The Book of Humanity

The soul is a parable of God. 1 The living universe knows neither age nor time. 2 He is present everywhere, like an unseen heaven that extends over all things, whether that which can be seen or unseen. 3, 4 The source of all absolute perfection is the soul of the universe. The source of all eternal beauty is in Him. The source of all absolute knowledge is He. The source of all secrets of power is He. 5 The Kingdom, the Word, and all things are in Him. Most holy is He beyond all that is worshiped, for He is the king of the universe and the light of all space. He is the creator of the universe. He is the unseen heaven of God who greatly extends over all things, pure beyond attributes or names, He is the one, eternal and everlasting.

He is the Creator of the whole universe. 6 Most holy is He beyond all speech and word, for He shall not be known forever and ever. 7

Man beseeches unto the heaven of God the most gracious, to bestow grace upon man by thy mercy most glorious, so that he will know the light of thy face most beautiful. 8, 9 He is the God of the universe. 10

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Footnotes:

1 ‘Kiasan’ refers more broadly to figures of speech, parable is a form of figure of speech but the contextually closest term.

2 ‘The life of the universe’ is more literally appropriate; secretary and translator of Sama’u’llah, Taj-ud-din Chawdhuri, specifically translated this as ‘living universe’ which shifts the sentence slightly although it is not the standard reading. Most departures from Taj-ud-din are strictly wording choices or grammatical choices rather than genuinely interpretive, and as such, this rare interpretive choice has been retained.

3 ‘It’ and ‘He’ are actually the same term in the original text; the English differentiation is used for the progressive personification of universal consciousness.

4 The ‘Unseen Heaven’ is a mystical Islamic concept which predates the text, referring to the spiritual dimensions of reality.

5 ‘Is He’ is implied grammar from the previous sentence which may be more acceptable in Indonesian but considered fragmentary in English.

6 Creator is capitalized here despite not being capitalized in Indonesian for the fact that sang as a term in English is nonexistent, representing a dramatic form of the word ‘the’. Thus, Creator has been capitalized here to retain dramatization.

7 ‘For’ added for English readability and sentence competion; word not strictly present in Indonesian.

8 ‘To’ has been added for English readability; word not strictly present in Indonesian.

9 ‘Man’ is a deeply theologically loaded word, referring to the Islamic idea of Insan-e-Kamil, the ‘Perfect Human’. Holy figures such as saints are those who have purified themselves to become Insan-e-Kamil. The Book of Man is called such because it is written by al-Insan, ‘the Man’, which while sounding humble is thus actually a significant theological claim, meaning that this text is both by and for Insan-e-Kamil, giving humans (Insan) a pathway to become Perfect Beings. Note: Insan is not a gendered word, ‘man’ is hence referred to archaically here as referring to all humanity.

10 ‘Allah’ here is rendered literally as ‘the God’, as God is referred to as being pure beyond names, which appears flattened in English, which has been left as-is on account of the flattening being the point — the original text talks at length about Tuhan, the Indonesian term for God, refers to God as being beyond names, and in this instance uses Allah, the Arabic word for God, showing that whether God is referred to as Tuhan or Allah, it is the same being.