ABSTRACT
The cryptic response of the Muslim sage reveals, when deconstructed, the existence in the Islamic tradition of a whole world of meaning beyond the formal profession of belief in God and external submission to God’s laws. The creation of human beings took place not merely that they should affirm the existence of a Creator and bow down to His laws through various rites and rituals: God is not merely a principle that is to be accepted, or a giver of laws who is to be obeyed. While the God of the Koran is infinite, absolute, theoretically unfathomable and ultimately unreachable in the very real sense of those terms, He can be understood through His creation and, more importantly, His reality can be gradually ‘uncovered’ by man, who is able to approach God and become ever more aware of what He is simply by virtue of the fact that he is created
in imago Dei, or in the image of God. In the cosmology of the Koran, man is the reflection whose purpose in life is to perceive and understand the Reflected.
