Direct references to the other two presentations will not be found
though the participants from the Judeo-Christian tradition would,
perhaps, recognize the same spirit energizing the Islamic discourse and
a familiar worldview informing the Islamic mode of expression.
I find myself in complete agreement with Mr. Safi in avoiding "a
naïve protestant reading" and to look at the question through the
"interpretive communities" that have gone before us. Our approach should
be focused on bringing out what Islam has thought of itself in terms of
Love. By "Islam," we mean the great texts that have been universally
acknowledged (until recent times) as the highpoints of the tradition.
Like any great religion, Islam has its towering landmarks, and it is
from these that one should seek to understand it. Such texts are rooted
in the Qur'an. In a very deep sense, Islam is the Qur'an, and the Qur'an
is Islam. The basic interpretation of the Qur'an is provided by Muhammad
himself. Following in his wake, numerous great figures—sages,
saints, philosophers, theologians, jurists—have elucidated and
interpreted the nature of the original vision in keeping with the needs
of their times. While looking at any intellectual or theological
question related to a tradition one should try to pry open the door to
the universe of discourse of that particular tradition. I am personally
not interested in evaluating Islam from within those dominant
perspectives of modern scholarship that make various contemporary modes
of self-understanding the basis for judging the subject. Instead, I
would prefer to portray Islam from the perspective of those great
Muslims of the past who established the major modes of Qur'anic
interpretation and Islamic understanding. This is what Safi has
successfully done.
This is not to say that one should simply translate passages from the
classical texts in the manner of an anthology. Along with presenting the
texts themselves, we have to try to step backward from the texts and
delve into the point of view that informs them.
From about the thirteenth century onward, few themes play as
important a role in Sufi teachings as love. Historians have commonly
spoken of a gradual development of Sufism that begins in a mysticism of
asceticism and fear, slowly changes to an emphasis on love and devotion,
and then turns to stressing knowledge and gnosis. Some have suggested
that these three ways of approaching God correspond with the three basic
Hindu paths—karma yoga, bhakti yoga, and jnana yoga. Whatever the
heuristic value of such schemes, there can be no doubt that from
earliest times Muslims who strove to gain nearness to God did so through
activity, love, and knowledge. Any close reading of the Qur'an will make
clear that it prefigures the diverse possibilities of the soul's
unfolding. And any close reading of Sufi literature will reveal
sophisticated insights into the soul's complexity at every period.
It might be argued that Islam is built on karma yoga, since everyone
without exception must observe the Shari'ah, which sets down the path of
conforming to God's will through activity. One can also argue that
Muslims and Sufis stress jnana yoga, because, generally speaking, they
place a higher value on knowledge than do Jews or Christians.
Nonetheless, Sufism gives a certain pride of place to love. Especially
in later times, when ihsan comes to be discussed as one of
Islam's three dimensions,[1]
love is placed at center stage and one of the words that is most closely
connected to everything implied by ihsan is hubb (love).
The question that gains importance, then, is in one word, what is the
right attitude of the human being toward God? The answer is Love. But
this is too much of a summary answer. Islam has a rich tradition going
back to the earliest times wherein "interpretive communities" have
responded to this question. One of these explications i.e. the path
of love has been explored by our learned presenter. In what follows,
a few brief suggestions are gathered elucidating the significance of
love as expressed in the two great watersheds of the tradition, Rumi and
Ibn 'Arabi. There is no suggestion here that either neglected the paths
of knowledge and activity, and indeed, in the case of Ibn 'Arabi, a
strong argument can be made that he gave priority to knowledge.[2] It is only an attempt to bring
out the basic Sufi understanding of love's reality, given that love is
so often the central concern of the Sufi texts. The point is often
obscured by the fact that the expressions of this central concern take
on different forms that defy a neat categorization and do not often fit
into a single "typology". Some of these, moreover, transcend the usual
dichotomies of sobriety and drunkenness. Although sobriety represents
the highest stage of the Sufi path, this does not imply that the sober
are no longer drunk. What it means is that the true Sufi, having
realized fully the pattern and model established by the Prophet, is
inwardly drunk with God and outwardly sober with the world. Of course,
the joy of intoxication may occasionally appear outwardly, but the
sobriety of discernment remains a necessary concomitant of faith. The
world is the domain of doing what is right and proper, and this needs to
be established in terms of a clear distinction between do's and don'ts.
