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

To be human is to be born with the fitra, which is an innate recognition of tawhid that is represented mythically by the Covenant of Alast and the Trust. There is nothing extraneous or superadded about this fitra—it is precisely what makes people human. But the fitra tends to become obscured by upbringing and circumstances, and then people become less than human. They are "deaf, dumb, blind—like the cattle; no, even further astray." Dhikr is the all-important remedy that makes possible the actualization of the fitra. Dhikr is both God's merciful response to heedlessness, and the human response to God's mercy.

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.