LOVE IN SUFI POETRY Gabriel Hartley Based on an essay by Matthew Kelly LOVE Love totally dominates and determines the Sufi's inward and psychological states. QURANIC MESSAGE: RECIPROCAL LOVE God wants people to love him. Their love for God follows upon His love for them. "...whom He loves, and who love Him" (5:54). Sufi mystics infer from this verse that love cannot be learned. It is the result of divine grace, and the initiative comes from God. DUALITY: HUMAN LOVER / DIVINE BELOVED This feeling of God's desire "to love and to be loved" inspired Rumi to suggest: Not a single lover would seek union if the Beloved were not seeking it. SEARCHING FOR A LANGUAGE OF LOVE All aspects of creation and spiritual aspiration are presented in an imaginal language fired by love. ishq = passionate love (more accurately describes the poets inner response to the revelation of the Qur'an) hubb & mahabba = measured affection for God NECESSITY Love is no longer merely an expression of gratitude for the blessings of God; it is no longer content with rigorous asceticism and meticulous ritual observance. It becomes an absolute necessity, entailing neither enjoyment nor alleviation, but intensifying as the reciprocity of the lover and the loved comes into effect. VEILS BEHIND VEILS The language of romantic love is readily accessible to be adapted as the metaphoric language of the spiritual journey. Nothing with Rumi can be taken literally: one must always be aware of the meaning behind the meaning, the veils behind veils. THE SOULS SEARCH The translator Jonathon Star says that Rumi, like other Sufi poets, At the deepest level of his poetry tells only one story: the soul's search for the Beloved. METAPHOR Love is the attribute of God, who has no need of anyone. To be in love with other than Him is metaphorical love. God cannot be defined. He can only be described with symbol, metaphor, or analogy, which eventually also prove to be inadequate. THE JOURNEY TO REUNION The journey to reunion with God was made by constant purification and, in exchange, qualification with God's attributes. For the Sufi mystic, "the qualities of the Beloved enter in the place of the qualities of the lover." LOVES JIHAD This is a heightened sense of jihad, when jihad is thought of as the personal struggle against one's own shortcomings that is required of all Muslims so that they can perfect their submission. Result: annihilation in the Beloved TAWHID The Sufi understanding of the annihilation of the self in the Beloved can be regarded as an expression of the ultimate understanding of tawhid asserting God's unity. to declare that God is One THE FACE OF GOD It is the tawhid that underpins the expression of love in Sufi poetry because the true lover sees everything as pertaining to his beloved. "Withersoever ye turn, there is the face of God" (Surah 2:115). CREATION AS LOVE Because "love is desire and need," it is stated that God, at the level of His attributes, created the world because He desired (or "loved") to be known. "But for thee I would not have made the celestial spheres."