Ra'aytu Allah

Ra'aytu Allah ("I Saw God") is a book by the Egyptian writer Mostafa Mahmoud, printed by Dar al-Ma'arif in Cairo in 1976 ³. It brings together an essay by the author on "seeing with the mind and inner sight", quotations from and commentary on al-Mawaqif wa-l-Mukhatabat of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Jabbar al-Niffari, and a closing essay on al-Niffari's doctrine of divine knowledge ^{2 4}. What follows are the author's views, attributed to him.

The author opens with the story of the lion "Sultan", which killed its trainer Muhammad al-Hilw in a Cairo circus, then refused food and ate its own forelimb until it died; he reads it as "a story of remorse of a unique kind" ^{5 6}. From there he moves to examples from animals and plants: the cat that lowers its head when caught, bees that raise a queen, termites that build air-conditioned houses, insect-eating plants, and asks: who taught them? Instinct, he says, is "another word for knowledge planted from birth" ^{7 8 9}. He refers here to al-Nahl, verse 68, al-An'am, verse 38 and al-Naml, verse 18 ¹⁰.

Calling this governing power "nature", he says, is only fleeing "from one word to another", and he quotes al-Niffari that God "is the proof of things and is not proved by them" ¹¹. He cites the story of the boat in al-Kahf to show that behind fates that look treacherous there is wisdom, and concludes that what matters is "to know how to read with minds and inner sight, not with eyes" ^{12 1}.

The author distinguishes two portions: that of "people of understanding", which is seeing God's traces and glimpsing His wisdom, and that of "those brought near", which is seeing with the heart, in which "the veil of things is torn, yet the divine essence stays veiled by its lights; it is not seen openly nor with the eye" ¹. The book's title, as he explains it, refers to the seeing of inner sight and the heart, not of the eye.

The author presents al-Niffari as "the knowing imam" and says that what he gives is al-Niffari's words verbatim or an attempt to explain and understand them ². He warns that the phrases "my Lord said to me" and "my Lord stayed me" are not, in his view, "a claim to prophethood" but the Sufis' language for what is cast into the heart, and that al-Niffari was "committed to the Qur'an in letter and meaning" ². The book, he says, is "for the elite of the elite", not for the general reader ¹³. Short chapters follow with titles such as Tawhid, The Veils, Standing before God, and Absence, Vision and Witnessing ^{14 15 16}.

In the closing essay the author holds that al-Niffari has no doctrine of his own but follows the general path of the Sufis, while standing out by "an astonishing power of expression" ¹⁷. For that reason any commentary on al-Niffari is, he says, "an impoverishment, not an enrichment, of his meanings", and he chose to explain him "only within the narrowest limits" ^{17 18}. He sets out al-Niffari's journey: knowledge for him is "a mount and a beast of burden", not a goal ¹⁹; then comes leaving and passing beyond the self ²⁰; and he reads the removal of the sandals in Ta Ha, verse 12 as a symbol of stripping off self and body ¹⁸. He insists that al-Niffari's idea of the "lordly servant" does not mean "any mixing of servanthood and lordship", citing al-Ma'ida, verse 110 to show that all of it is "by divine leave" ²¹. He sums up the doctrine in one word, "transcendence, crossing or rising" ²¹, and says he has read al-Niffari for five years and still finds something new in him every day ²².

• Citations use PDF page numbers; printed page = PDF page − 2.
• The contents list a chapter titled "A newly found manuscript of al-Niffari" (p. 160); its details have not yet been checked.
• The edition used is the 1976 printing; the year of the first edition is not given in the file.