The metaphysical reality that creation was an emanation, an overflow, of God’s perfection, growing darker and less real the further it extended from Him; that human souls were caught too far out in this tide and yearned for the divine shore, traced its roots to Plato and a later mystical interpreter of his philosophy in Rome, the influential third-century philosopher Plotinus. Such awareness led some Muslim mystics to acknowledge that truth lay embedded in other religions, even if they had gone egregiously astray. The