Observing the necessary distinctions demands sober awareness of our
actual situation in the world and society. Inwardly, however, those who
have reached sobriety after drunkenness revel in the intimacy of living
with God.
Intoxication is the fruit of finding God. The Sufis commonly express
the quest for God in the language of love, the most intense and profound
of human experiences. In employing this language, they are following not
only the realities of human nature, but also explicit Qur'anic verses
and hadiths. Especially significant is this verse: "Say [0
Muhammad!]: "If you love God, follow me, and then God will love
you"(3:3I). There is hardly any verse in the Qur'an more important for
specifying the rationale for Islamic and Sufi praxis. Why is it that
Muslims strive so hard to follow the Prophet's Sunnah? The simple answer
is that they love God and God has commanded them to follow Muhammad so
that God may come to love them.
In a typical Sufi reading of this verse, love for God drives the
seeker to search for the mutuality of love, which is to say that the
lover wants to be loved by his Beloved and to taste the wine of his
Beloved's embrace. No lover is satisfied short of reciprocity. The verse
tells us that the only way to show that you love God is to adopt the
sobriety of Muhammad, and this means that you must follow his practices,
that is, the Sunnah, which is codified in the Shari'ah. If you can
sincerely follow Muhammad, that will make you worthy of God's love and
open you up to the intoxication of His presence.
Once the seekers love God, they will be loved by Him in return. God's
love may then intoxicate them and annihilate all their human failings
and limitations. It may drive away the darkness of temporality and
contingency, leaving in its place the radiance of God's own eternal
being. Note here that the hadith says, "When I love him, I am his
hearing with which he hears." As some Sufis have pointed out, the words
I am alert us to the fact that God is already our hearing with which we
hear, our sight with which we see, and our hand with which we grasp. The
problem is not God's nearness to us, because He is eternally near to us
and closer than our jugular vein. The problem is our nearness to God,
which we cannot see and cannot fathom. The seeing of God's nearness has
to be achieved, and the way to do so is to devote oneself to the
prophetic model. Although we do not see Him now, we can achieve the
seeing of Him if we worship and serve Him as if we see Him.
Although love is rarely emphasized in the earliest expressions of
Sufism, the Qur'an speaks of love in a number of key verses that clarify
its essential role.[3] We have
already remarked on one of these verses above, which tells us that God's
love for people grows up in keeping with their success in conforming
themselves to the Prophet's example. Although this verse speaks of love
for God as a precondition for receiving God's love in return, all the
great lovers recognized that what stirs up love for God in the first
place is God's love for human beings. People could not love God if He
did not already love them. The Hadith of the Hidden Treasure[4] makes precisely this point—
God created people out of love for them.[5] The most often cited Qur'anic proof text
for this hierarchy of love is the verse, "He loves them, and they love
Him" (5: 54). First God loves human beings, then human beings love God.
Once they come to love Him, His love for them will increase to the
extent that they follow the Prophet, purify and cultivate their souls,
remember God ceaselessly, and become perfect human beings.
Whether or not love is mentioned, the earliest expressions of
Sufism's reality tend to take the form of pithy sayings touching on a
great variety of topics having to do with the path to God. Two or three
figures appear who are looked back upon as exemplars of the life of
love, like Rabi'ah and Hallaj. But from the eleventh to the thirteenth
centuries—the fifth to the seventh Islamic centuries—a
number of extremely important authors appear who map out a detailed
psychology of love. The famous Ghazzali sometimes writes about human and
divine love, but his less well-known brother, Ahmad Ghazzali (d. 1126),
devotes most of his relatively short Persian work, Sawanih, to
love as the underlying, unitive reality of the soul. This work then
provides inspiration for dozens of later treatises. Ahmad's disciple
'Ayn al-Qudat Hamadani[6](d.
1131) played an important role in formulating a psychology and
metaphysics of love as we have observed through Safi's paper. Perhaps
most profound and original in approach—in a period of many great
masters—was Ahmad Sam'ani (d. 1140), even though he has remained
almost completely unknown to modern scholars.[7] Somewhat later appeared the great Persian
poet 'Attar (d. 1221), whose works mapped out all the themes of
love.
Despite the large number of authors who wrote on divine and human
love, Ibn 'Arabi[8] and Rumi[9] can be considered the two
greatest masters of the tradition.
