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[I]t is incumbent upon the Folk of Allah to know the doctrine of every sect and creed concerning God, in order to witness Him in every form and in order not to stand in the place of denial. For He permeates existence, so no one denies Him except those who are limited.
Ibn Al-'Arabi, quoted in William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge
William C. Chittick, "The Spirituality of the Sufi Path"
In trying to express the nature of intellectual knowledge, Muslim scholars commonly cite mathematical understanding as an example, and they consider true mathematical insight as a halfway house on the road to intellectual vision. A real knowledge of mathematics does not derive from rote learning or rational argumentation, but rather from the discovery of the logic and clarity of mathematics in one’s own self-awareness. When one perceives the truth of a mathematical statement, one cannot deny it, because it is self-evident to the intelligence.
William Chittick, “The Recovery of Human Nature”, Transdisciplinarity in Science and Religion No. 4 (2008), pp. 281-93
That the universe is incomplete without human beings is a corollary of the common Islamic idea that the cosmos has no purpose in and of itself. Its only purpose is to bring human beings into existence. The perfect human being is the "Sought-after Entity" (al-'ayn al-maqsuda), God's reason for creating the universe. The hadith of the Hidden Treasure tells us that God created the creatures in order to be known. […] The microcosm is the human being, created in the form of every divine name and containing within himself the realities that bring the cosmos into existence. The macrocosm is the whole cosmos, so long as perfect human beings exist within it, since without them it is incomplete, a body without a spirit. Both macrocosm and microcosm are forms of God, manifest (zahir) within the created order. The reality of the perfect human being, also known as the "Muhammadan Reality," is then the nonmanifest form of God as known by God Himself, or the divine face turned toward the creation of both macrocosm and microcosm. Finally, the perfect human being in historical actuality is the "manifest side of the form of God" (III 109.13), God's sought-after entity whereby He actualizes His goal in creating the universe.
William C. Chittick, Imaginal Worlds: Ibn Al-'Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity
If rational thought tends to negate attributes from God and affirm His incomparability, "imagination" (khayal) has the power to grasp God's similarity (tashbih). The Shaykh [Ibn Al-'Arabi] devotes hundreds of pages to contrasting these two ways of gaining knowledge. His constant theme is that perfect knowledge of God demands that He be recognized as both incomparable and similar: God in Himself—absolute wujud—is incomparable with all existent things, but wujud makes its properties manifest in the cosmos, and in this respect God is somehow similar to the created things.
William C. Chittick, Imaginal Worlds: Ibn Al-'Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity
If Adam had been created not in the form of God, but in the form of the All-Compassionate, no human being could be angry or cruel. If he had been created in the form of the Vengeful, no one would ever forgive his enemy. If he had been created in the form of the Almighty or the Inaccessible, no one would ever obey God or anyone else. But since human beings were created in the form of all names, they can make manifest any conceivable attribute. [...] [S]ince human beings comprehend all names, each human individual reflects every divine attribute to some degree. But during the course of a human life the divine names manifest themselves in all sorts of intensities, combinations, and interrelationships.
William C. Chittick, Imaginal Worlds: Ibn Al-'Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity
Glory be to Him who veils Himself through His manifestation and manifests Himself through His veil!
Ibn ‘Arabi, Al-Futuhat Al-Makkiyya, III 547.12, as quoted by William Chittick in Ibn ‘Arabi, Heir to the Prophets
It is the very centrality and totality of the human state which makes any "linear" and "horizontal" evolution of man impossible. One cannot reach a more central point in a circle than the center itself. Once at the center one can always move either upward or downward but no further in the horizontal direction. The evolutionary view of man as an animal, which even from the biological point of view is open to question, can tell us little as to the real nature of man; no more than can the theories of many anthropologists who discuss anthropology without even knowing who man, the anthrōpos, is and without realizing the complete states of universal existence which man carries with him here and now.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Essential Seyyed Hossein Nasr, edited by William C. Chittick
