ash-shuhūd (oneness of appearance). According to this doctrine, the experience of unity between God and creation is purely subjective and occurs only in the mind of the Sufi who has reached the state of fana' fi Allah (to forget about everything except Almighty Allah). Sirhindi considered wahdat ash-shuhūd to be superior to wahdat al-wujūd (oneness of being), which he understood to be a preliminary step on the way to the Absolute Truth. Despite this, Sirhindi still used Ibn al-'Arabi's vocabulary without hesitation. Sirhindi writes: I wonder that Shaykh Muhyī 'l-Dīn appears in vision to be one of those with whom God is pleased, while most of his ideas which differ from the doctrines of the People of truth appear to be wrong and mistaken. It seems that since they are due to error in kashf, he has been forgiven... I consider him as one of those with whom God is well-pleased; on the other hand, I believe that all his ideas in which he opposes (the people of truth) are wrong and harmful. On the other hand, William C. Chittick, a prominent Ibn 'Arabi scholar, writes: When Sirhindī explains the meaning of waḥdat al-wujūd, he demonstrates little acquaintance with the writings of Ibn ʿArabī or his major followers. By insisting that it was an inadequate expression of the nature of things and that it needed to be supplanted by waḥdat al-shuhūd, he was taking for granted that it was the teaching of Ibn ʿArabī and that wujūd was being used in the philosophical sense. He seemed not to recognize that Ibn ʿArabī used it to mean “finding” and “witnessing” as well as “being” and “existence.” So, at least partly because Sirhindī was oblivious to the meaning of wujūd as finding and perceiving, he felt it necessary to insist that seeing God in all things goes back to the viewer. The unity achieved on the path to God, he claimed, is that of shuhūd, not that of wujūd. But, for Ibn ʿArabī and many of his followers these two words meant the same thing. So Sirhindī not only ascribes a doctrine to Ibn ʿArabī that he does not profess—waḥdat al-wujūd—but he also understands wujūd in a way that is not compatible with Ibn ʿArabī’s use of the word. Reality of the Quran and Ka'ba versus the reality of Muhammad Sirhindi had originally declared the reality of the Quran (haqiqat-i quran) and