DIVINE LOVE
Any one acquainted, however slightly, with the mystical poetry of Islam
must have remarked that the aspiration of the soul towards God is
expressed, as a rule, in almost the same terms which might be used by
an Oriental Anacreon or Herrick. The resemblance, indeed, is often so
close that, unless we have some clue to the poet’s intention, we are
left in doubt as to his meaning. In some cases, perhaps, the ambiguity
serves an artistic purpose, as in the odes of Hafiz, but even when
the poet is not deliberately keeping his readers suspended between
earth and heaven, it is quite easy to mistake a mystical hymn for a
drinking-song or a serenade. Ibn al-ʿArabī, the greatest theosophist
whom the Arabs have produced, found himself obliged to write a
commentary on some of his poems in order to refute the scandalous
charge that they were designed to celebrate the charms of his mistress.
Here are a few lines:
“Oh, her beauty--the tender maid! Its brilliance gives light like
lamps to one travelling in the dark.
She is a pearl hidden in a shell of hair as black as jet,
A pearl for which Thought dives and remains unceasingly in the
deeps of that ocean.
He who looks upon her deems her to be a gazelle of the sand-hills,
because of her shapely neck and the loveliness of her gestures.”
It has been said that the Sūfīs invented this figurative style as a
mask for mysteries which they desired to keep secret. That desire
was natural in those who proudly claimed to possess an esoteric
doctrine known only to themselves; moreover, a plain statement of
what they believed might have endangered their liberties, if not
their lives. But, apart from any such motives, the Sūfīs adopt the
symbolic style because there is no other possible way of interpreting
mystical experience. So little does knowledge of the infinite revealed
in ecstatic vision need an artificial disguise that it cannot be
communicated at all except through types and emblems drawn from the
sensible world, which, imperfect as they are, may suggest and shadow
forth a deeper meaning than appears on the surface. “Gnostics,” says
Ibn al-ʿArabī, “cannot impart their feelings to other men; they can
only indicate them symbolically to those who have begun to experience
the like.” What kind of symbolism each mystic will prefer depends
on his temperament and character. If he be a religious artist, a
spiritual poet, his ideas of reality are likely to clothe themselves
instinctively in forms of beauty and glowing images of human love.
To him the rosy cheek of the beloved represents the divine essence
manifested through its attributes; her dark curls signify the One
veiled by the Many; when he says, “Drink wine that it may set you free
from yourself,” he means, “Lose your phenomenal self in the rapture of
divine contemplation.” I might fill pages with further examples.
This erotic and bacchanalian symbolism is not, of course, peculiar
to the mystical poetry of Islam, but nowhere else is it displayed so
opulently and in such perfection. It has often been misunderstood by
European critics, one of whom even now can describe the ecstasies
of the Sūfīs as “inspired partly by wine and strongly tinged with
sensuality.” As regards the whole body of Sūfīs, the charge is
altogether false. No intelligent and unprejudiced student of their
writings could have made it, and we ought to have been informed on what
sort of evidence it is based. There are black sheep in every flock, and
amongst the Sūfīs we find many hypocrites, debauchees, and drunkards
who bring discredit on the pure brethren. But it is just as unfair to
judge Sūfism in general by the excesses of these impostors as it would
be to condemn all Christian mysticism on the ground that certain sects
and individuals are immoral.
“God is the Sāqī[10] and the Wine:
He knows what manner of love is mine,”
said Jalāluddīn. Ibn al-ʿArabī declares that no religion is more
sublime than a religion of love and longing for God. Love is the
essence of all creeds: the true mystic welcomes it whatever guise it
may assume.
[10] Cupbearer.
“My heart has become capable of every form: it is a pasture for
gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,
And a temple for idols, and the pilgrim’s Kaʿba, and the tables
of the Tora and the book of the Koran.
I follow the religion of Love, whichever way his camels take. My
religion and my faith is the true religion.
We have a pattern in Bishr, the lover of Hind and her sister, and
in Qays and Lubnā, and in Mayya and Ghaylān.”
