Question: “Those who are not preoccupied with elevated goals will be consumed by lowly troubles.” What needs to be understood from this statement?

Answer: If a person is to be burdened by troubles, they should be burdened with elevated or sublime problems.             One such trouble we should burden ourselves with is our nearness to God. Are we responding to the countless blessings God has bestowed upon us the way we should? Are we able to use the Prophetic teachings as guidelines for that proper response?

Bediuzzaman Said Nursi said:

“The Worship of God is not an act through which to demand a Divine reward in the future, but rather the necessary result of a past Divine favor.”

“Worship is not for future rewards; it is offered for blessings that have already been given.”

Essentially, everything is given to us as Divine favors. While this is a fact, would it not be disrespectful to God to claim we have deserved even more, for we think we have fulfilled everything? Some have even considered the usage of pronouns such as “I, you, we,” as overstepping our territory vis-à-vis God Almighty. Get rid of the self so that He, God Almighty, may manifest within your heart. Take yourself out of the equation. For even our existence is only a matter of contingency, whereas the existence of the One Who is the Ultimate Truth and Ever-Constant one is absolute. We are not more than the shadow of the shadow of the shadow of His Existence.

In this sense we have no right to claim anything since He has given, and gives, everything.

No matter how long we live, even if we were to live 950 years like Prophet Noah did, peace be upon him, our sole duty should still be servanthood to God.

Even if we lived as long as he did and spent the entirety of our years in servitude to God in full sincerity, we would still not be able to express full gratitude for the bounties bestowed upon us by God.

We should do our best to occupy ourselves with this concern.

This should be the goal of all people who have chosen the path of the Prophets, strive to deliver God’s message, and make Him known to all of humanity. Making the hearts of others beat with His love and with excitement should be the grand purpose of life.

If one does not assume such lofty goals, lowly troubles will consequently befall them and plague their minds. One becomes occupied with pursuits such as living in extravagant houses, getting the best job with the highest pay, driving the nicest cars, or other worldly pleasures. The heart becomes obsessed with these fleeting desires, causing the person to unknowingly walk down the path of Satan.

The following saying, while being slightly changed, belongs to the Muslim jurist Imam Shafi:

“If you do not occupy yourself with the truth, falsehood occupies you.”

May God protect us from this truth!

Satan has made it his mission to drive us astray from the path of God and to fill our minds with falsehoods so that the truth may escape our grasp. He has had a burning hatred and contempt towards humankind from the very beginning. The only way to stand upright against Satan is to stand in front of God in devoted servanthood, bowing down, prostrating, and spilling your heart out in front of Him. This is based upon having a strong connection with Him. A weak connection will not last in the face of such temptations         

Bediuzzaman said, “A lie is a word of unbelief.” Everyone that lies does not become an unbeliever, but from the perspective of a believer, it is a characteristic that is associated with denying the biggest truth, God’s existence. God’s Messenger, peace and blessings be upon him, lists the three traits of a hypocrite. These and many more can be seen within an unbeliever:          

The first: he lies when he speaks.   

The second: he does not deliver on his promise.

And lastly: he betrays trust when entrusted with something.

Sometimes, a fourth attribute is mentioned:

“When he makes a promise, he wrongs you and breaches it.”          

The first trait is rooted in deceit; a hypocrite’s attribute is an unbeliever’s attribute. Lying is mentioned; however, slandering also falls into that category. It is even worse to have a slander that supports such a lie. This is because lying primarily concerns one’s self, whereas slandering questions others’ dignity and reputation. In order to save oneself from oppression, if people are defaming and ostracizing others, they need to know that this is wrong and it falls under the first category of lying, for what they are attributing to others is false.

There is always hope that repentance can allow us to turn back to God and be cleansed. Even major sins, such as these, can be removed with enough sincere repentance.

There are many steps that must be taken if one wishes to become closer to God, distance themselves from loving material goods, stay away from sin, and avoid spreading falsehoods.

