Creation is God's longing to be known — 'I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be known'
This saying reframes the reason anything exists at all: not divine need, but a kind of longing that made an otherwise hidden God want to be recognized through the mirror of creation.
This hadith qudsi, treated by the Sufi tradition as divine speech transmitted through the Prophet rather than the Prophet's own words, gives creation a motive that is neither necessity nor obligation but something closer to desire: a hidden treasure wanting to be known. Ibn Arabi returns to it constantly across the Fusus al-Hikam, using it to argue that every existent thing exists in order to actualize and display some facet of the divine names that would otherwise remain purely potential and unseen. On this reading, the cosmos is less an object God finished making than an ongoing act of self-disclosure, with each creature a fresh angle from which the hidden treasure becomes visible. It supplies the emotional register — longing, love, the wish to be recognized — that runs underneath Ibn Arabi's otherwise highly technical metaphysics of Being.
I was a Hidden Treasure and I loved to be known, so I created the creatures that they might know Me.
Hadith scholars have long noted this saying lacks a sound chain of transmission in the classical hadith collections; its authority in Sufism rests on its extensive use by Ibn Arabi rather than on hadith-critical grounds.
Hadith Qudsi
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- What Sufism says about longing and separation
A saying the Sufis treat as divine speech gives creation a motive rather than a mechanism: a hidden treasure that wanted to be known. On that reading, longing did not begin with us.