Such ‘travelers’ are those who are near to Allah (muqarribun), referred to as the People of Allah (ahlullah). In other words, those who are mentioned in the verse,
“…Allah chooses for Himself whom He wills…” (Quran 42:13)
If we can comprehend the reality that the name ALLAH points to One body, not in the sense of a physical body, but in the sense that there isn’t a second being other than His Being, that His limitless, infinite Being encompasses all… And if we can understand that He hasn’t come about from something, and due to His infinite nature, no ‘other’ thing has come about from Him… Then it may become obvious that an Infinite One, has contemplated, evaluated, manifested and then made nonexistent the whole of creation in His ‘Knowledge’.
To put it another way, with His Knowledge and Power, a Limitless, Infinite One has created the worlds from nothing, and observed the reflections of His Names via the names of the creation, all at the level of knowledge!
These ‘forms of meanings’ in the Knowledge of the One, obtain their form from His existence, by manifesting the properties of His Names, at His discretion. And it is He yet again, who observes these meanings.
A Being that encompasses all beings…
A cosmos that exists at the level of knowledge…
To give an example: Let us create a world in our imagination. Let us imagine all the different types of people living in this world… Despite how real it may feel to us, it is a world created from nothing in our imagination; it has no real substantial existence independent of our existence; it is eventually ‘nonexistent’.
As such, all of the universes and all the dimensions and life forms that they contain exist in His Knowledge, depend on His existence, and are fundamentally nonexistent!
Comprehending this immense reality will enable us to see a remarkable truth. That is, Allah with the properties of the name ‘The Possessor of Absolute Will’ (Mureed), has willed to create appropriate forms for the meanings to be manifested and observed. And these forms willingly conformed and accepted this duty.
Let us now go back to the Universe we created in our imagination. We imagined and populated a world with different individuals, equipping unique skills and capabilities to them. As such, these individuals, in our imagination, manifest their essence based on the skills they have been given. Can we say then, that these individuals have their own independent will, with which they choose to govern their actions?
Or is it more correct to say, these imaginary individuals are projecting the innate characteristics that we have assigned to them? Let us suppose that one of these individuals commit murder and kill another individual, whereby a third person who witnesses this scene says “So and so has killed so and so”. But all of this is happening at the level of our knowledge, in our thoughts and imagination. We are writing the script and ordaining their roles, and they are playing it out. So how can we say “So and so has killed so and so with his own independent free will and choice”? Saying this would entail the assumption that ‘all’ individuals have a free will, and render obsolete the Will of the One. The declaration of a free will alongside the Will of the One will implicitly fragment and lessen His Absolute Will.