Ibn 'Arabi and Rumi belong to two different strands of Sufism. Each
in his own way marks the high point of the tradition. Most formulations
of Sufi teachings after them are inspired to some degree by the writings
of one or both. Their perspectives differed in many ways, but they also
share numerous common themes, especially on the issue of love. In what
follows, we can have a glimpse how Ibn 'Arabi explains something of
love's reality and can see a few appropriate examples of Rumi's poetical
expressions of the same ideas.
* * *
What is it to be a lover? To have perfect thirst.
So let me explain the water of life.[12]
On the divine level, love can be called the motive force for God's
creative activity. In one of his many commentaries on the Hadith
of the Hidden Treasure, Ibn 'Arabi tells us that the kind of knowledge
that God loved to achieve through creation was a knowledge that had its
origin in time, since He already knew Himself and all things in
eternity. Ibn 'Arabi makes this remark while drawing a parallel between
sexual union for the purpose of having children and God's love to be
known for the purpose of creating the universe.
When the marriage union occurs because of the love for reproduction and
procreation, it joins the divine love when there was no cosmos. He
"loved to be known." So, because of this love, He turned His desire
toward the things while they were in the state of nonexistence. They
were standing in the station of the root because of the preparedness of
their own possibility. He said to them, Be!, so they came to be, that He
might be known by every sort of knowledge. This was temporal knowledge.
As yet it had no object, because the one who knows by it was not yet
qualified by existence. His love sought the perfection of knowledge and
the perfection of existence.[13]
In another passage, Ibn 'Arabi explains the meaning of God's love to
be known while commenting on the Qur'anic verse, "And He is with you
wherever you are" (57:4). God's love for human beings means that He
never lets them out of His sight.
God's love for His servants is not qualified by origin or
end, for it does not accept qualities that are temporal or
accidental.... Hence the relation of God's love to them is the same as
the fact that He is With them Whatever they are [57:4I. . . . just as He
is with them in the state of their existence, so also He is with them in
the state of their nonexistence, for they are the objects of His
knowledge. He witnesses them and loves them never endingly... He has
always loved His creatures, just as He has always known them. . . . His
existence has no first point, so His love for His servants has no first
point.[14]
In one of his prose works, Rumi explains the significance of the
Hidden Treasure by referring to the two categories of God's
attributes—mercy and wrath, or gentleness and severity. God created
the world to make all his attributes manifest, and this demands infinite
diversity:
God says, "I was a hidden treasure, so I loved to be known." In other
words, "I created the whole cosmos, and the goal in all of it was to
make Myself manifest, sometimes through gentleness and sometimes through
severity." God is not the sort of king for whom a single herald would be
sufficient. Were all the atoms of the universe His heralds, they would
fall short and be incapable of making Him known.[15]
Rumi frequently points to love as God's motive for creation by
commenting on a divine saying addressed to Muhammad: "But for you, I
would not have created the heavenly spheres." The Prophet is the
fullness of realized love, through whom and for whom the universe was
created.
Love makes the ocean boil like a pot,
love grinds mountains down to sand.
Love splits the heaven in a hundred pieces,
love shakes the earth with a mighty shaking.
Pure love was paired with Muhammad-
because of love God said to him, "But for you."
Since he alone was the goal of love,
he was singled out from all the prophets.
"If not for pure love,
why would I give existence to the spheres?
"I raised the celestial wheel on high
so that you might understand love's elevation.[16]
The True Beloved
God created the world through love, so love produces the multiplicity
that fills the universe. He never ceases loving the creatures, so He
never ceases creating them, and this keeps the universe in a perpetual
state of transformation and flux. All things are infused with love,
because God's attribute of love brings them into existence and motivates
all their activities.
The Prophet said, "God is beautiful and He loves beauty"
and this is an established hadith. So, He described Himself as
loving beauty, and He loves the cosmos. Hence, there is nothing more
beautiful than the cosmos. And He is beautiful, while beauty is
intrinsically lovable, so the whole cosmos loves God. The beauty of His
artisanry permeates His creation, while the cosmos is the loci wherein
He becomes manifest. Therefore the love of some parts of the cosmos for
other parts derives from God's love for Himself.[17]
* * *
God's wisdom through His destiny and decree
made us lovers one of another.
That foreordainment paired all the world's parts
and set each in love with its mate....
