‘Allah has Seventy Thousand Veils of Light and Darkness; if He were to remove them, the radiant splendours of His Face would burn up whoever (or ‘whatever creature’) was reached by His Gaze.’- Holy Prophet Muhammad (sa), the tradition is cited from Imam Al Ghazzali's Mishkat Al Anwar, p. 157].
‘My Lord, grant me complete severance of
my relations with everything else and total submission to You. Enlighten the
eyes of our hearts with the light of their looking at You to the extent that
they penetrate the Veils of Light and reach the Source of Grandeur, and let
our souls get suspended by the glory of Your sanctity.’
[Duah of Hazrat Ali (ra)]
'Inna lillahi la-sabina alfa hijabin min nurin wa zulmatin'
The number, 70,000, varies
in different versions, and is not by way of definite enumeration, but rather to
denote some indefinitely great quantity. There are three classes of men who are
veiled from the ineffably glorious Light of God:
(1) Those veiled by
Pure Darkness;
(2) Those veiled by mixed Darkness and Light; and
(3) Those veiled by
Pure Light.
In each class there are
numerous sub-divisions. (When we take account of all these, we may well speak
of 70,000 veils.)
Those veiled by Pure Darkness are such as are atheists, or such as take something else, which is not God, for God.
For example, they take Nature, or Self for God. But there are numerous
varieties of such men: the sort of men that confess with their tongues the Creed of Islam, but are probably urged to it by fear alone, or the desire to
beg from the Muslims, or to curry favour with them, or to get financial or other
assistance out of them, and so on.
If the Creed fails to impel them to good works, it will not secure their elevation from the dark sphere to Light. Rather are their patron-saints devils, who lead them from the light into the darkness.
(2) Those veiled by Mixed Light
and Darkness may be:
(1) Those veiled by the
darkness of the Senses; they are above those who worship the Self, but they give
God's attributes of Majesty and Beauty to sense-perceived bodies, or to Nature,
or the force/s of nature.
(2) Those veiled by mixed Light and Darkness of the imagination; they have got above the senses, but they allow their imagination to govern their ideas of God, Who is above anything that the imagination of man can conceive; and
(3) those veiled by
Light Divine, mixed with the darkness of Intelligence; they fall into
anthropomorphism in their ideas of God (and fail to perceive that the Soul is
above the intellect).
Those veiled by Pure Light are those who have perceived spiritual truths up to a certain point, but whose eyes have been so dazzled by the light itself that there is a Veil between them and the Light. But these are only the Few of the Few whom "the splendours of the Sublime Countenance consume," and the majesty of the Divine Splendour wipes out, so that they cannot go any further, and are ultimately destroyed.
Man takes in the information brought by (1) the senses; (2) the imaginative spirit, which records the information conveyed by the senses and presents it to the intelligential spirit above it, when required; (3) the transcendental prophetic spirit, which is possessed by the Prophets and the Revivers of faith; by it the unseen tables and statutes of the Law are revealed from the other world, together with several of the sciences of the Realms [Celestial and Terrestrial], and pre-eminently Theology, the science of Deity, which the intelligential and discursive (wandering) spirits cannot compass.
All of these are Lights, for it is through
them that every kind of existing thing is manifested, including objects of
sense or imagination.
Therefore, darkness as well as light can both be dangerous in our quest for God alone. Man sometimes concentrates to attain the light rather than God alone- in His pure essence. Allah is Light [Nur], yes, beyond the Veils of light. If one gets tangled in the veils, believing them to be the Light itself (i.e., Allah), then, they go to their loss, but if they strive to achieve Allah, it is Allah Himself Who will remove the veils and let the particle of His own essence [i.e., the pure Divine essence found in the human soul] to reunite to Him.
So, Mr. Abdul Nazir Qureshi Sahib, hope you understand my explanation and you got the reply of your question, Jazak-Allah Khair.