At the station of servanthood, a servant must seek only to fulfil the will of his Lord. He reaches this station when he has no will of his own, but becomes a complete locus for the manifestation of God’s will: the servant’s every desire is then the will and decree of the Creator of all existence. He wills nothing except what God wills.
In the order of creation, all beings are subject to the absolute will of the incomparable Creator. But when beings are granted free will and the capacity to choose, they must show that they are God’s servants. To attain true servanthood is to understand that a servant’s freedom of choice rests upon the Creator’s will. When a person rises above their own will and entrusts their choice to the One whose will is absolute, they truly become God’s servant. In other words, they demonstrate their servanthood freely by observing all the divine laws that apply to them.
The ultimate end of servanthood is for the servant to understand that they were created from nothing, and that without the continuous exercise of the Lord’s sustaining will over them, they would again be “nothing.” At every moment, this “nothing” becomes “something” by His will. The will, desire and choice of every creature, at every station, were once “nothing”; by Allah’s decree, the will and choice of creatures came to be. If Allah’s sustaining care over their will and choice were not continuous, the creature’s will and choice would become “zero and nothing.”
However, the hadith «عبدی أطعنی أجعلک مثلی» is weak and unreliable in terms of its chain of transmission, and its wording has shortcomings. The structure of the transmitted text suggests that, even if the report were accepted, it has plainly been abridged, miscopied and left incomplete; its wording cannot be that of the original hadith qudsi. It is also clear that the transmitter’s own understanding influenced the way it was reported.
In any case, when Allah’s will sustains a servant’s life, He raises that servant to a state of deathlessness; He does not bring them to the station of divinity—God Most High forbid. Moreover, their deathlessness continues only so long as God’s will sustains it.
There is no doubt that if a unique reality had a likeness, it would cease to be unique, since uniqueness means having no equal or counterpart.
Put loosely, through obedience a servant of God reaches a degree at which the Creator makes them a locus for the manifestation of His Most Beautiful Names, such as the names al-Hayy and al-Ghani.