Sufism is a path of love, and for the last thirty years I have been trying to describe this mystery of the heart. Since my first book, The Bond with the Beloved, and one of my earliest talks in Hamburg, I have followed this thread, the link of love that is at the core of all that exists, that takes us into the unknown and unknowable Essence, as well as revealing the oneness of the created world around us. Now this journey has come full circle and I would like to share this story, this adventure of love, woven together with past writings from this journey of the heart.
—Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee,
August 3, 2023
LOVER AND BELOVED:
Mystical Love in Sufism
Sufism is a mystical path of love. The Sufi is a traveler on the path of love, a wayfarer journeying back to God through the mysteries of the heart. For the Sufi the relationship to God is that of lover and Beloved, and Sufis are also known as lovers of God. The journey to God takes place within the heart, and for centuries Sufis have been traveling deep within themselves, into the secret chamber of the heart where lover and Beloved share the ecstasy of union. Through this mystical journey the Sufi wayfarer comes to experience God as a deepening experience of divine love, a love that belongs to both the created and the uncreated worlds, form and formlessness.
To love God and to be loved by God, to experience the depth and intimacy of this relationship, is a secret long known to the Sufis. Within the heart we come closer and closer to our Beloved, so close that finally there is no separation as the lover merges into the Beloved, the lover becomes lost in love, “drowned in love’s ocean.” Step by step we walk along the path of love until finally we are taken by love into love; we are taken by God to God, and then there is no going back, only a deepening and deepening of this love affair of the soul. This is the ancient journey from separation to union, the journey from our own self back to a state of oneness with God.
There is a story about a group of mystics, a band of lovers of God, who were called the Kamal Posh. Kamal Posh means blanket wearers, for their only possession was one blanket which they wore as a covering during the day and used as a blanket at night. As the story goes, they traveled throughout the ancient world from prophet to prophet but no one could satisfy them. Every prophet told them to do this or to do that, and this did not satisfy them. Then one day, at the time of Muhammad, the Prophet was seated together with his companions when he said that in a certain number of days the men of the Kamal Posh would be coming. So it happened that in that number of days this group of Kamal Posh came to the prophet Muhammad. And when they were with him, he said nothing, but the Kamal Posh were completely satisfied. Why were they satisfied? Because he created love in their hearts, and when love is created, what dissatisfaction can there be?
Sufism is the ancient wisdom of the heart, not limited by time or place or form. It always was and it always will be. There will always be lovers of God. And the Kamal Posh recognized that Muhammad knew the mysteries of the heart. They stayed with the Prophet and were assimilated into Islam. According to this story the Kamal Posh became the mystical element of Islam. And later these wayfarers became known as Sufis, perhaps in reference to the white woolen blanket, sūf, which they wore, or as an indication of their purity of heart, safā, for they were also known as the pure of heart.[1]
These lovers of God followed Islam, and observed the teachings of the Qur'an, but from a mystical point of view. For example, in the Qur'an (50:16) there is a saying that God, Allah, is nearer to us than our jugular vein. For the Sufis this verse speaks about the mystical experience of nearness with God, of divine intimacy. The Sufi relates to God not as a judge, nor as a father figure, nor as the creator, but as our own Beloved, who is so close, so near, so tender. In the states of nearness the lover experiences an intimacy with the Beloved which carries the softness and ecstasy of love.
We all long to be loved, we all long to be nurtured, to be held, and we look for it in another; we seek a man or woman who can fulfill us. We follow it into the tangle of human relationships. But the mystic knows the deeper truth, that while an outer lover can appear to give us the love and support we crave, it will always be limited. And one day the mystic discovers that the source and answer to our primal need is not separate from us, but part of our own essential nature, our own true being. To quote Rumi:
The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along.[2]
Only within the heart can our deepest desires, our most passionate needs, be met, totally and completely. In moments of mystical intimacy with God we are given everything we could want, and more than we believe possible. God is closer to us than ourself to ourself, and we are loved with the completeness that belongs only to God.
Another passage from the Qur'an that carries a mystical meaning is the “verse of light” from sura 24, which contains the phrase, “light upon light, Allah guides to His light whom He will.” The Sufis have interpreted the words “light upon light” as describing the mystery of how the divine light hidden within our own heart rises up to God, giving us the longing and light we need for the journey. God awakens the lamp of divine light within the hearts of those who believe in divine oneness. For the Sufi this light is a living reality that is felt as love, tenderness, and also the guidance that is necessary to help us on the way. This light takes us back to the Divine, from the pain of separation to the embrace of union.