Commenting on the last verse, the poet writes:
“Love, _quâ_ love, is one and the same reality to those Arab
lovers and to me; but the objects of our love are different,
for they loved a phenomenon, whereas I love the Real. They are
a pattern to us, because God only afflicted them with love for
human beings in order that He might show, by means of them, the
falseness of those who pretend to love Him, and yet feel no such
transport and rapture in loving Him as deprived those enamoured men
of their reason, and made them unconscious of themselves.”
Most of the great medieval Sūfīs lived saintly lives, dreaming of God,
intoxicated with God. When they tried to tell their dreams, being men,
they used the language of men. If they were also literary artists,
they naturally wrote in the style of their own day and generation. In
mystical poetry the Arabs yield the palm to the Persians. Any one who
would read the secret of Sūfism, no longer encumbered with theological
articles nor obscured by metaphysical subtleties--let him turn to
ʿAttār, Jalāluddīn Rūmī, and Jāmī, whose works are partially accessible
in English and other European languages. To translate these wonderful
hymns is to break their melody and bring their soaring passion down to
earth, but not even a prose translation can quite conceal the love of
Truth and the vision of Beauty which inspired them. Listen again to
Jalāluddīn:
“He comes, a moon whose like the sky ne’er saw, awake or dreaming,
Crowned with eternal flame no flood can lay.
Lo, from the flagon of Thy love, O Lord, my soul is swimming,
And ruined all my body’s house of clay.
When first the Giver of the grape my lonely heart befriended,
Wine fired my bosom and my veins filled up,
But when His image all mine eye possessed, a voice descended,
‘Well done, O sovereign Wine and peerless Cup!’”
The love thus symbolised is the emotional element in religion, the
rapture of the seer, the courage of the martyr, the faith of the
saint, the only basis of moral perfection and spiritual knowledge.
Practically, it is self-renunciation and self-sacrifice, the giving up
of all possessions--wealth, honour, will, life, and whatever else men
value--for the Beloved’s sake without any thought of reward. I have
already referred to love as the supreme principle in Sūfī ethics, and
now let me give some illustrations.
“Love,” says Jalāluddīn, “is the remedy of our pride and
self-conceit, the physician of all our infirmities. Only he whose
garment is rent by love becomes entirely unselfish.”
Nūrī, Raqqām, and other Sūfīs were accused of heresy and sentenced to
death.
“When the executioner approached Raqqām, Nūrī rose and offered
himself in his friend’s place with the utmost cheerfulness and
submission. All the spectators were astounded. The executioner
said, ‘Young man, the sword is not a thing that people are so eager
to meet; and your turn has not yet arrived.’ Nūrī answered, ‘My
religion is founded on unselfishness. Life is the most precious
thing in the world: I wish to sacrifice for my brethren’s sake the
few moments which remain.’”
On another occasion Nūrī was overheard praying as follows:
“O Lord, in Thy eternal knowledge and power and will Thou dost
punish the people of Hell whom Thou hast created; and if it be Thy
inexorable will to make Hell full of mankind, Thou art able to fill
it with me alone, and to send them to Paradise.”
In proportion as the Sūfī loves God, he sees God in all His creatures,
and goes forth to them in acts of charity. Pious works are naught
without love.
“Cheer one sad heart: thy loving deed will be
More than a thousand temples raised by thee.
One freeman whom thy kindness hath enslaved
Outweighs by far a thousand slaves set free.”
The Moslem _Legend of the Saints_ abounds in tales of pity shown to
animals (including the despised dog), birds, and even insects. It is
related that Bāyazīd purchased some cardamom seed at Hamadhān, and
before departing put into his gaberdine a small quantity which was left
over. On reaching Bistām and recollecting what he had done, he took out
the seed and found that it contained a number of ants. Saying, “I have
carried the poor creatures away from their home,” he immediately set
off and journeyed back to Hamadhān--a distance of several hundred miles.