The female inclines towards the male
so that each may perfect the other's work.
God placed inclination in man and woman
so the world may subsist through their union.[18]
Love's creative power does not stop at the externalization and
maintenance of the cosmos. Although the jewels of the Hidden Treasure
have been thrown out into the open, most creatures do not recognize them
for what they are, nor do they understand that their own loves and
desires externalize God's love. Their love is simply God's own love
reflected in the creatures. It follows that, as Ibn 'Arabi puts it,
"None loves God but God,"[19]
and "There is no lover and no beloved but God."[20] Lovers grasp this when they reach the
point of seeing God in everything that exists. This is the fully
realized love mentioned in the hadith, "When I love My servant, I
am his hearing through which he hears, his sight through which he sees."
Ibn 'Arabi writes,
The soul sees that it sees Him only through Him, not through itself, and
that it loves Him only through Him, not through itself. So He it is who
loves Himself - it is not the soul that loves Him. The soul gazes upon
Him in every existent by means of His very eye. Hence it knows that none
loves Him but He. He is the lover and the beloved, the seeker and the
sought.[21]
Rumi provides many parallel accounts of God's love that courses
through all things. But his perspective focuses more on practice than
theory, so he constantly reminds his readers of their own situation.
Here is one of his ghazals:
It is incumbent on lovers to seek the Friend,
flowing like floods on face and head to His river.
He himself does the seeking, and we are like shadows.
All our talking and speaking are the words of the Friend.
Sometimes we rejoice like water running in His stream, sometimes we're trapped like water in His jug.
Again we boil like carrots in a pot while He stirs
with the ladle of thought - such is the Friend's temper.
He puts His mouth to our ear and whispers
and our soul quickly takes on His fragrance.
He comes like the spirit's spirit, leaving no escape
never have I seen a spirit that was an enemy of the Friend!
He will melt you with coquetry, making you frail as a hair but you would not take the two worlds for a hair of the Friend.
We sit with the Friend saying, "Friend, where [ku] are you?"
Drunk, we keep on cooing [ku] in the lane of the Friend.
Unhappy pictures and ugly thoughts
come from an idle nature - not from the Friend.
Be silent, so that He Himself may describe Himself!
What does your cold "hey, hey" have to do with His "hey, hey"?[22]
Ibn 'Arabi and especially Rumi constantly remind their readers that
love for any creature can only be love for God. Only ignorance veils
people from perceiving what they love. Ibn 'Arabi writes,
None but God is loved in the existent things. It is He who is manifest
within every beloved to the eye of every lover - and there is no
existent thing that is not a lover. So, the cosmos is all lover and
beloved, and all of it goes back to Him. In the same way, no one is
worshiped but Him, for no worshiper worships anything without imagining
divinity within it. Otherwise, he would not worship it. Thus God says,
"Your Lord has decreed that you worship none but Him" [I7:23].
So
also is love. No one loves anyone but his own Creator, but he is veiled
from Him by love for Zaynab, Su'ad, Hind, Layla, this world, money,
position, and everything loved in the world. Poets exhaust their words
on all these existing things, but they do not know. The gnostics never
hear a verse, a riddle, a panegyric, or a love poem that is not about
God, hidden beyond the veil of forms.[23]
In his major prose work, Rumi makes the same point with these
words:
All the hopes, desires, loves, and affections that people have for
different things - father, mother, friends, heavens, earth, gardens,
palaces, sciences, deeds, food, drink - all these are desires for God,
and these things are veils. When people leave this world and see the
Eternal King without these veils, then they will know that all these
were veils and coverings and that the object of their desire was in
reality that One Thing. All their difficulties will be solved, all the
questions and perplexities that they had in their hearts will be
answered, and they will see all things face to face.[24]
All love is in truth love for God. Love is good because it is divine,
but it remains a deceptive veil so long as lovers do not recognize its
true object.
Love is an attribute of God, who has no needs-
love for anything else is a metaphor.
The beauty of the others is gold-plated:
outwardly it is light, inwardly smoke.
When the light goes and the smoke appears,
metaphorical love turns to ice.
The beauty returns to its own root, the body is left-
putrid, disgraced, ugly.
The moonlight goes back to the moon,
the moon's reflection leaves the wall.
Water and clay remain with no picture without the moon, the wall becomes fiendish.
