The Shaykhs who prefer wealth to poverty do not use the term “wealth” in its popular sense. What they intend is not “acquisition of a benefit” but “acquisition of the Benefactor”; to gain union (with God) is a different thing from gaining forgetfulness (of God). Shaykh Abú Sa`íd[28]—God have mercy on him!—says: “Poverty is wealth in God” (_al-faqr huwa ´l-ghiná billáh_), i.e. everlasting revelation of the Truth. I answer to this, that revelation (_mukáshafat_) implies the possibility of a veil (_ḥijáb_); therefore, if the person who enjoys revelation is veiled from revelation by the attribute of wealth, he either becomes in need of revelation or he does not; if he does not, the conclusion is absurd, and if he does, need is incompatible with wealth; therefore that term cannot stand. Besides, no one has “wealth in God” unless his attributes are permanent and his object is invariable; wealth cannot coincide with the subsistence of an object or with the affirmation of the attributes of human nature, inasmuch as the essential characteristics of mortality and phenomenal being are need and indigence. One whose attributes still survive is not rich, and one whose attributes are annihilated is not entitled to any name whatever. Therefore “the rich man is he who is enriched by God” (_al-ghaní man aghnáhu ´lláh_), because the term “rich in God” refers to the agent (_fá`il_), whereas the term “enriched by God” denotes the person acted upon (_maf`úl_); the former is self-subsistent, but the latter subsists through the agent; accordingly self-subsistence is an attribute of human nature, while subsistence through God involves the annihilation of attributes. I, then, who am `Alí b. `Uthmán al-Jullábí, assert that true wealth is incompatible with the survival (_baqá_) of any attribute, since human attributes have already been shown to be defective and subject to decay; nor, again, does wealth consist in the annihilation of these attributes, because a name cannot be given to an attribute that no longer exists, and he whose attributes are annihilated cannot be called either “poor” or “rich”; therefore the attribute of wealth is not transferable from God to Man, and the attribute of poverty is not transferable from Man to God. Footnote 28: See Chapter XII, No. 5.