This universal charity is one of the fruits of pantheism. The ascetic
view of the world which prevailed amongst the early Sūfīs, and their
vivid consciousness of God as a transcendent Personality rather than
as an immanent Spirit, caused them to crush their human affections
relentlessly. Here is a short story from the life of Fudayl ibn ʿIyād.
It would be touching if it were not so edifying.
“One day he had in his lap a child four years old, and chanced
to give it a kiss, as is the way of fathers. The child said,
‘Father, do you love me?’ ‘Yes,’ said Fudayl. ‘Do you love God?’
‘Yes.’ ‘How many hearts have you?’ ‘One.’ ‘Then,’ asked the child,
‘how can you love two with one heart?’ Fudayl perceived that the
child’s words were a divine admonition. In his zeal for God he
began to beat his head and repented of his love for the child, and
gave his heart wholly to God.”
The higher Sūfī mysticism, as represented by Jalāluddīn Rūmī, teaches
that the phenomenal is a bridge to the Real.
“Whether it be of this world or of that,
Thy love will lead thee yonder at the last.”
And Jāmī says, in a passage which has been translated by Professor
Browne:
“Even from earthly love thy face avert not,
Since to the Real it may serve to raise thee.
Ere A, B, C are rightly apprehended,
How canst thou con the pages of thy Koran?
A sage (so heard I), unto whom a student
Came craving counsel on the course before him,
Said, ‘If thy steps be strangers to love’s pathways,
Depart, learn love, and then return before me!
For, shouldst thou fear to drink wine from Form’s flagon,
Thou canst not drain the draught of the Ideal.
But yet beware! Be not by Form belated:
Strive rather with all speed the bridge to traverse.
If to the bourne thou fain wouldst bear thy baggage,
Upon the bridge let not thy footsteps linger.’”
Emerson sums up the meaning of this where he says:
“Beholding in many souls the traits of the divine beauty, and
separating in each soul that which is divine from the taint which
it has contracted in the world, the lover ascends to the highest
beauty, to the love and knowledge of the Divinity, by steps on this
ladder of created souls.”
“Man’s love of God,” says Hujwīrī, “is a quality which
manifests itself, in the heart of the pious believer, in the form
of veneration and magnification, so that he seeks to satisfy his
Beloved and becomes impatient and restless in his desire for
vision of Him, and cannot rest with any one except Him, and grows
familiar with the recollection of Him, and abjures the recollection
of everything besides. Repose becomes unlawful to him, and rest
flees from him. He is cut off from all habits and associations, and
renounces sensual passion, and turns towards the court of love,
and submits to the law of love, and knows God by His attributes of
perfection.”
Inevitably such a man will love his fellow-men. Whatever cruelty they
inflict upon him, he will perceive only the chastening hand of God,
“whose bitters are very sweets to the soul.” Bāyazīd said that when
God loves a man, He endows him with three qualities in token thereof:
a bounty like that of the sea, a sympathy like that of the sun, and
a humility like that of the earth. No suffering can be too great, no
devotion too high, for the piercing insight and burning faith of a true
lover.
Ibn al-ʿArabī claims that Islam is peculiarly the religion of love,
inasmuch as the Prophet Mohammed is called God’s beloved (_Habīb_),
but though some traces of this doctrine occur in the Koran, its main
impulse was unquestionably derived from Christianity. While the oldest
Sūfī literature, which is written in Arabic and unfortunately has come
down to us in a fragmentary state, is still dominated by the Koranic
insistence on fear of Allah, it also bears conspicuous marks of the
opposing Christian tradition. As in Christianity, through Dionysius
and other writers of the Neoplatonic school, so in Islam, and probably
under the same influence, the devotional and mystical love of God soon
developed into ecstasy and enthusiasm which finds in the sensuous
imagery of human love the most suggestive medium for its expression.
Dr. Inge observes that the Sūfīs “appear, like true Asiatics, to
have attempted to give a sacramental and symbolic character to the
indulgence of their passions.” I need not again point out that such a
view of genuine Sūfism is both superficial and incorrect.
