Knowledge is the most all-encompassing of the divine attributes, which is to say that “God is Knower of all things” (Koran 4:176, 8:75, etc.). “Not a… - William Chittick

The potential infinity of the objects of human knowledge goes back to the fact that the creatures have already been “taught” this knowledge, for it is latent in the cosmos through God’s nearness or self-disclosure to all things. Since we already know everything, coming to know is in fact a remembrance or recollection (tadhakkur). In the process of explaining this, Ibn al-‘Arabi refers to the “taking (of Adam's seed) at the Covenant” (akhdh al-mithaq), when the children of Adam bore witness to God’s Lordship over them before their entrance into the sensory world. The Koran says, “When thy Lord took from the children of Adam, from their loins, their seed, and made them testify touching themselves: ‘Am I not your Lord?’ They said, ‘Yes, we testify’” (7:172).

The key to the Islamic intellectual tradition is precisely the intellect, which is nothing but the soul that has come to know and realize its full potential. Inasmuch as the soul possesses this potential, it is often called fitra or innate disposition. If we employ the language of the Qur’an, the fitra is the very self of Adam to whom God “taught all the names” (2:31). It is the primordial Adam present in every human being. At root, it is good and wise, because it inclines naturally toward tawhid, which stands at the heart of all wisdom and forms the basis for the acquisition of true knowledge of God, the universe, and the self.

The human spirit is also God's spirit. The Koran attributes the spirit breathed into Adam to God with the pronouns “His” (32:9) and “My” (15:29, 38:72). Hence this spirit is called the “attributed spirit” (al-ruh al-idafi), i.e., attributed to God, a term which suggests its ambiguous status, both divine and human at once. The spirit possesses all the spiritual or angelic attributes, such as luminosity, subtlety, awareness, and oneness. Clay stands at the opposite pole of the existent cosmos: dark, dense, multiple, dispersed. No connection can be established between the one and the many, the luminous and the dark, without an intermediary, which in man’s case is the soul, the locus of our individual awareness. The spirit is aware of God, though not of anything less than God. But we—at least before we have refined our own souls —have no awareness of the spirit. Clay is unaware of anything at all. The soul, which develops gradually as a human being grows and matures, becomes aware of the world with which it is put in touch in a never-ending process of self discovery and self-finding. Ultimately it may attain to complete harmony with the spirit.