The moment this light, this love is awaked, is called tauba, the turning of the heart. Sufis are known as wayfarers and this is when the journey back to God begins. The Sufi says that there are three journeys. The journey from God, when in the midst of the world we forget God; we forget our divine nature, the love and light of the soul. The journey to God, which is the journey from separation back to union. And finally, the journey in God, which is a deepening experience of the Divine, of the love and oneness that is everywhere and everything. But the journey to God begins with the spark of love being ignited within the heart, the longing for our heart’s Beloved.
The lover then longs to become empty, so that the Beloved can fill our heart with the wine of divine remembrance, with the taste of nearness, with the intimacies of love. We are called back to God and turn away from the outer world so that our Beloved can reveal what is hidden within our hearts, the wonder of oneness, the innermost union of lover and Beloved. In the words of al-Hallaj, known as the prince of lovers, “I am He whom I love, He whom I love is me.”
On this journey we discover that the veil that separates us from the Divine is our ego, our illusory sense of a separate self. We have to “die before you die”: the ego has to be sacrificed; consumed by the fire of divine love. For the Sufi “nothing is possible in love without death,” again to quote al-Hallaj,
Between you and me there lingers an “It is I” which torments me
Ah! lift this "It is I" from between us both![3]
The energy of divine love and our longing for love is the fire that burns away the veil of separation, that awakens us to the knowing of our deepest nature, the essence of our being which is love. Destroyed by love we become love itself as told in the story of Layla and Majnun, the best-known love story of the Middle East, which is about a young man Qays, whose love for Layla changes his name to Majnun, the mad one. Sufis are often known as the fools of love.
For the Sufi this story is an allegory of mystical love.[4] Layla is the beloved, Majnun the lover, and his story is that of the seeker consumed by longing, burnt by love. In Nizami's version, written at the end of the twelfth century, their relationship is rich in Sufi symbolism—as when Majnun, driven by the pain of separation, creeps to Layla's tent:
All the radiance of this morning was Layla, yet a candle was burning in front of her, consuming itself with desire. She was the most beautiful garden and Majnun was a torch of longing. She planted the rose bush; he watered it with his tears.
.... Layla could bewitch with one glance from beneath her dark hair, Majnun was her slave and a dervish dancing before her. Layla held in her hand the glass of wine scented with musk. Majnun had not touched the wine, yet he was drunk with its sweet smell.[5]
The candle held against the light of the sun is a Sufi image of the light of the lover before the radiance of God. Majnun is the lover, consuming himself like a candle in the fire of his own longing, and his beloved holds in her hand the wine of love whose very scent intoxicates him. For the Sufi wine is a symbol of a divine love that is both intoxicating and addictive. Just one sip of the wine of divine love and one will give away everything for another sip. This wine is the most dangerous substance in creation, which is why the Sufi says, “Keep away, keep away, from the lane of Love.”
The glass of wine offered by Layla, that wine that belongs to the heart and was made “before the creation of the vine,” is the Beloved's gift that makes the lover, like Majnun, “a slave and a dervish.” Sufis are often known as the slaves of God—they belong only to their Beloved. They are the bondsmen of love.
This love is the greatest secret of creation, a substance within the heart that, when awakened by the glance of the Beloved, begins the mystical transformation of the lover, the turning of the heart that finally reveals the secret of union, that lover and Beloved are one. This is the journey that Majnun is drawn to make, helpless in the hands of love. Even the sweet smell of this intoxicating substance is enough to make him drunk.
Qays and Layla begin with the innocence of childhood sweethearts, but only too soon they are separated, and the pain of separation turns Qays into Majnun. The pain of separation—that we are separate from God, the lover separate from the Beloved—is at the very foundation of mystical life. Rumi begins his greatest poem, the Mathnawi, with the cry of the reed torn from the reed-bed, a cry that is echoed in the plaintive wail of the reed flute played by the dervish:
Listen to the reed how it tells a tale, complaining of separations,
Saying, “Ever since I was parted from the reed-bed, my lament has caused man and woman to moan.
It is only to a bosom torn by severance that I can unfold the pain of love-desire.
Everyone who is left far from his source wishes back the time when he was united with it.”[6]
Anyone who has entered the lane of love, who has been awakened to this love affair, has felt this pain within the heart. Nothing is more painful than the primal sorrow of separation, this cry of the soul. It is said that Sufism was “at first heartache, only later it became something to speak about.” And the ninth-century Sufi, Rabi'a of Basra, who is attributed as introducing the theme of divine love into early Islamic mysticism, described how this heartfelt grief can only be healed by divine union:
The source of my grief and loneliness is deep in my breast.