Love, like gnosis, is in its essence a divine gift, not anything that
can be acquired. “If the whole world wished to attract love, they could
not; and if they made the utmost efforts to repel it, they could not.”
Those who love God are those whom God loves. “I fancied that I loved
Him,” said Bāyazīd, “but on consideration I saw that His love preceded
mine.” Junayd defined love as the substitution of the qualities of the
Beloved for the qualities of the lover. In other words, love signifies
the passing-away of the individual self; it is an uncontrollable
rapture, a God-sent grace which must be sought by ardent prayer and
aspiration.
“O Thou in whose bat well-curved my heart like a ball is laid,
Nor ever a hairbreadth swerved from Thy bidding nor disobeyed,
I have washed mine outward clean, the water I drew and poured;
Mine inward is Thy demesne--do Thou keep it stainless, Lord!”
Jalāluddīn teaches that man’s love is really the effect of God’s love
by means of an apologue. One night a certain devotee was praying aloud,
when Satan appeared to him and said:
“How long wilt thou cry, ‘O Allah’? Be quiet, for thou wilt get
no answer.” The devotee hung his head in silence. After a little
while he had a vision of the prophet Khadir, who said to him, “Ah,
why hast thou ceased to call on God?” “Because the answer ‘Here am
I’ came not,” he replied. Khadir said, “God hath ordered me to go
to thee and say this:
“‘Was it not I that summoned thee to service?
Did not I make thee busy with My name?
Thy calling “Allah!” _was_ My “Here am I,”
Thy yearning pain My messenger to thee.
Of all those tears and cries and supplications
I was the magnet, and I gave them wings.’”
Divine love is beyond description, yet its signs are manifest. Sarī
al-Saqatī questioned Junayd concerning the nature of love.
“Some say,” he answered, “that it is a state of concord, and
some say that it is altruism, and some say that it is so-and-so.”
Sarī took hold of the skin on his forearm and pulled it, but it
would not stretch; then he said, “I swear by the glory of God, were
I to say that this skin hath shrivelled on this bone for love of
Him, I should be telling the truth.” Thereupon he fainted away, and
his face became like a shining moon.
Love, ‘the astrolabe of heavenly mysteries,’ inspires all religion
worthy of the name, and brings with it, not reasoned belief, but
the intense conviction arising from immediate intuition. This inner
light is its own evidence; he who sees it has real knowledge, and
nothing can increase or diminish his certainty. Hence the Sūfīs never
weary of exposing the futility of a faith which supports itself on
intellectual proofs, external authority, self-interest, or self-regard
of any kind. The barren dialectic of the theologian; the canting
righteousness of the Pharisee rooted in forms and ceremonies; the
less crude but equally undisinterested worship of which the motive
is desire to gain everlasting happiness in the life hereafter; the
relatively pure devotion of the mystic who, although he loves God, yet
thinks of himself as loving, and whose heart is not wholly emptied of
‘otherness’--all these are ‘veils’ to be removed.
A few sayings by those who know will be more instructive than further
explanation.
“O God! whatever share of this world Thou hast allotted to me,
bestow it on Thine enemies; and whatever share of the next world
Thou hast allotted to me, bestow it on Thy friends. Thou art enough
for me.” (Rābiʿa.)
“O God! if I worship Thee in fear of Hell, burn me in Hell; and
if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise;
but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, withhold not Thine
everlasting beauty!” (Rābiʿa.)
“Notwithstanding that the lovers of God are separated from Him
by their love, they have the essential thing, for whether they
sleep or wake, they seek and are sought, and are not occupied with
their own seeking and loving, but are enraptured in contemplation
of the Beloved. It is a crime in the lover to regard his love, and
an outrage in love to look at one’s own seeking while one is face
to face with the Sought.” (Bāyazīd.)
“His love entered and removed all besides Him and left no
trace of anything else, so that it remained single even as He is
single.” (Bāyazīd.)
“To feel at one with God for a moment is better than all
men’s acts of worship from the beginning to the end of the
world.” (Shiblī.)
