Kashf al-Maḥjūb (Persian Critical Edition)

...and the disciples have ceased their spiritual struggle mujahada striving against the self, and have named their own defective conjectures 'witnessing'. Before this, I compiled books on this meaning, but the whole was wasted. The false pretenders snatched some of the speech to hunt the people, and they washed away and made unstable the rest, because the person of [low] nature has a capital of envy and denial of God’s bounty. Another group sat, but they did not read, and another group read, but did not know the meaning and chose its expression, so that they might write and memorize and say: 'We speak the science of Sufism and gnosis.' But they are in the midst of ignorance. All of this was because these meanings are 'red sulfur' alchemical term for something extremely rare and precious, and it is dear. When they find it, it is alchemy, and a single grain of it turns much copper and brass into red gold. In sum, everyone seeks the medicine that matches their pain, and they do not want anything else. Just as one of the great poets says:

To someone whose illness requires the simplest of things, pearls and corals are not needed, so that they might mix it with balsam and musk medicine. This meaning is dearer than that everyone should have a share of it. Before this, the ignorant of this science did the same to the books of the masters. When those treasures of God's secrets fell into their hands, they did not know their meaning and threw them into the hands of ignorant hat-makers and gave them to impure bookbinders, so that they made them the linings of hats and the bindings of the poetry collections of Abu Nuwas and the jokes of al-Jahiz. Inevitably, when a royal falcon sits on the wall of an old woman's house, they clip its wings. God, Mighty and Majestic, has brought us into a time where its people have named desire 'Sharia', and the pursuit of status, leadership, and arrogance 'honor and knowledge', and the showing off to people 'piety', and keeping hatred in the heart 'gentleness', and arguing 'debate and warfare', and foolishness 'greatness', and hypocrisy...