irshaad.net

All truths in this world are partial truths since as limited beings we are (through our limitations) restricted to seeing things from one perspective or the other. We have trouble reconciling opposites and differences since our perspective is limited by the ever-present reality of our many limitations. Total illumination in which there is no error is only with God. Creation only experiences a limited light – it is said to be a night in which the creatures move about in the darkness of the constraints generated by our own hemmed-in, bounded knowledge. Just as in darkness a person seeks to find his way by the light and position of the stars (“in the darknesses of the land and sea” Qur’an 6:97), so also we seek to find our way by the lights of the Prophets (who are conduits for an illumination connected to the light of God’s throne) and by the light of revelation which contains the potential to illuminate our own soul and thereby provide glimpses of a shielded and trustworthy path to a higher world. Otherwise, if we rely solely upon what we create and what we invent, we will be in error since our inventions (whatever high opinion we hold concerning them) are suffused with the same limitations which permeate us – they are the product of limited creatures drawing upon their own limited understanding.