TN751-1: The Arabic connects jabarūt, here “compelling power,” with jabr, “compulsion.” “The tailed ones” literally renders dhawāt al-adhnāb, an expression associated with comets, while the same sentence calls them a group of piercing flames. The translation retains this compressed account and its claim that fiery spirits are subdued by their own kind.