This is a disease no doctor can cure.
Only union with the Friend can cure it.[7]
All lovers know this pain that tears apart the very fabric of one's being, the longing that makes one bleed tears of love. And this longing is infinitely precious because it draws one directly back to God. To quote the ninth-century Sufi Bayezid Bistami:
If the eight Paradises were opened in my hut, and the rule of both worlds were given in my hands, I would not give for them that single sigh which rises at morning-time from the depth of my soul in remembering my longing for Him.[8]
Majnun has become the slave of love and a prisoner of longing. His longing, this divine sickness of the soul, has begun its work of breaking him free from the chains of normal existence, from the conditioned life of the ego:
O who can cure my sickness? An outcast I have become. Family and home where are they? No path leads back to them and none to my beloved. Broken are my name, my reputation, like a glass smashed on a rock; broken is the drum which once spread the good news, and my ears now hear only the drumbeat of separation.[9]
Longing is the feminine side of love, the cup waiting to be filled. It is so potent because it bypasses the mind and the ego and speaks directly to the heart. It does not allow argument, but like a magnet pulls us homeward, away from our attachments, our identity, our self. This is why the lover prays for the longing to increase. The prayer of Ibn 'Arabi was “Oh Lord, nourish me not with love but with the desire for love.”[10] Majnun cries the same prayer when he is with his father at the Holy Kaaba in Mecca:
They tell me: "Crush the desire for Layla in your heart!" But I implore thee, oh my God, let it grow even stronger… My life shall be sacrificed for her beauty, my blood shall be spilled freely for her, and though I burn for her painfully, like a candle, none of my days shall ever be free of this pain. Let me love, oh my God, love for love's sake, and make my love a hundred times as great as it was and is![11]
This is the path of love that has chosen Majnun, that has made him appear mad in the eyes of the world but become a figure of mystical love in the tradition of the Sufis. As Qushayri writes: “Someone saw Majnun of the Banu 'Amir in a dream and asked him: "What has God the sublime done with you?" He said: "He has forgiven me and made me the ideal for lovers.”[12]
Majnun, consumed by love, ceases to exist. He becomes so absorbed by the object of his love that the lover and the beloved become one. In such a state there is no longer any separation: "If you knew what it means to be a lover, you would realize that one only has to scratch him and out falls the beloved."[13] Rich with his love, Majnun cares for nothing else. He goes into the desert where he lives on roots, grass, and fruit, and having died to himself is afraid of nothing. The wild beasts sense his unusual power, and, rather than attack him, befriend him. They forget their hunger and become tame and friendly. The fox, the wild ass, the lion, the wolf, and the panther travel with him and are his companions, watching over him when he sleeps. Majnun's love transforms the wildest animals, suggesting that within the lover the deepest, wildest instinctual forces are transformed through the power of love. These instinctual energies are not tamed by force or willpower, as in the path of the ascetic, but by love itself.
Majnun cares only for love. He speaks his love poems to the wind; others hear them and he attains fame as a poet. But to those who have not experienced it the words cannot convey the real depth of longing in Majnun's heart. A young, romantic poet who comes to visit him mistakes it for the youthful passion of romance. For Sufis, as for Majnun, there is no comparison: romantic feelings, while they can point us towards love, are like the moth that, seeing a lamp from afar, tries to describe the quality of fire—only the moth that has flown into the fire and been burnt to ashes knows it’s real nature. Majnun, speaking from the pure, annihilating fire of his love, makes this distinction very clear:
Who do you think I am? A drunkard? A love-sick fool, a slave of my senses, made senseless by desire? Understand: I have risen above all that, I am the King of Love in majesty. My soul is purified from the darkness of lust, my longing purged of low desire, my mind free from shame. I have broken the teeming bazaar of the senses in my body. Love is the essence of my being. Love is fire and I am wood burnt by the flame. Love has moved in and adorned the house, my self tied up its bundle and left. You imagine that you see me, but I no longer exist: what remains is the beloved....[14]
The power of love works within the heart, consuming everything that separates us from God. When Rumi summed up his whole life in the phrase "I burnt, and burnt, and burnt,"[15] he was not speaking in poetic metaphor; he was describing the actual inner experience of someone who has made this journey of love.