When gold jumps from the face of counterfeit coin,
it returns to sit in its own mine.
The disgraced copper stays like smoke
and even more ashamed is its lover.
Those with eyes turn their love to the mine of gold,
each day their love increasing.
The mine has no partner in its goldness-
hail, 0 Mine of Gold! In You there is no doubt.[25]
Love is an ever-present reality, but it tends to be dispersed and
dissipated because people fall in love with the Beloved's reflections.
Here we come back to the centrality of knowledge. Even though Rumi
devotes all his works to love, he frequently reminds us that true love
depends upon discernment. The lover must be able to distinguish gold
from gold-plate.
Love makes bitter sweet,
love turns copper to gold,
Love makes dregs into wine,
love turns pain into healing,
Love brings the dead to life,
love makes kings into slaves
But this love results from knowledge.
When did a fool sit an this throne?
How can faulty knowledge give birth to love?
It gives birth to love, but love for inanimate things.
When it sees the color of its desire in the things,
it hears the call of the beloved in a whistle.
Faulty knowledge does not know the difference
it thinks that lightning is the sun.[26]
In short, love for God grows up from the basic declaration of faith,
the assertion of God's unique reality -"No god but God." Since love is a
divine attribute, it follows that "There is no true lover and no true
beloved but God." Once the lovers see things clearly, they find that
they love everything in creation, because all of creation displays God's
beauty, and their own love displays God's love. Ibn 'Arabi tells us that
when the seekers pass beyond "natural" and "spiritual" love, they reach
the stage of "divine" love, where they love God in all things through
God's own love of the things. Then they love all things in every
dimension of existence.
The mark of divine love is love for all beings in every domain -
spiritual, sensory, imaginal, and imaginary. Every domain has an eye
that it receives from His name Light, an eye with which it looks upon
His name Beautiful.[27]
When their love is complete, the lovers live in the joy of
experiencing their own union with the One who is both lover and beloved.
As Rumi puts it,
The joy and heartache of lovers is He,
the wages and salary for service is He.
If they were to gaze on other than the Beloved,
how could that be love? That would be idle fancy.
Love is that flame which, when it blazes up,
bums away all except the everlasting Beloved.
It slays "other than God" with the sword of no god.
Look carefully: After no god what remains?
There remains but God, the rest has gone.
Hail, 0 Love, great burner of all others!
It is He alone who is first and last,
all else grows up from the eye that sees double.[28]
The Religion of Love
The precondition for love is the ability to see straight. This
demands that we understand our own inadequacies and limitations. We must
acknowledge that we do not know who we are. Knowing our own ignorance
and inadequacy, we know that God alone is adequate. We are far from the
Real, far from wholeness, far from balance, equilibrium, wisdom,
compassion, and every other desirable quality. Truly understanding and
savoring this inadequacy yields a deep longing in the soul, which Rumi
commonly calls "pain."
Whoever is more awake has greater pain,
whoever is more aware has a paler face.[29]
Dwelling on one's pain and imperfection can only call down the
remedy. Rumi frequently urges his readers to seek out pain and
suffering, to become thirsty and not to look for water.
Since the world's Remedy is searching
for pain and disease,
we have cut ourselves off from remedies
and are the companions of pain.[30]
The knowledge of human inadequacy is knowledge of our essential
nothingness. The Qur'an sometimes calls this human nothingness "poverty"
(faqr), a word which, in Islamic languages, is a far more common
designation for what we have been calling "Sufism" than the word
tasawwuf itself. Both fakir (Arabic faqir) and dervish
(Persian darwish) mean "poor man," that is, a traveler on the
Sufi path. The term is taken from the Qur'an, especially the verse, "0
people, you are the poor toward God; and God - He is the Wealthy, the
Praiseworthy" (35:I5). As Ibn 'Arabi says, "Poverty is an affair that is
inherent in everything other than God. There is no way to escape from
it.[31] Rumi writes,
Poverty is not for the sake of hardship
no, it is because nothing exists but God.[32]
Sufism is poverty toward God. To be poor toward Him is to acknowledge
one's need for Him, and the deeper and more sincere this acknowledgment
becomes, the more it turns into an overpowering drive to reach the
Beloved. Few pains are as deep as the lovers' pain in their separation.
