2:8 Among the people are those who say, “We have faith in God.”
This is the story of the hypocrites. The secret of the hypocrites' hypocrisy goes back to the eminence of Muṣ?afā in two respects, one in respect of jealousy and the other in respect of mercy.
Muṣ?afā was the Real's beloved. His beauty and perfection passed beyond the limits of understanding and imagination, so by virtue of jealousy God kept him behind the curtain of His protection and made the hypocrites' hypocrisy the mask of his beauty. He was veiled from the world's folk so that no one recognized him in reality, and He did not show him to anyone as he was. Thou seest them looking at thee, but they do not see [7:198]. If the hypocrites' hypocrisy had not been the mask of that shining face, all the creatures would have thrown dust on the light of the Unseen. With such a sun, such a light, and such a brilliance, a hypocrisy was needed such as that of ʿAbdallāh Abī Salūl and his likes. Otherwise, the radiance of that beauty would have done more to the Adamites than the beauty of Jesus did to his people such that they said, “The Messiah is the son of God” [9:30].
This can be said with a simile: The sun's disk, whose rays shine forth from the fourth heaven, has turned its face toward the fifth heaven. God created angels and entrusted that disk to them, and He created deserts full of snow in front of those angels. They lift mountain after mountain of snow from those deserts and dash them against the sun's disk so that its heat will be broken. Otherwise, the world would burn because of its shine and heat. In the same way, the hypocrisy of the hypocrites was thrown against the presence of that sun of good fortune. Otherwise, the creatures would all have bound the belt of associationism. But, that paragon of the world was all gentleness and mercy, as he said: “I am a guided mercy.” God says, “We sent thee only as a mercy to the worlds” [21:107].