23:115 What, did you reckon that We created you for frivolity and that you would not be returned to Us?
Abū Bakr Wāsi?ī recited this verse and said, "He made manifest the colors and created the creatures to make manifest His existence, for had He not created, it would not be recognized that He exists; and to make manifest the perfection of His knowledge and power through the manifestation of His acts soundly arranged by wisdom; and to make manifest the signs of friendship on the friends and the signs of wretchedness on the wretched."
He is saying, "The majestic and perfectly powerful Lord, in His majesty and exaltedness and His perfect power, brought the engendered beings and newly arrived things into existence. Thereby they would know His Being, recognize His lordhood, and find evidence of His perfect knowledge and power from His artisanry. As His knowledge of them went out, He made apparent the mark of friendship on the friends and inscribed enmity on the enemies. He brought them from the concealment of nonexistence into existence in keeping with His knowledge, known in the Beginningless, that He would create creation. He wanted to make His creation come to be in exact correspondence with His knowledge."
David the prophet said in his whispered prayer, "O God, O endless Majesty described by the attribute of perfection and qualified by the description of unneediness! You have no need for anything and You subsist in Your own description. You require nobody and You take help and aid from no one. Why did You create these creatures? What wisdom is there in their existence?"
The answer came, "'I was a hidden treasure, and I loved to be recognized.' I was a concealed treasure and no one knew or recognized Me. I wanted to be known and loved to be recognized."
"I loved to be recognized" is an allusion to the fact that recognition is built on love. Wherever there is love, there is recognition, and wherever there is no love, there is no recognition.
The great ones of the religion and the Tariqah have said, "No one recognizes Him save those to whom He has made Himself recognized, no one voices His tawḥīd save those to whom He has shown His tawḥīd, and no one describes Him save those to whose secret cores He has disclosed Himself."
No one recognizes the Real save someone to whom He shows Himself as the One; no one describes Him save someone to whose secret core He makes Himself appear. Expression is the spokesman of the secret core, and the secret core is gazing on the Real. First there is seeing, then the tongue expresses what the secret core saw. The tongue is the mark of the folk of practice.
As for the folk of the Haqiqah, they have no expression or allusion. This is what they have said: "He who recognizes Him does not describe Him, and he who describes Him does not recognize Him." When someone has received the self-disclosure to the secret core according to the rightful due of the Haqiqah, his secret core is in contemplation itself and his spirit is drowned in the ocean of face-to-face vision. When the Friend is present, giving a mark of the Friend is to abandon veneration.
The Pir of the Tariqah said, "When the inwardness's contemplation has been set aright in someone, he does not want to express it with the tongue or have his outwardness become aware of it."
Shiblī said, "On the night they killed Ḥusayn Manṣūr Ḥallāj, I whispered secretly with the Real all night until dawn. Then I placed my head down in prostration and said, 'O Lord, He was a servant of Yours, a man of faith, a tawḥīd-voicer, a firm believer, numbered among Your friends. What was this trial You brought down upon him? How did he come to be considered worthy for this tribulation?'
Then I dreamt, and it was as if I was shown this call of exaltedness reaching my ears: 'He is one of Our servants. We informed him of one of Our secrets and he disclosed it, so We sent down upon him what you saw. It is fine for a green-grocer to call out about his vegetables, but absurd for a jeweler to call out about a night-brightening pearl.'"