I am about to create a mortal out of the mire...

I am about to create a mortal out of the mire, And when I have fashioned him and breathed into him of My Spirit, then fall down before him prostrate. (3) This verse provides essential insights into man’s position and nature in this universe. Firstly it says that man is made of a dual nature. He is part earth and part divine spirit. Of the portion that is earth, the Qur’an calls it a stinking clay.

There are two opposing forces within man, one which is totally animal, material, carnal, and unclean (clay) and the other is the purest essence – the spirit of God.

“Hence human beings represent a mixture of clay and spirit, darkness and light, ignorance and knowledge, activity and passivity … all divine attributes are present in man, but they are obscured by those dimensions of existence that manifest a lack of the same divine attributes.”(4) A lack of divinity would mean a lack of understanding and knowing what is divine.

It is the innermost spirit that is the only part of a human that can in some sense perceive that divine reality, as it is essentially a part of it. The rest of man is a curtain between him and God. It is the partition between the spirit and the mirror of the spirit. It is with these tensions within his nature that the first man (Adam) was created. The “clay” aspect causes him to “incline towards the earth”. The spirit aspect draws him towards God.

For this reason, the Qur’an says that Adam was created with the two hands of God’s power. One hand represents the attributes (or names) of God that draw man near to God (e.g., mercy, love, compassion etc.). The other hand represents the attributes of distance and wrath (e.g., anger, vengeance, wrath, etc.), those qualities which separate man from God.

“The most invisible dimension of the human being reflects the divine light directly, while the bodily or visible dimension reflects it only dimly or not at all.” (5) Man has to pull aside this veil of the corporeal or material self. Shunning it he is able to let his invisible dimension reflect the light that it so wants to see. This spirit of God which resides in man longs for a reunion with its original, it cries and makes man’s soul restless to cleanse itself of all that is not God.

As man lays away his corporeal vestments his inner being sees more clearly. It gains a vision which sees what was previously unseen. Gates of knowledge are opened up to it and before this man will be laid out the secrets of the control of the Universe.