Knowing their own pain, the lovers yearn for the cure of every pain, and
that is their Beloved. The end result is deliverance from pain and union
with all joy, but without pain, the journey will never begin.
First You empty the lovers at the hand of separation,
then You fill them with gold to the tops of their heads![33]
Rumi has thousands of verses on the interplay between separation and
union, hope and fear, sobriety and drunkenness, annihilation and
subsistence, pain and joy. This is the dialectic of love. No love is
possible without the ups and downs inherent to the created realm. He
constantly invites his readers to leap into the fray. This ghazal is
typical:
How much the Companion made me suffer until this work settled into the eye's water and the liver's blood!
A thousand fires and smokes and heartaches all named "Love"!
A thousand pains and regrets and afflictions all named "Companion"!
If you are the enemy of your own self, come - in the name of God!
Welcome to the soul's sacrifice! Welcome to a pitiful slaughter!
Look at me - I see Him worth a hundred deaths like this.
I neither fear nor flee from the Heart-keeper's slaying.
Like the Nile's water, love's torture has two faces-
water for its own folk, blood-drinking for others.
If aloes and candles didn't burn, what good would they be? Aloes would be the same as the trunk of a thornbush.
If battles had no striking of swords and spears and arrows, how would a catamite be different from Rustam the hero?
Rustam finds the sword sweeter than sugar,
he sees the arrows raining down better than coins of gold.
This lion takes her prey with two hundred coquetries
the prey runs in desire for her wave after wave.
The slain prey keeps on screaming in the midst of the blood- "For God's sake, kill me again!"
The eyes of the slain gaze at the living-
"0 heedless and frozen, come, don't scratch your heads!"
Silence, silence! Love's allusions are upside-
down too much speaking keeps the meanings hidden.[34]
If Rumi objects to his own poetical expressions of love, all the more
would he object to the attempts by Ibn 'Arabi and other theoretically
minded Sufis to explain love's reality. Love needs to be tasted and
experienced, and poetry is far more adequate than rational disquisition
to expressing experience where love is the dominant theme with an
infinite variety of images. It is also true of Sufism, where love is
typically presented as the key to Islamic life and practice. In other
words, for a large body of Muslims, love has always been Islam's
life-blood. In their view, without the animating spirit of love-Islam's
third dimension-the religion dries up and desiccates, and we are left
with sterile debates over the fine details of activity, or polemical
attacks on anyone who does not toe the dogmatic line concerning issues
of faith.
We have already explained that love is a divine attribute or, in
other words, that God is love. Love needs to be distinguished from
mercy. God's general mercy is directed toward all things, while his
specific mercy becomes manifest in paradise, which is given to the
god-wary. The opposite of God's specific mercy is wrath, which finds its
clearest reflection in hell. The Qur'an associates God's love with his
specific mercy, not with his general mercy. God loves those who do what
is beautiful, but he does not love those who conceal the truth and do
what is ugly. If he did love them, he would not place them in hell. None
of this is to deny that God's mercy takes precedence over his wrath, and
that hell itself is a mercy for those who enter it, but this is another
issue that would lead us too far from the question of love.
The Sufi stress on love for God grows out of their emphasis on the
priority of tashbih over tanzih, of mercy over wrath. When
the theologians and jurists discuss God, with their rational categories
and their commands and prohibitions, the result can only be a human
feeling of distance and fear. But Sufis place their emphasis on God's
nearness and his love for human beings. Instead of stressing rational
arguments and abstract discourse, they employ every sort of analogy and
image to make the experience of God concrete. Their underlying message
is that God loves us and desires the best for us. To bring this home,
they stress God's beautiful and lovable qualities in the language of
everyday speech. It is only human to love someone who loves you. Anyone
who has that much sense has to be lovable. The Sufis were supremely
aware of this psychological tendency. Moreover, they were fully informed
of the metaphysical fact that God's goal in creating human beings was to
actualize love, given that no other creature can truly love God.
Innumerable Sufi texts could be quoted to support these points. Some
of these we have quoted above. We would like to conclude with a
different genre of Sufi texts. Instead of quoting what is already
available in English, we now present below a short text that has been
translated by Dr W. C. Chittick in his The Vision of Islam. It is
from one of the greatest classics of Sufi literature—a work, however,
that has largely been ignored by modem scholars—known as Kashf
al-asrar (The Unveiling of the Mysteries) by Rashid al-Din Maybudi.