Majnun, whose heart was awakened by Layla, becomes the mystical lover crying tears of separation from his beloved. Every Sufi wayfarer is like Majnun, whose longing draws him into the desert, where love transforms him. Love and longing burn away all sense of separation, finally revealing the truth that lover and Beloved are one. This oneness with the Beloved is traditionally the secret of the Sufis. They know the cry of the heart and experience the death of the ego that awakens the lover into the presence of the Beloved—the mystery of merging where all separation dissolves and there is only God.
The path of love is a journey from the ego with its illusion of separation, to the truth of divine oneness, the complete identification with the Beloved. This can be seen as heretical, and some Sufis like al-Hallaj have been persecuted at the hands of the orthodoxy. Traditionally Al-Hallaj was crucified because of his heretical statements, such as “I am he whom I love.” Even his friend Shibli said at the time of his execution, “God gave you access to one of His secrets, but because you made it public He made you taste the blade.”[16] One of the first Sufis to openly proclaim the mystical truth of divine oneness he was known as “love's martyr” after he was crucified in Baghdad in 922.[17]
And this quality of divine love is the cornerstone of Sufism. Sufis have been referred to as “the people of the secret” because they know and live this secret of divine unity.
The journey back to God then becomes the journey in God. We have been taken into the the intimacies of the heart and the unveiling of oneness. The lover who has been awakened to the divine consciousness of oneness then sees with the eye of the heart, the kohl of the eye of divine unity, that the world around us is infused with love, and that our Beloved’s face is everywhere we look—“wheresoever you turn there is the face of God.” (Qur’an 2:115)
The love that was experienced deep within the heart is recognized in the world around, a love that infuses everything—every bird and butterfly, every leaf on every tree. Everything, every dream, every cloud passing, is permeated with love, is an expression of love. Love is the source of all that exists, is all that exists.
Scientists may tell us that our universe began thirteen billion years ago with the Big Bang, when from an infinitely hot and dense single point matter came into existence. But mystics know a different truth: how from the unborn and undying emptiness, existence is constantly being created as a flow of light and love that then becomes physical form. And this love remains, the foundation, the essence of everything—every particle and every star. It is the primary energy, power, presence within the created world. And it is our divine nature, always evolving and changing within our body and soul, even as it remains constant.
The dervish, merged in love, experiences this ecstatic dance of creation, a cosmic dance in which every atom praises God, is God praising Itself, as Rumi exclaims:
we came whirling
out of nothingness
scattering stars
like dustthe stars made a circle
and in the middle
we dance
…every atom
turns bewildered
…and it is only God
circling Himself[18]
Born from love we are drawn back to love, to a greater and deeper immersion in our divine nature. And love calls to us in many different ways. As Rumi says:
sultan, saint, pickpocket
love has everyone by the ear
dragging us to God by secret ways[19]
Love speaks to our soul and to our body. Love includes all the senses—taste and touch, smell, sight, and sound. Love by its very nature includes everything. It can be found anywhere, because it is everywhere. The mystic uncovers the simple secret: that in truth love flows through everything—sweet, tender, aching, knowing, as well as dark and passionate. And as this primal energy, this greatest power, awakens within us, within our heart, our soul, always it draws us deeper into its own mystery, into the secret of oneness, what the Sufis call the unity of being.
There is a story about the great Sufi Dhu’l Nun, “He met a woman at the seashore and asked her: ‘What is the end of love?’ And she answered: ‘O simpleton, love has no end.’ ‘Why?’ She said: ‘Because the Beloved has no end’” This story describes the infinite nature of the love that is the energy, the power of the Divine. For the Sufi God is found in the infinite emptiness, the silence that is experienced in meditation or prayer when one goes deep within the heart, beyond form into the formless. But also in divine presence manifest throughout the created world—the smallest cricket, the wildest ocean, the most beautiful sunset. This is the primal duality of the Absolute—Creator and creation, transcendent and immanent.
