Worship God, and associate nothing with Him, and act beautifully toward parents, and toward kinsfolk, orphans, the indigent, and the neighbor who is of kin, and the neighbor who is a stranger, and the companion at your side, and the son of the road, and what your right hands own. This verse begins by mentioning tawḤīd, which is the root of the sciences, the secret of the recogni- tions, the basis of the religion, the foundation of being a Muslim, and the partition between enemy and friend. Any act of obedience without tawḤīd has no value or weight, and its outcome will be nothing but darkness and captivity. Any act of disobedience along with tawḤīd will yield nothing other than familiarity and brightness. TawḤīd is that you say that God is one and that you be one for Him. Saying one is the submit- ter's tawḤīd, and being one is the basis of the recognizer's tawḤīd. The submitter's tawḤīd drives away the devil, washes away sin, and opens up the heart. The recognizer's tawḤīd cuts away at- tachments, washes away the creatures, and brings forth the realities. The submitter's tawḤīd takes advice, opens the door, and gives fruit. The recognizer's tawḤīd effaces the customs of human nature and burns away the veil of mortal nature so that the breeze of familiarity may blow, the beginningless reminder may arrive, and the friend may gaze upon the Friend. The submitter's tawḤīd is that you bear witness to God's one Essence, pure attributes, and beginningless names and marks. He is the God other than whom there is no god, the Creator of heaven and earth other than whom there is no enactor. No one has loyalty like Him in the whole cosmos. He is a Lord who is above all in measure, beyond all in Essence and attributes. From the Beginningless to the Endless He is the greatest Lord. When intellect holds that something is impossible, God has perfect power over it. His power makes no use of contrivance, and His self- standing has no change of state. In the kingdom He is safe from disappearance, and in Essence and attributes He is transcendent. You will never see any created thing without marks of deficiency and fault, but the Eternal Enactor is pure of deficiency, incomparable with fault, free of blights. He does not eat or sleep, nor is He the locus for newly arrived things or changing states. He is not new in attribute, nor does He accept alteration. He stands before “when,” acts before activity, creates before creation, and is powerful before the artisanries. In His Essence, attributes, and perfection He has always been just as He is now. Shaykh al-Islām Anṣārī said, “The tawḤīd of the Muslims amounts to three words: affirmation of attributes without excess, negation of similarity without declaring ineffectuality, and going for- ward according to the outwardness without mixing.” The reality of affirmation is that you acknowledge and surrender to whatever God said in explanation and whatever MuṣṬafā said plainly about Him. You stand firm in the outwardness, you offer no likenesses for it, you do not turn it away from its formulation, and you do not wander around it with imagination, for God comes into knowledge but not imagination. You avoid reflec- tive thinking about how it can be so and you do not seek any self-exertion or interpretation. You do not turn away from saying it or listening to it. You know that in reality whatever creatures know about God's attributes is only the name. To perceive it is to accept it. The stipulation is surrender, and the commentary is to remember. Know God's Essence in God's measure, not as rationally understood by creatures. Know His attributes as is worthy of Him, not as reflected upon by creatures. Know His ability in His measure, not with the artifice of creatures. He is a Being that is one, outside of imaginations and apart from qualification. Whatever He wants, He does, not because of need, for He needs nothing. Rather, He puts things straight by want, pure knowledge, precedent wisdom, and penetrating power. His speech is true, His promise correct, and His Messenger trustworthy. His speech exists in the earth in reality, always joined with Him. His argument stands through it, His decree is irrevocable, His commands and prohibitions firm. Surely His are the creation and the command. Blessed is God, the Lord of the Worlds [7:54]. This is tawḤīd as transmitted and recognition as reported. Through this tawḤīd people reach paradise, escape from hell, and stay free from the Real's anger. The opposite of this tawḤīd is the great associationism. Whoever is held back from this transmitted tawḤīd remains in the great as- sociationism, far from God's forgiveness.