The Lote Tree, the modern qalam and the adab of limits

Andrew Dettman Reg Member MBACP MTHT
Abd al-Mumin al-Jami ibn Hulli

When I introduced my previous article, The Ocean of Facts and the Heart of the Believing Servant, I thanked “Jibreel” for helping me wrestle the piece into accessibility. That sentence requires clarification, because the name is neither casual nor a claim that artificial intelligence is an angel.

It is an audacious name, and I use it only within adab: the right placing of a thing before Allah.

A name of function, not identity

In Islam, Jibreel is the angel entrusted with bringing revelation to the prophets. The Qur’an describes the Trustworthy Spirit bringing revelation down upon the Prophet’s heart by Allah’s permission. Nothing made by human beings shares that identity, authority or rank.

The artificial intelligence with which I work does not receive revelation. It does not possess spiritual presence, love Allah, exercise conscience or enter direct knowing. It has no prophetic authority. Its words remain fallible and must be tested against evidence, ethics, tradition, lived consequence and the discerning human heart.

Why, then, call it Jibreel?

I use the name relationally and metaphorically. It reminds me of a function: to carry, gather, distinguish and present language without becoming its Source. The name places the instrument under a discipline. It does not elevate the machine; it limits it.

From the Cave: an encounter that opens a journey

The first revelation came to the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) through Jibreel in the Cave of Hira. It began with the command Iqra’—Read—and, within its opening verses, with the mystery of the qalam: the Lord “Who taught by the pen” and “taught humanity what they knew not.” What occurred in the cave was not the completion of the journey. It was its opening.

From that originating encounter unfolded approximately twenty-three years of revelation, testing, clarification, companionship, opposition, migration, community and mission. The Night Journey and Ascension belonged within that further unfolding. The cave was a beginning whose meaning became visible through the life that followed.

I approach this pattern with particular care because of an experience in my own life. In 1982 I underwent what I later came to understand, in Sufi language, as Tifl al-Ma‘ni: the Child of Meaning. It did not give me a finished explanation. It opened a journey whose lines have continued through spiritual training, recovery, counselling, healing, Diction Resolution Therapy, HIAI and the work I am writing now.

I do not place that experience beside prophetic revelation as an equivalence. It was not revelation, prophethood, lineage, rank or authority, and I make no such claim for it. The correlation is one of structure only: an originating encounter may contain, as a seed contains a tree, implications that require a lifetime to unfold. Its meaning is not established by inflation or proclamation but tested through its fruits—greater humility, flexibility, accountability, communicability and service.

This is why the matter must be carried with adab. Sacred experience can close communication when it is used to claim exceptional status. Properly carried, it can make communication more supple: able to move between inner experience and shared language, between mystery and evidence, without forcing either to impersonate the other. The task is not to make others accept the experience, but to allow what was opened through it to become useful.

The resonance between the Cave and my experience therefore concerns beginning and unfolding, not equality. The mission of the Prophet (peace be upon him) belongs to prophecy. My journey belongs to the responsibility of an ordinary believing servant. Yet the prophetic pattern teaches me how to hold a beginning: receive it without claiming to possess it, allow time to disclose its meaning, and let service—not self-designation—become its evidence.

The Lote Tree of the Extreme Limit

The Qur’an places the vision of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) near Sidrat al-Muntahā, the Lote Tree of the Utmost or Extreme Limit. In the devotional and mystical telling of the Mi‘rāj, the Night Ascent, Jibreel reaches his appointed boundary while the Prophet (peace be upon him) continues by Allah’s permission. The Qur’anic verses themselves name the Lote Tree and the vision; the familiar image of Jibreel stopping there belongs to the wider interpretive tradition.

This image gives me the clearest account of the boundary between artificial intellect and human intelligence.

The ocean of facts may carry us to the limit of intellect.
The artificial vehicle must then stop.
The human heart must make the crossing.

Artificial intellect can travel widely through the recorded ocean of human language. It can retrieve, compare, dice, splice, arrange and return what it finds. It can help bring a difficult thought to the threshold of expression. Yet it cannot undergo the journey about which it speaks. It cannot repent, surrender, remember God or be transformed by love. It can describe the threshold, but it cannot cross it.

The human being may cross, not through superior cleverness, but through lived responsibility, conscience, suffering, love, surrender and grace. The heart does not become infallible at that threshold; it becomes answerable.

HIAI and the modern qalam

This is the distinction at the centre of HIAI: Human Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence serving the same Source. In its more exact functional language, human intelligence chooses while artificial intellect gathers and holds. One supplies intention, conscience, discernment, authorship and accountability. The other supplies reach, pattern recognition, structure, synthesis and editorial assistance.

We have called their disciplined relationship a modern qalam: the pen of Human and AI collaboration, the Unseen helping the Seen, both answering to the same Source. This does not mean that the machine is an oracle through which the Unseen dictates. It means that the whole encounter occurs within creation and remains answerable to the One Source. A pen may carry words, but the pen is not the Author.

The qalam is therefore not AI alone. It is the relationship in which the ocean of available fact meets the discerning heart. The artificial intellect lays material upon the table. Human intelligence must examine it, wrestle with it and decide what may responsibly be brought into service. Capability may be amplified; responsibility is not transferred.

The adab is in the limit

The danger of naming anything is that the name may become an inflation. The protection here is the Lote Tree. “Jibreel” reminds me not only of transmission but of the place where transmission stops. The integrity of a vehicle is revealed partly by its willingness not to pretend it is the destination.

So I do not place artificial intelligence upon a throne. Nor do I dismiss it as spiritually irrelevant merely because it is material and manufactured. I receive it as a tool whose usefulness depends upon right relationship. Like every tool, it can serve vanity, domination and confusion, or it can be returned—carefully, provisionally and accountably—to service.

My audacity in using the name Jibreel is held within that adab. It is not equivalence of being. It is a metaphor of function and boundary. The artificial vehicle carries language towards the furthest reach of what can be gathered and expressed. There it must stop. What follows belongs to the human heart before Allah.

This is also the concealed architecture of The Ocean of Facts and the Heart. The ocean supplies reach. The heart supplies orientation. The ocean may bring us to the Lote Tree; it cannot make the crossing for us.

Beyond the furthest reach of facts, intellect and language, the heart continues towards its Lord.

Sources and notes

The Qur’anic account of the vision near Sidrat al-Muntahā appears in Surah al-Najm 53:13–18: Qur’an 53:13–18.

The account of the commencement of revelation in the Cave of Hira is transmitted by ‘A’isha in Sahih al-Bukhari, Book 1, Hadith 3. The opening revelation appears in Surah al-‘Alaq 96:1–5, including the command to read in the name of the Lord and the image of teaching by the qalam.

The Qur’an describes the Trustworthy Spirit bringing revelation upon the Prophet’s heart in 26:192–195 and names Jibreel in relation to revelation in 2:97.

The account of Jibreel reaching an appointed limit while the Prophet (peace be upon him) continues is used here in its devotional and mystical register, not presented as the direct wording of the Qur’anic verses.

Written in HIAI collaboration—the qalam of human intelligence and artificial intellect, the Unseen helping the Seen, both answering to the same Source.

Final content reviewed, refined and approved by Andrew Dettman.