The Sufi mystic aspires to witness God in both worlds, in the seen and unseen. There are two kinds of witnessing: one is to behold the singularity of the Sacred Essence, stripped from the veil of manifestations. Ibn ‘Arabi describes this Divine Singularity:
He is now as He was. He is the One without oneness and the Single without singleness.... He is the very existence of the First and the very existence of the Last, and the very existence of the Outward and the very existence of the Inward. So there is no first nor last, nor outward nor inward, except Him, without these becoming Him or His becoming them.... By Himself He sees Himself, and by Himself He knows Himself. None sees Him other than He, and none perceives Him other than He. His veil, that is phenomenal existence, is a part of His oneness; nothing veils other than He. His veil is only the concealment of His existence in His oneness. None sees Him other than He, no sent Prophet, nor saint made perfect, nor angel brought nigh know Him. His Prophet is He, and His sending is He, and His word is He. He sent Himself with Himself to Himself.... There is no other and there is no existence other than He.[20]
The other form of witnessing is to contemplate within the curtain of manifestations. This is what the Sufis call “the vision of Oneness in multiplicity.” Through this dialogue the Creator uses the mirror of humanity to reveal Itself to Itself, as expressed in the hadith, “I was a hidden treasure and I wanted to be known, so I created the world.” But there is also another expression of this hadith, beloved of the Sufis, “I was a hidden treasure and I longed to be loved, so I created the world.” Traveling the path of love we are drawn into this mystery of love, this love affair that embraces both worlds.
Witnessing our Beloved in its deepest sense is the self-revelation of God. “The world is no more than the Beloved’s single face,” writes the poet Ghalib, “In the desire of the One to know its own beauty, we exist.”[21] Within the heart this secret is revealed. The veils of separation are drawn back so that the mystic can see with the eye of oneness, the single eye of the heart that sees the true nature of creation, that it is a manifestation of the Divine. The multiplicity of life, the wonder of its myriad forms, reflects God’s oneness. In Sufism this is called “the unity of witnessing.”
It is said that “no one knows God but God.” But through the awakened heart of the lover the Beloved can be known in the creation. Ibn ‘Arabi expresses this mystical paradox:
How can I know You when You are the Inwardly Hidden who is not known?
How can I not know You when You are the Outwardly manifest, making Yourself known to me in everything?[22]
The Divine, whose true nature is hidden, reveals Itself in the creation, and yet at the same time remains unknowable. But through the heart, our spiritual organ of direct perception, we can experience the Divine Essence, the love, that is present in all things. We recognize a love that is a direct expression of the Divine. And this love carries a quality of divine consciousness, is awake in ways beyond our limited understanding. This love speaks to us, to our heart and soul, and reveals the hidden qualities of God, the secret of secrets.
It knows the oneness of existence, within the heart and within the world around us. It can be experienced as the softness, the tenderness of a lover’s touch, a warm feeling within the heart, that speaks of intimacy and nearness, and also as the greatest power in creation, that gives birth to stars and galaxies, because all of creation is an outpouring of love. But love also reveals what is beyond creation, the infinite emptiness that is before and after existence. A nowhere, a nothingness, placeless and traceless, which belongs to the Absolute, and is sometimes known as the hidden face of God.
And this nothingness is also our Beloved, meeting and merging with us, bringing ecstasy and bliss, as expressed by Irina Tweedie:
There are moments of oneness with the Beloved, absolute ecstasy and bliss. That is nothingness. And this nothingness loves you, responds to you, fulfills you utterly and yet there is nothing there. You flow out like a river, without diminishing. This is the great mystical experience, the great ecstasy.[23]
Here, in the emptiness, is “the dark silence in which all lovers’ lose themselves.”[24] Annihilated in love we are “lost in the company of those who are lost in God.” The Christian mystic Thomas Merton describes this nothingness as “the incomparable point” which can only be found by being lost:
But for each of us there is a point of nowhereness in the middle of movement, a point of nothingness in the midst of being; the incomparable point, not to be discovered by insight. If you seek it you do not find it. If you stop seeking, it is there. But you must not turn to it. Once you become aware of yourself as seeker, you are lost. But if you are content to be lost you will be found without knowing it, precisely because you are lost, for you are, at last, nowhere.[25]
In this emptiness love is pure potential, unformed, unmanifest, but true to its Divine Essence. Flowing out of the emptiness love is the invisible foundation of creation, present in all of life, in the hummingbird drinking nectar, in the laughter and tears of a child. But in the unborn and undying emptiness before and after creation it cannot be named. This is the depth of the mystical journey in God of which little can be said, even as it is known within the heart. “Then the pilgrim returns home, to the home of his origin… that is the world of Allah’s proximity, that is where the home of the inner pilgrim is, and that is where he returns. This is all that can be explained, as much as the tongue can say and the mind grasp. Beyond this no news can be given, for beyond is the unperceivable, inconceivable, indescribable.”[26]
For the Sufi love is the beginning and the end of the journey.[27] The Sufi’s mystical journey begins with a spark of divine love that awakens the heart to the remembrance of God. This turns our attention away from the world and begins the journey back to God, the lover a scrap of iron drawn by love’s magnet. On this journey love and longing burn away our ego, our sense of a separate self, a process called fana, or annihilation, which leads to baqa, abiding in God. [28] This is the journey in God where the heart experiences the inner union of lover and Beloved, and also reveals the divine oneness in the world around. Love awakens us to the unity of being in the inner and outer worlds, and how both worlds are an expression of divine love. Finally, when love has dissolved all semblance of our own existence, when we have become “featureless and formless,” love takes us into the emptiness, the nothingness that is the true home of the mystic. To reach this “placeless place,” to make this journey home, is why the Sufi mystic follows the path of love, as expressed by Ibn ‘Arabi, also known as the Greatest Sheikh:
“I follow the religion of Love: whatever way
Love’s camels take, that is my religion, my faith.” [29]
FOOTNOTES
[1] Sufism, or tasawwuf, is often known as the mystical heart of Islam. Some sources say it originates in the inner mystical reading of the Qur’an, while others say it arose within Islam as an ascetic movement in the 8th–9th centuries CE. The word Sufi derives from “the Arabic word for wool (suf) used in the rough garments worn by ascetics in the Near East for centuries.” Carl Ernst, Sufism, (Boston: Shambhala, 1997), pp. 19–20.
