The gnostics often write that it is Absolute Being without...

The gnostics often write that it is Absolute Being without even the “limitation” of absoluteness. It is therefore the Reality which is both Beyond-Being and Absolute Being. Later gnostics called this supreme subject wujūd-i lā bi-shart-i maqsamī, the totally unconditioned Being which is the ground for all divisions and distinctions.

Gnosis, therefore, deals not only with ontology but with a metaphysics that is grounded beyond Being in the Supreme Reality of which Being usually understood is the first determination. It begins with the Divine Ipseity or Dhāt that is above all limits and determinations and that is sometimes referred to as al-Haqq (the Truth).

It also deals with multiplicity within the Divine Order, that is, the Divine Names and Qualities which are so many Self-Determinations and Self-Disclosures of the Supreme Essence. This Supreme Science (al-‘ilm al-a‘lā) that is gnosis also deals with manifestations of the Principle, with all the levels of universal existence from the archangelic to the material but views all that exists in the cosmic order in light of the Principle.

It descends from the Principle to manifestation and deals with cosmology as a science of the cosmos in relation to the Principle, as a form of knowledge that provides maps to guide and orient human beings who are situated in the confines of cosmic existence to the Metacosmic Reality. This Supreme Science also deals of necessity with the human state in all its width, breadth, depth and height.

It contains a most profound “science of man”, which one could call an anthropology if this term were to be understood in its traditional and not modern sense, as well as a “science of spirit” within man or pneumatology which is absent from the worldview of the modern world. Finally, gnosis deals with the Principle and all the levels of manifestation from the point of view of the unity which dominates over all that exists and which is especially central to the Islamic perspective.

One might say that Islamic metaphysics or gnosis is dominated by the two basic doctrines of the “transcendent oneness of Being” (wahdat alwujūd) and the universal man (al-insān al-kāmil) which includes not only a gnostic anthropology but also a symbolic cosmology on the basis of the correspondence between the microcosm and macrocosm. Theoretical gnosis is also concerned in the deepest sense with the reality of revelation and religion.