jad hatema reality that is not visible without exteriorization, even though, as it
is said in the same page, it would be that of God’s countless Names.
This allusion to the Names, added to the title of the chapter, shows
that God’s image is Man himself, the being in which the Names are
reflected.
To give the reason for the creation of the world, the mystics usually
refer to a hadîth qudsî (in other words, a divine speech reported by a
prophet, but not part of a revealed book) according to which God said:
“I was a hidden treasure; I desired to be known [u‘raf], which is why
I brought the creatures [khalq] to life, which made them know me.”
Although Ibn ‘Arabî often makes use of this saying, and even though
he has it in mind here, it is not what he is professing. In the hadîth,
God is only the object of knowledge, whereas in the Bezels of Wisdom,
he is at once the subject and the object of knowledge, the world and
man serving merely as mediators. What matters to him is to be known
by himself, and not to be known in general. But obviously he cannot
reach self-knowledge without going through the element of exteriority,
without alienating himself in an image of himself, which is precisely
what Suhrawardî judges to be at once unworthy of God and impossible,
since the essence lacks nothing, even in terms of knowledge, because
the essence is itself that self-knowledge. But before considering the
Persian’s, the Andalusian’s text invites us to explore one point. The
word I have translated as essence in the sentence: “God [al-Haqq]
wished to see his essence [‘ayn] in a universe that encompasses all of
reality so that so that his own secret is manifested to him” means also
“source” and “eye.” By source, what is suggested is that he desired to
see his own origin, the power of absolute self-production. By eye, what
is signified is that he projected the organ of vision in a way that the
image sees him as much as he sees it, or, in other words, that God and
his image are by turns both subject and object. But the idea that an
image can see, is what Suhrawardî and Henry would find even more
absurd. It simply matches identically the error of treating the self as a
thing, furthermore deprived of its ipseity; here, it is the thing that is
mistaken with a self. But what is not light does not have self-awareness,
nor does it have an awareness of what is other, the former being a con-
dition of the latter. (H, §121) Suhrawardî stands, then, in an ontological
dualism (in Henry’s sense) that separates the living from the non-