Repentance (istighfar) comes first, as it is required to clean the slate and start anew. Following that, one must turn to God completely (tawba). Then, one must try to do it wholeheartedly (inaba). Another step in this journey is awba, which for those who are nearest to God Almighty is “turning to God in contrition.”

If one of these people that had turned to God in contrition glanced at something forbidden, 60 years later when he remembers it, he says, “I repent a million times! How could I have fallen into doing such a thing, my Lord!’”

The Glorious Prophet also praised those who repented much: “Glad tidings to the person whose record is filled with repentance.”

Abu Hurayra is known to have spent his time in remembrance and glorifications of God – as many as twelve thousand times daily, including supplications of the Prophet:

“O God Who is beyond any faults, I seek refuge from everything that doesn’t please You. I am seeking Your mercy and for the forgiveness of my sins. Dear Lord, increase me in knowledge and grant me salvation, and keep my heart steadfast; bestow blessings unto me; without doubt you are gracious, the Giver.”

Again, Abu Hurayra repeated such prayers twelve thousand times every day. It may seem strange that he repented so much. When asked about it he said, “I will repeat [prayers] as many times as the sins I have.” I wonder what sin he might have committed, when he was only among the poorest students of Ashab al-Suffa in Medina. How could he ever do any sin when he never abandoned the Prophet and lived a humble life in hunger? His is an example of awba, turning to God in contrition.

If you look at the prayers of Prophet Muhammad, Moses, Jesus, Jacob, and Joseph, peace be upon them all, you might assume that they did nothing but sin. They considered even an innocent word or faintest thought that crossed their imagination as sin, and developed an attitude accordingly, as if they committed murder. By the way, we have to acknowledge that these great souls never committed a sin as we understand what a sin is.

May God Almighty grant us success in knowing them!

“I commanded you the good but I haven’t taken it on board myself!
I haven’t been on the straight path
Be on the straight path! was my word to you.”
Busiri

Tajalli (manifestation), which has almost the same meaning as showing itself, display, and appearance, in the language of Sufism means being favored with God’s special gifts. It also denotes that the Divine mysteries have become apparent in the heart of the seeker by means of the light of knowledge of God Almighty. Every traveler to the Ultimate Truth can feel this favor in the conscience according to capacity and station.

The manifestation which is felt and perceived in every realm, be it low or high or simple or composed of parts, especially those included in humanity, which has the potential to attain perfection in all fields and is the most polished mirror to God, is called the manifestation of (Divine) works. A step forward is the manifes­tation of (Divine) Acts, which means that the Divine Acts are perceived with their meanings and purposes in the heart of the servants who are favored with glimpses of the manifestation of the Names as a result of their having a true view of God and His Acts with God’s help, but without falling into naturalism. The manifestation of the (Divine) Names is when travelers take on the color of the Divine Names, with their feelings becoming mirrors to them. After this is the manifestation of the Divine Compas­sionateness or the particular manifestation and the manifestation of the Divine Mercifulness or the universal manifestation. The former is the manifestation with which the believers, including in partic­ular the most loyal ones, are favored and by which they are embraced from all sides, while the latter denotes the manifesta­tion with which God favors the whole of creation by giving it existence and by maintaining it. Believers come to perceive in their hearts one or some of the Divine Attributes with their true nature, meanings and actions. This is the manifestation of the Divine Attributes. God elevates His servants whom He has favored with this manifestation to such a rank that, under the guid­ance of the Attribute or Attributes manifested, He makes them hear sounds others cannot hear and see things others cannot hear. There is another kind of manifestation that is connected with the Divine Attributes and this is called the manifestation pertaining to the Attributes; that is, it is purely a manifestation of an Attri­bute in a way that does not bring to mind the Divine Being Who is possessed of this Attribute. If, in particular, the Existence and Knowledge of God manifest themselves in the heart of a perfect­ed believer in all their nature, meaning and actions, in the compa­ny of other Names and Attributes, this is called the manifestation pertaining to the Divine Being Himself. Although the manifesta­tions of the Divine Names and Attributes are usually ignored with regard to this greatest and most intense manifestation, what is true in respect of this is that the Necessarily Existent One can­not be viewed and considered without the veil of the Names and the imaginary outlines that are drawn by the Attributes.

