The verse of Alast continues by explaining God's purpose in calling everyone to witness: ""Lest you say on the Day of Resurrection, "As for us, we we… - William Chittick

In short, already in the Koran and the Hadith, we find the idea that human beings are created with an innate capacity that allows them to understand things as they really are, but this capacity is clouded by the human environment. The function of the prophets is to “remind” (dhikr) people of what they already know, while the duty of human beings is simply to “remember” (dhikr). Having remembered, they return to the innate capacity from which they have never really become separate.’ If the human spirit knows God and affirms tawhid at the moment of its creation, this is because this spirit is not completely separate from God. In describing the creation of human beings, the Koran says that God molded Adam’s clay with his own two hands, then blew into him of his own spirit. The spirit is God’s breath, and Muslim thinkers were well aware of the implications of the metaphor. Breath is different from the breather; yet it is also the same, since a person without breath is a corpse. The divine breath that animates human clay is not identical with God, nor is it completely different. Human beings are near to God through their spirits, but they are far from him through their bodies made out of clay. The qualities of spirit and body lie at opposite extremes. The spirit is perfect, luminous, alive, rational, aware, intelligent, powerful, desiring, speaking; in short, it possesses all the attributes of God. But the body displays none of these qualities to any perceptible degree. It is merely earth and water, which represent the lowest of created things. When God blows the spirit into clay, this gives rise to the soul or self (nafs), which is an intermediate reality that possesses qualities of both sides. Hence the soul—which is the level of ordinary awareness—lies between light and darkness, perfection and imperfection, intelligence and ignorance, rationality and irrationality, awareness and unawareness, power and weakness. Within the soul, the innate capacity is represented by the luminous qualities of the spirit that are only dimly present. Actualizing the innate capacity in its fullest measure is seen as the goal of human existence. The soul must be transmuted such that its darkness becomes fully infused with spiritual light.

To the extent that people fail to actualize their fitra, they remain ignorant of who they are and what the cosmos is. To the degree that they are able to actualize their fitra, they come to understand things in their principles, or in their roots and realities. In other words, they grasp things as they are related to God or as they are known to God. They do not remain staring at phenomena and appearances. Rather, they see with God-given insight into the real names of things. These names subsist eternally in the divine intelligence, which is the spirit that God blew into Adam after having molded his body from clay.

If dhikr represents both the function of the prophets and the proper human response to the prophets, guidance (huda) represents the divine attribute that is embodied in the prophets. It sums up in a single word both God's motivation for sending the prophets and their activity in the world. If the opposite of dhikr is forgetfulness and heedlessness, the opposite of guidance is misguidance (idlal) and leading astray (ighwa). Just as the prophets incarnate God's guidance, so also the satans incarnate the quality of misguidance and error...Besides Satan, others are also said to be the source of misguidance. Among these is caprice, which we have already met as the worst of all false gods: "Follow not caprice, lest it misguide you from the path of God" (38:26).