[2] Trans. Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi, (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), p. 106.
[3] Quoted by Massignon, The Passion of Al-Hallaj, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), Volume 3, p. 47.
[4] The following is partly adapted from a longer reading of Nizami’s Layla and Majnun, see Vaughan-Lee, “Love is Fire and I am Wood: Layla and Majnun as a Sufi Allegory of Mystical Love,” Sufi Journal, 2011.
[5] Nizami, The Story of Layla and Majnun, ed. R. Gelpke, (London: Bruno Cassirer, 1966), p. 29.
[6] Mathnawî, ed. and trans. by R.A. Nicholson, (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1925 to 1940), Bk. I, ll. 1–4.
[7] Trans. Charles Upton, Doorkeeper of the Heart, (Putney, Vermont: Threshold Books, 1988), p. 34.
[8] Quoted by Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), p. 133.
[9] Nizami, p. 37.
[10] Quoted by Claude Addas, Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn 'Arabî, (Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 1994), p. 61.
[11] Nizami, p. 44.
[12] Quoted by Helmut Ritter in The Ocean of the Soul, trans. John O'Kane, (Boston: Handbook of Oriental Studies, 2003), p. 384.
[13] Nizami, p. 133.
[14] Nizami, p. 195.
[15] Quoted by Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, p. 324.
[16] Massignon, Louis. The Passion of al-Hallâj, Volume 1, p. 610.
[17] However, Massignon argues that the real reason for his execution was political not spiritual.
[18] Rumi, Rumi: Fragments, Ecstasies, trans. Daniel Liebert, (Santa Fe, New Mexico: Source Books, 1981), pp. 13–14.
[19] Rumi, Rumi: Fragments, Ecstasies, trans. Daniel Liebert, p. 21.
[20] Whoso Knoweth Himself, (Abingdon: Beshara Publications, 1976), pp. 3–4. Although attributed to Ibn ‘Arabi, many scholars hold it to be authored by Awhad al-Din Baylani.
[21] Trans. Jane Hirschfield, The Enlightened Heart, (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), p. 103.
[22] Seven Days of the Heart, trans. Pablo Beneito and Stephen Hirtenstein, (Oxford: Anqa Publishing, 2000), p. 43.
[23] Irina Tweedie, quoted in Traveling the Path of Love: Sayings of Sufi Masters, ed. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, (Inverness, California: The Golden Sufi Center, 1995), p. 205.
[24] St. John of Ruysbroeck, The Adornment of Spiritual Marriage, ed. Evelyn Underhill, (New York: Dutton & Co), Chapter 37.
[25] Cables to the Ace, from Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, (New Directions, 1980).
[26] Abdul Qadir al-Jilani, The Secret of Secrets, trans Tosun Bayrak al-Jerrahi, (Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 1992), p. 85.
[27] This is imaged as “The drop that became the sea,” or in Rumi’s words “the shoreless sea; here swimming ends always in drowning.” Rumi: Fragments, Ecstasies, trans. Daniel Liebert, p. 41.
[28] The practices of the path, for example the dhikr—the repetition of the name of God—help in this work of inner purification and transformation.
[29] Quoted by Stephen Hirtenstein, The Unlimited Mercifier, (Oxford: Anqa Publishing, 1999), p. 203.