What the Knowersof Allah have said about the Knowledge of Allah

The work presented here was originally written for delivery at a Mawlid celebration in Abidjan, Ivory Coa in 2011. It concerns ma¢rifat-Allah, the experiential knowledge of God, sometimes translated as gnosis or cognizance. Ma¢rifa is often considered the essence of the Sufi path, for it meant to aualize the la age of the Islamic religion: after al-islam (submission) and al-iman (faith) comes al-isan (excellence), "to worship God as if you are seeing Him, and if you are not seeing Him, know that He is seeing you."