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of Truth, and by Truth are we created.’ Quoth the prince, ‘I apprehend that which thou hast said on the subject of the Creator and accept this from thee with understanding; but I hear thee say that He created the world by His Word of Truth. Now Truth is the opposite of Falsehood; whence then arose Falsehood and its opposition unto Truth, and how comes it to be possible that it should be confounded therewith and be obscure[1] to human beings, so that they need to distinguish between them? And doth the Creator (to whom belong might and majesty!) love Falsehood or hate it? If thou say He loves the Truth and by it created all things and hates Falsehood, how came the latter, which the Creator hates, to invade the Truth, which He loves?’ Quoth Shimas, ‘Verily God the Most High created man after His own image and likened him to Himself, all of him truth, without falsehood; then He gave him dominion over himself and ordered him and forbade him, and it was man who transgressed His commandment and erred in his disobedience and brought falsehood upon himself of his own will. When God created man with Truth, he had no need of repentance, till Falsehood invaded the Truth by which he was created, by means of the ableness[2] that God had placed in him, being the will and the inclination called acquisitiveness.[3] When Falsehood invaded Truth on this wise, it became confounded therewith, by reason of the will of man and his ableness and acquisitiveness, which is the voluntary part, together with the weakness of human nature: where-
- ↑ Or doubtful.
- ↑ Or capability (istitäah).
- ↑ Or [the lust of] gain. This is the common meaning of the word kesb, but the scholastic writers of the Arabs use it to express the act by which a man seeks to win advantage or avert ill from himself. The Arab casuist of the present tale evidently intended to formulate the Christian dogma of freewill, although his meaning is much obscured by the imperfection of his expression and (in all probability, also) by his defective apprehension of the knotty point of doctrine involved.
