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In a sense, the consuming challenge of the Prophet, indeed of any authentic tutor, is to embody the suffering paradox uniting the gift of autonomy with the gift of guidance. Here’s Brown, again: ‘ “Would to God that all the Lord’s people were Prophets” – that agonized cry of Moses at the beginning of the prophetic tradition and repeated by Blake toward its close. It would be wrong to imply that Islam has resolved the tension between the authority of the past and authenticity of present experience, between individual autonomy and authoritative guidance: indeed these issues sustain the ever-living tension between Sunni and Sufi, between Sunni and Shiite, between sharia (Law) and tariqah (spiritual way). Islam is the boldest attempt to affirm both poles of this dilemma inherent in the prophetic tradition, to remain radically open to visionary experience. Ghazali, the supreme theologian of Islamic consensus, recognizes a universal call to prophecy, each according to his ability; prophetic authority can only be recognized by a touch of the prophetic spirit (‘spiritus per spiritum intellegitur’). For the supreme Sufi poet Rumi there is an angelic Christos in all of us, waiting to be born – “Nothing can be accomplished without pain as the guide. The body is like our Lady Mariam (on whom be peace), for everyone of us has a Jesus within himself who without pain will never be born, but will return whence he came us, by the same secret pathway, leaving us bereft.” New Nazareths in us’, and a transfiguration requiring of us, as the grounded Mr. Critchley avers, “the acceptance of necessity and the affirmation of the moving constraint of our mortality.”