However, thanks to their belief, the Companions did not waver in the face of the attacks of the entire world of unbelief and of the Christians, Jews, and philosophers. And how can you compare the intense fear of God of the Companions and their complete righteousness, which demonstrated the strength of their belief and proceeded from it, and your dull belief, which due to your extreme weak­ness does not impel you to perform even the obliga­tory practices properly, O you who make such a claim!? However, the Hadith the meaning of which is: "Those people at the end of time who do not see me yet believe, are more acceptable,"^[16] refers to par­ticular virtues. It concerns certain special individu­als. Our discussion, however, is in regard to general virtue and the majority.

SECOND QUESTION: They say that the saints and possessors of perfection abandoned the world. It even says in a Hadith: "Love of this world is the source of all error."^[17] Whereas the Companions were very involved in the world. Let alone abandoning it, some of them were more advanced than the civilized people of the time, even. How is it that you say that even the least of such Companions was of greater worth than the greatest saint?

The Answer: It has been proved decisively in the Second and Third Stopping-Places of the Thirty-Second Word that to love the face of the world which looks to the hereafter and the face that looks to the divine names is not the cause of loss, but the means to perfection and attainment, and however far one goes in those two faces, the further one goes in worship and knowledge of God. The Companions' world was in those two faces. They saw this world as the arable field of the hereafter, and sowed and reaped it. They saw beings as mirrors of the divine names, and gazed on them yearningly. As for the world's ephemerality, it is its transitory face and looks to man's base desires.

THIRD QUESTION: The Sufi paths are the ways of reality. Some of the heroes and leaders of the Naqshbandi Order, which is claimed to be the most famous, the most elevated, and the highway among Sufi ways, defined its basis as follows. They said: "On the Naqshbandi way four 'abandonings' are necessary: abandoning the world, abandoning the hereafter, abandoning existence, and abandon­ing abandoning." That is to say, on the Naqshi way one has to give up four things: both give up this world; and, on account of the soul, not make even the hereafter one's true aim; forget one's existence; and in order not to become vain and proud, not think about these acts of renunciation. This means that true knowledge of God and human perfections are attained through giving up what is other than God?
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[16]Musnad, v, 248, 257, 264; al-Hakim, al-Musladrak, iii, 41; iv. 89.
[17]al-Munawi, Fayd al-Qadlr, iii, 368, No: 3662.