Wilson Chacko Jacob’s moving monograph on the life of a single figure profoundly problematizes notions of life at the intersection of history, philosophy, anthropology, and religious studies. At the broadest level, the book allows us to grapple with the following question: How might we study a historical life to reflect on the remainder of history? I centre my response to Jacob’s book on this question not to valorize resistance qua resistance but to think about the conceptual and methodological issues concerning the remainder of finitude as a perpetual sign of plenitude. What becomes of ethics and politics — what happens to notions of linear time and modern territoriality — when we consider seriously historical claims about the transcendental origin of history’s remainders? Perhaps you can already sense in my words a certain conceptual resonance between life and sovereignty, the latter being the fantastical aspiration to transcend the limitations that finitude imposes on biological and historical life. Jacob contextualizes the life of a single actor, the Muslim nobleman, moral theologian, and mystical aspirant Sayyid Fadl (ca. 1824-1900). We encounter him in For God or Empire on competing stages of absolute authority: Islamic sovereignty, on one side, and modern sovereignty, on the other. In one sense, formations of the latter, such as the British empire, constricted Sayyid Fadl’s life. Yet, in another sense, something of Islamic sovereignty, particularly sayyid sovereignty, survived in his worldly movements and spiritual strivings. This is so because Sayyid Fadl conceived of his life as a manifestation of the Living, the absolute origin and source of plenitude and perfection. I explain below how Jacob relates this theological view to the Sufi idea of “unity of life” (also known as “unity of being” or wahdat al-wujud). This essay is an attempt on my part to flesh out the conceptual nodes of Jacob’s argument, which is to say that it is an elaboration of life, sovereignty, and survival. I also find it important to draw your attention to Jacob’s productive mode of analysis. To that end, the final section highlights some key elements of his “methodology of the glimpse.” At the outset, let me note that Jacob’s invocation of the ideas of the Andalusian mystic Ibn ‘Arabi (1165-1240), in both the book’s argument and methodology, informs my own attention to Ibn ‘Arabi in the following analyses. To appreciate Jacob’s argument about life, sovereignty, and survival, let us briefly encounter, perhaps imagine, Sayyid Fadl’s world. What sources allow us access to this world? This question is a bit problematic since it runs the risk of overlooking Jacob’s careful and creative logic of selection. I would like to suggest that the way Jacob identifies and deploys his sources itself reflects how life, sovereignty, and survival have been conceptualized in his archive. There are, of course, obvious sites of inscription where information about a life is found: archival records, personal diaries and correspondence, books, periodicals, and other print materials, spatial and institutional traces such as tombstones and mausolea, and Internet content such as YouTube videos. While Jacob draws on these sundry sources, his archive also demands an expansion of what counts as “source” in the discipline of history. In other words, to interpret Sayyid Fadl’s intellectual and political activities on his own terms requires less the rigour of modalities of reason, such as grammar and discipline, and more an openness to “intuition, instinct, [and] faith” (8). This close attention to the heterogeneity of life, and living “sources” of history, speaks to one of Jacob’s methodological impulses: “One cannot do a global history of the Indian Ocean without better histories of …