“Behold I set before you this day a blessing and a curse.”45 Is it inconsistent that such words should be spoken by an omnipresent God? By no means. An infusion of God’s essence into the soul of man carries no imputation of passivity or impotence. Quite the reverse, if human fulfillment is assimilation to God and if the drives that bring a man to fulfillment are implanted by God, then the fostering by God of those drives and the realization of the potentials they represent will make a man more perfect, more himself. This is the meaning, Ibn Tufayl tells us, of the dictum accepted by Muslim,
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