The first and universal manifestation that pertains to the Divine Being Himself occurred as the special manifestation of His Divinity and Lordship on Prophet Muhammad, who was also known as Ahmad and Mahmud, and who was regarded as the ultimate cause for the whole creation being transferred from existence in the (Divine) Knowledge to the external, sensed existence. The community of Muhammad, upon him be peace and blessings, has a particular share, albeit shadowy in this manifestation. What Prophet Moses, upon him be peace, experienced on Mount Sinai was an aspect of this greatest, all-embracing mani­festation of the Divine Lordship which occurred by means of the mountain beyond all human concepts of modality.

We can approach this last point from the viewpoint of Sufism as follows:

Like the desire of Prophet Adam for the forbidden tree, which resulted in all of his descendants coming to this world, including, in particular, the greatest of them all, Prophet Muhammad, upon him be peace and blessings, Prophet Moses had an intense love for the Truly Existent One and an irresistible desire to speak to Him. At a time when the evident signs of his Prophethood and Messengership came one after the other, he sighed from the bot­tom of his heart with an overflowing yearning: “Show me Your­self, that I may look upon You!” (7:143). The Voice of the Pow­er, Which always speaks with wisdom, answered: “Never can you see Me (with your eyes in the world).” The Almighty meant: How can you see Me, seeing that you are still behind the veil of seeing Me and prevented by separation, being in the corporeal world. You are a shadow of the light of My Existence. If You rise to the horizon of seeing Me by Me, then you can see Me, but not with your eyes as I declared, Eyes comprehend Him not (6:103).

When you desire to look, you must look at the mountain of exis­tence with the eyes of non-existence so that the mountain of exis­tence may remain as it is and you will be able to see what you desire to.

Nevertheless, none except Prophet Muhammad would be favored with this manifestation. So, for an answer to Moses’ overflowing yearning to see the Divine Being and refusal to the appeal to see Him with his eyes in the world, the Almighty Lord displayed a manifestation of His Lordship on Mount Sinai or the nature of Moses, and either the Mount or both it and Moses shook violently and fell down as if struck by lightning. When the teaching for guidance had finished, Moses woke up from his faint that had been caused by the might of a manifestation of the Divine Lordship, and said: “O God! I proclaim that You are free from all kinds of defect, and that You alone are All-Holy (to be worshipped as God, and the Lord). From now on I turn to You with the consideration of annihilation in You and subsistence by You. We can observe You in Your signs, not with the darkness of our egos, but with the light of Your Being. I am among the first to believe in this truth.”

The gist of the matter is:

Love functioned as if the soul of Sinai, and
when Sinai was intoxicated with love, Moses fell down in swoon.

The manifestation of the Lordship has different veils:

The first is the manifestation of the Being Himself. This man­ifestation being beyond the Names and Attributes, a traveler who experiences it considers only the Divine Being Himself. Yazi­cizade Mehmed Efendi, the author of Muhammadiya, implicitly criticizes the Mu‘tazilites who deny a vision of God even in the Hereafter and expresses this spiritual perception as follows:

Since His image shows itself wholly within my soul,
My heart wipes away both name and form from this imaginary picture.
As it is possible to view Your Face and I desire to view It,
For I keep my ears free from the words of the Mu‘tazilites.

The manifestation of the Divine Attributes, which is the sec­ond category or degree, is the manifestation of one or more of cer­tain Attributes. This has been dealt with in two sub-categories:

The first is the manifestation of the Divine Majesty, with which people of self-possession are favored, and the other is the manifesta­tion of the Divine Grace, of which people of coloring feel in need.

