The veiling of pontifical man and his transformation to the...

The veiling of pontifical man and his transformation to the Promethean could not but result in the cosmic book becoming illegible and sacred Scripture reduced to only its outward meaning. In Islam the correspondence between man, the cosmos, and the sacred book is central to the whole religion. The sacred book of Islam is the written or composed Quran (al-Qur'ān al-tadwīnī) as well as the cosmic Quran (al-Qur'ān al-tadwīnī).

Its verses are called āyāt which means also signs or symbols to which the Quran itself refers in the verse, “We shall show them our portents upon the horizon [āfāq] and within themselves [anfus], until it be manifest unto them that it is the truth” (XLI; 53).7 The āyāt are the Divine Words and Letters which comprise at once the elements of the Divine Book, the macrocosmic world and the inner being of man.

The āyāt manifest themselves in the Holy Book, the horizons (āfāq) or the heavens and earth and the soul of man (anfus). To the extent that the āyāt of the sacred book reveal their inner meaning and man's outer faculty and intelligence become wed once again to the inner faculties and the heart, and man realizes his own being as a sign of God, the cosmos manifests itself as theophany and the phenomena of nature become transformed into the āyāt…