This is a Koran commentary which, the author tells us, he began writing
in the year 520/1126. Since it fills eight thousand pages in its modern
edition, one can suppose that it took a few years to complete. Only
about one quarter of Kashf al-asrar is devoted to Sufi
interpretations of Koranic verses, since the main body of the text is
concerned with translating the Koran into Persian, explaining its
apparent meaning, and then explicating its literal and historical
context and significance. Then the author turns to the more hidden
meaning of the text. He often quotes in these sections from his teacher,
the famous Sufi and jurist, Khwaja 'Abdallah Ansari (d. 481/1088).
Ansari is noted for important works in both Arabic and Persian. His
Persian prose is among the most beautiful and poetic of the language,
and hence it is especially difficult to translate. The author is
explaining the meaning of the most commonly cited Koranic verse about
love, already quoted above: "0 you who have faith, should any of you
turn back on your religion, God will bring a people whom He loves and
who love Him..." (5:54). Here is Maybudi's text:
"0 you who have faith, should any of you turn back on your
religion. " This verse contains an allusion for the knowers and good
news for the faithful.
The allusion is that God is the protector of the community of Islam, the
primordial religion, the Muhammadan Shari'ah, and that it will always
remain. Nothing will be lost if some people turn their back on this
religion and become apostates. The Lord of Mightiness will bring others
who embrace this religion with soul and heart and nurture it lovingly.
God will preserve the signposts of His commandments and the pillars of
His prohibitions through them. He will decorate the carpet of the
Shari'ah by their dignity. He has inscribed them with the letters of
love, for He says, "whom He loves and who love Him." He has written upon
the page of their hearts with a divine script: "He has written faith in
their hearts" [58:23]. He has illuminated their inmost eye with the lamp
of true knowledge, "So he is upon a light from his Lord" [39:22]. The
Divinity is their upbringer, the lap of prophecy is their cradle,
eternity without beginning and eternity without end are their warder,
the playing field of gentleness is the lodging place of their gaze, and
the carpet of awe is the resting place of their aspiration. God makes
the same point when He says in another place, "So if those cover its
truth, we have already entrusted it to a people who do not cover its
truth" [6:89]. The Prophet said, ''A group among my people will never
cease to support the Truth. None who oppose them will harm them until
God's command comes." The good news is that whoever does not turn his
back is counted among the objects of love. They are the people of love
and faith. Those who do not fall into the abyss of apostasy have the
good news that the name of love will fall on them. God says, "Should any
of you turn back on your religion, God will bring a people whom He loves
and who love Him." First He affirms His love then the love of the
servants. Thus you come to understand that as long as God does not love
the servant, the servant will not love ...
Khwaja Abdallah said,
The sign of finding love's well is contentment,
that which increases love's water is faithfulness.
The substance of love's treasure is light,
the fruit of love's tree is joy.
If you fail to separate 'yourself from the two worlds
you are excused from love,
If you seek recompense from the Friend,
you are ungrateful.
Love is love for God,
the rest is all idle fancy.
'Whom He loves and who love Him" is a great work,
a marvelous bazaar-it lifted up water and clay.
Thereby God became love's kiblah
and the target of union's arrows.
How could the traveler not be delighted
that love is the nearest house to the Lord?
love. is a tree that produces only joy's fruit,
an earth that grows nothing but intimacy's flowers,
a cloud that rains nothing but light,
a wine whose potion is nothing but honey,
a road whose earth is nothing but musk and ambergris.
Love was written in eternity without beginning,
Love's brand lasts till eternity without end From the time when love for the Friend became my habit and character all of me comes from the Friend, and the Friend comes from my all.
Behold how long love's fortune lasts!
Hear how beautiful is the tale of lovers!
Love's playing field is as wide as the heart,
paradise is one branch of the tree of love.
Those who drink love's wine are promised the vision,
whoever is sincere will reach the goal.
* * *
[1] For an illuminating
discussion of the three dimensions of Islam see W. C. Chittick, The
Vision of Islam, Paragon House New York, 1994, reprinted, Suhail
Academy, Lahore, 2000, p. xxxii. The whole book is in fact an extended
commentary on the Hadith of Gabriel that describes Islam in its
three dimensions, right activity, right understanding and right
intentions or motivation.