If those who have not attained self-possession and wakefulness receive the manifestation of the Attribute of Existence, they may say, as Junayd al-Baghdadi said: “There is but He under my robe.” When those who are not people of self-possession are visited by the mani­festation of the Attribute of Oneness, they can express the state they fall into with pleasure, like Bayazid al-Bistami, who said: “Glory be to me, how exalted my being is!” If they are invaded by the manifes­tation of the Attribute of Permanence, they can utter the sentence that is irreconcilable with the rules of Shari‘a, that Hallaj al-Mansur [1] did: “I am the Truth (and Ever-Constant)!” [2]

When this manifestation occurs as the manifestation of the Divine Power and Will and is received in its true nature in wakefulness, and not in a state of pleasure, it will be as expressed: When you threw, it was not you who threw, but God threw (8:17). It is only Prophet Muhammad, the master of creatures, upon him be peace and blessings, who could receive this manifestation in its originality and true nature. If it is the manifestation of the Divine Creativity, it is Prophet Jesus who became a polished mir­ror to it in an extraordinary manner, as stated in the verse (3:49): I fashion for you out of clay something in the shape of a bird, then I breathe into it, and it becomes a bird by God’s leave.

The third is the manifestation of Divine Acts. This manifestation is an aspect of the manifestation of Divine Attributes and means that temporary acts have been annihilated in everlasting Acts. The author of Muhammadiya expresses this also in a vivid style as follows:

The All-Beautiful Beloved One has displayed His Light
again from the palace of Majesty;
this is why I am once more enraptured and crazy
because of the wine of His being all-eternal with no beginning.
My eyes and heart have removed from themselves the veil of ignorance,
and a call has been made to my soul from the One All-Exalted.
I have given up attachment to love as I have found His love.
Those who have found His love have abandoned grief-laden love.

Initiates lying in wait for a manifestation sometimes become so intoxicated that they feel Him in whatever they see. It even occurs that as they are so immersed in their present state, they see themselves in whatever they look at and cannot help but utter words that are irreconcilable with the rules of the Shari‘a, such as “I am the Truth,” or “Is there anybody else save me in both worlds?”

So far many have made such confusions and uttered such words. We can cite here only a single example:

I am not myself, if I am myself, then “he” is You;
If I am wearing a shirt, it is also You.
Full of suffering on Your way, I am left without body and soul;
If I still have a body and soul, then they are but You.

 The manifestations that cause those receiving them to utter such words are manifestations connected with the Attributes. Those deceived by their reason or the illusions which they take for the truth, have fallen away from the sphere illuminated by the master of the creatures, upon him be peace and blessings. They have both ruined themselves and deceived others. Let us listen to what the author of Mizanu’l-‘Irfan says about the state of such people:

If an intense manifestation comes from the Divine Being,
some initiates lose balance in this state.
This is a hard trial and great trouble for the initiate.
If he is not a perfected guide or
under the guidance of such a perfected one,
he may be hanged like Hallaj al-Mansur.
This is truly a difficult state for an initiate:
Whoever utters, “I am the Truth,” without being like Mansur,
he will become an unbeliever (with his) body and soul.
In short, this state is a slippery place,
Where the perfected ones among the saints do not long remain.

O God! Include us among Your servants sincere (in faith and practicing the religion), and endowed with sincerity, and God-revering, pious, and abstinent from all forbidden things big or small, and among those of asceticism and those near-stationed to You. And bestow blessings and peace on our master Muham­mad and on his Family and Companions, all of them.

Notes

1. Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj (857–309) is famous for his utterance “I am the Truth.” He mostly lived is Basra. He is also famous for his austerities. (Tr.)
2. God’s manifestation with His Attribute of Oneness means His overall manifes­tation throughout the universe with His unique Grandeur, and this is why one who experiences it utters what al-Bistami uttered. God’s being the (Ultimate) Truth (al-Haqq) also means His being constant and unchanging, for haqq also means stable, established and constant. This explains why one experiencing this manifestation may make utterances like that which al-Hallaj made. (Tr.)

The best place to begin this discussion is with the Qur’an. There are numerous verses that mention love, but whenever the word love is used “the quality is always ascribed to God and human beings, and nothing else; and God’s love is always directed at human beings.” Not only does this mean that the relationship between God and human beings is unique, but love defines that unique relationship. In the verses that mention love for God, the Qur’an makes two important points. Firstly, God wants people to love him, and secondly, their love for God follows upon His love for them. The verse of the Qur’an most cited for this is “…whom He loves, and who love Him” (5:54). The inferences that Sufi mystics have drawn from this verse is that love cannot be learned, it is the result of divine grace, and the initiative comes from God. 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.