“Fear of the Fire, in comparison with fear of being parted
from the Beloved, is like a drop of water cast into the mightiest
ocean.” (Dhu ’l-Nūn.)
“Unless I have the face of my heart towards Thee,
I deem prayer unworthy to be reckoned as prayer.
If I turn my face to the Kaʿba, ’tis for love of Thine;
Otherwise I am quit both of prayer and Kaʿba.”
(Jalāluddīn Rūmī.)
Love, again, is the divine instinct of the soul impelling it to realise
its nature and destiny. The soul is the first-born of God: before the
creation of the universe it lived and moved and had its being in Him,
and during its earthly manifestation it is a stranger in exile, ever
pining to return to its home.
“This is Love: to fly heavenward,
To rend, every instant, a hundred veils;
The first moment, to renounce life;
The last step, to fare without feet;
To regard this world as invisible,
Not to see what appears to one’s self.”
All the love-romances and allegories of Sūfī poetry--the tales of Laylā
and Majnūn, Yūsuf (Joseph) and Zulaykhā, Salāmān and Absāl, the Moth
and the Candle, the Nightingale and the Rose--are shadow-pictures
of the soul’s passionate longing to be reunited with God. It is
impossible, in the brief space at my command, to give the reader more
than a passing glimpse of the treasures which the exuberant fancy of
the East has heaped together in every room of this enchanted palace.
The soul is likened to a moaning dove that has lost her mate; to a reed
torn from its bed and made into a flute whose plaintive music fills the
eye with tears; to a falcon summoned by the fowler’s whistle to perch
again upon his wrist; to snow melting in the sun and mounting as vapour
to the sky; to a frenzied camel swiftly plunging through the desert
by night; to a caged parrot, a fish on dry land, a pawn that seeks to
become a king.
These figures imply that God is conceived as transcendent, and that the
soul cannot reach Him without taking what Plotinus in a splendid phrase
calls “the flight of the Alone to the Alone.” Jalāluddīn says:
“The motion of every atom is towards its origin;
A man comes to be the thing on which he is bent.
By the attraction of fondness and yearning, the soul and the heart
Assume the qualities of the Beloved, who is the Soul of souls.”
‘A man comes to be the thing on which he is bent’: what, then, does the
Sūfī become? Eckhart in one of his sermons quotes the saying of St.
Augustine that Man _is_ what he loves, and adds this comment:
“If he loves a stone, he is a stone; if he loves a man, he is
a man; if he loves God--I dare not say more, for if I said that he
would then be God, ye might stone me.”
The Moslem mystics enjoyed greater freedom of speech than their
Christian brethren who owed allegiance to the medieval Catholic Church,
and if they went too far the plea of ecstasy was generally accepted as
a sufficient excuse. Whether they emphasise the outward or the inward
aspect of unification, the transcendence or the immanence of God, their
expressions are bold and uncompromising. Thus Abū Saʿīd:
“In my heart Thou dwellest--else with blood I’ll drench it;
In mine eye Thou glowest--else with tears I’ll quench it.
Only to be one with Thee my soul desireth--
Else from out my body, by hook or crook, I’ll wrench it!”
Jalāluddīn Rūmī proclaims that the soul’s love of God is God’s love of
the soul, and that in loving the soul God loves Himself, for He draws
home to Himself that which in its essence is divine.
“Our copper,” says the poet, “has been transmuted by this rare
alchemy,” meaning that the base alloy of self has been purified and
spiritualised. In another ode he says:
“O my soul, I searched from end to end: I saw in thee naught save
the Beloved;
Call me not infidel, O my soul, if I say that thou thyself art He.”
And yet more plainly:
“Ye who in search of God, of God, pursue,
Ye need not search for God is you, is you!
Why seek ye something that was missing ne’er?
Save you none is, but you are--where, oh, where?”
Where is the lover when the Beloved has displayed Himself? Nowhere and
everywhere: his individuality has passed away from him. In the bridal
chamber of Unity God celebrates the mystical marriage of the soul.