[2] A separate document
details Ibn 'Arabi's views on the question of human love and its roots
in the Divine. See appendix. I—Ibn 'Arabi on Love.
[3] See appendix II—
Love verses of the Qur'an.
[4] In the presentation as
well as in the comments this is constantly referred to as a hadith
qudsi. This saying, attributed in Sufi texts to the Prophet, is
better known in the form, "I was a Hidden Treasure, so I loved to be
known. Hence I created the creatures that I might be known." The
scholars of Hadith consider it a forgery. Ibn 'Arabi quotes it
very often and he is well aware of the objections. However, in his view
its authenticity has been proven by unveiling (kashf), or vision
of the Prophet in the imaginal world. Hence he writes that this
hadith "is sound on the basis of unveiling, but not established
by way of transmission (naql)" (Futuhat II 399.28). His
views on establishing the soundness of hadiths through unveiling
are given in appendix III.
[5] Ibn 'Arabi has given us
perhaps the most sophisticated and nuanced interpretation of
Hadith of the Hidden Treasure and relates it to a more
fundamental issue of the Divine Principle and the "necessity" of its
manifestation.
[6] The author on which our
presenter has focused his discourse.
[7] For a recent treatment
of Sam'ani see "Fall of Adam" in W. C. Chittick, Sufism—A Short
Introduction, One World, Oxford, 2000, pp. 111.
[8] Ibn 'Arabi was born in
Murcia in Spain and died in Damascus in I240. He wrote prolifically in
Arabic and came to be considered the foremost Sufi theologian and
philosopher. In later centuries, his name became almost synonymous with
the expression wahdat al-wujud, "the Unity of Being," a doctrine
that was often taken as encapsulating his perspective though it could be
quite misleading. He composed more than 500 prose works, some of them
enormously long. He also wrote something like twenty thousand verses of
poetry.
[9] Rumi, younger
contemporary of Ibn 'Arabi, was born in Balkh in present-day Afghanistan
and moved in his youth to Anatolia, eventually settling in Konya in
present-day Turkey, where he died in I273. He composed about 65,000
verses of breathtaking Persian poetry along with three short prose
works. The Persianate world, from Turkey to India, looks back upon Rumi
as the greatest spiritual poet of history, just as the whole Islamic
world considers Ibn 'Arabi the greatest Sufi theoretician.
[10] Futuhat 11
111.12; cf. 11 325.13, translated in W. C. Chittick, "The Divine Roots
of Human Love," Journal of the Mubyiddin Ibn 'Arabi Society XVII,
1995, pp. 55-78 (p. 57).
[11] Rumi, Kulliyyat-i
Shams, edited by B. Furuzanfar (Tehran: Danishgah, 1336-46/1957-67),
vss. 29050-1; for more on this theme, see W. C. Chittick, Sufi Path of
Love, (SPL) Suhail Academy, 2000, pp. 194-5.
[12] Kulliyyat
17361.
[13] Futuhat 11
167.12.
[14] Futuhat
11329.5
[15] Fihi ma fihi,
pp. 176-7; SPL 48.
[16] Mathnawi V
2735-40; SPL 198.
[17] Futuhat
11114.8; for an English translation of the passage in context, see M.
Chodkiewicz et al., Les Illuminations de La Mecque (The Meccan
Illuminations) (Paris: Sindbad, 1988), p. 97.
[18] Mathnawi
1114400-1, 14-15; SPL 198-9.
[19] Futuhat 11
113.2.
[20] Futuhat 11
114.14; Chodkiewicz, Illuminations, p. 98.
[21] Futuhat
11331.17.
[22] Kulliyyat,
ghazal no. 442.
[23] Futuhat
11326.19; On Ibn Arabi's "ontological" reading of the Koranic verse, see
Sufi Path of Knowledge (SPL) 342-3.
[24] Fihi ma fihi,
p. 35; SPL 201.
[25] Mathnawi VI
971-80; cf. SPL 202-3.
[26] Mathnawi 11
1529-35.
[27] Futuhat 11
113.6.
[28] Mathnawi V
586-91; SPL 215.
[29] Mathnawi
1629.
[30] Kulliyyat
35477; SPL 209.
[31] Futuhat
11600.32
[32] Mathnawi
113497.
[33] Kulliyyat
29753.
[34] Kulliyyat,
ghazal no. 1138.
© 2003, Society for Scriptural
Reasoning