The message of the Qur’an compelled Muslims to understand their relationship with God as one requiring reciprocated love. Sufi poets then searched for a vocabulary to describe their love for God, including words not found in the Qur’an or Hadiths.

In the early period of Sufism “the majority of teachings on love are contained in poems and brief statements that focus upon the human love for God, wherein there is always a duality between the human lover and the Divine Beloved.” This developed into a trend within Sufi thought in which “all aspects of creation and spiritual aspiration are presented in an imaginal language fired by love.” An important development in this trend was the use of the word for passionate love, ishq, rather than the more accepted vocabulary of the Qur’an. The Qur’anic terms for love are hubb and mahabba that describe the measured affection of God. Ishq came into the lexicon of Sufi poetry to describe “the essential desire for God and the love of God as an essential attribute, which fills the heart of the mystic.” Using the word ishq in a religious context means that:

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.

By redefining their love for God as ishq, the early Sufi poets extended their vocabulary, and by doing this they could more accurately describe their inner response to the revelation of the Qur’an. The recognition of two types of love is expressed by Rabia in the following quatrain:

Two loves I give thee, love that yearns.
And love because thy due is love.
My yearning, my remembrance turns
To Thee, nor lets it from thee rove.

Here, Rabia identifies the spontaneous love for God she feels within herself – and the dutiful love she is obliged to give to God in the performance of her religious responsibilities. As Chittick wrote, “Love pertains to the experiential dimension of Sufism, not the theoretical; it must be experienced to be understood.” Sufism connects experiential knowledge to the belief that “nothing is dearer to God than that man loves him.” A mystic and poet who lived in Anatolia in the same period as Rumi, Yunus Emre, described the intensifying experience of love for God:

Your love has wrested me away from me
You’re the one I need, you’re the one I crave.
Day and night I burn, gripped by agony,
You’re the one I need, you’re the one I crave.
For Yunus Emre, “love is the most powerful of everything.”

When love for God is described in terms of passion then the language of romantic love is readily accessible to be adapted as the metaphoric language of the spiritual journey. In Sufi poetry there is a convention of the spiritual supplicant being called the lover of God, while God is referred to as the Beloved. Throughout Sufi poetry we read verses that elaborate ideas about the relationship of the lover and the Beloved. A good example of this is seen in this verse by Rumi:

Lovers share a sacred decree –
to seek the Beloved.
They roll head over heels
rushing toward the Beautiful One
like a torrent of water.

Here God has two titles, the Beloved and the Beautiful One, but this poem could easily be read as secular love poetry. In this verse Rumi includes the beliefs that the impetus to love comes from God, as it is a sacred decree, and doing so is as unstoppable as the rush of water.

Another poem of Rumi that can be read as secular love poetry uses less recognizable references to God:

In one sweet moment
She burst from my heart.
There we sat on the floor,
drinking ruby wine.
Trapped by her beauty,
I saw and I touched –
My whole face became eyes,
All my eyes became hands.

Through the use of the conventional poetic symbols of his era, for example, drinking wine as a symbol for spiritual intoxication, the poet again express both secular and spiritual meanings simultaneously. As one of the translators of the above piece comments in his introduction to the selection of Rumi’s poems:

Nothing with Rumi can be taken literally: One must always be aware of the meaning behind the meaning, and the veils behind veils.

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.”

For Rumi, passionate love, ishq, has two expressions. The first is love in the material world, “like the love between male and female”, and the second is the “real love,” which is the “love felt toward God.” These couplets of Rumi’s explain how the poet signified both aspects of ishq:

Love is the attribute of God, who has no need of anyone. To be in love with other than Him is metaphorical love.
And
Love, be it real or metaphorical,
Ultimately takes humans to God.

These two couplets express two fundamental beliefs of Sufism. In the first couplet we read that love is an attribute of God – as stated in the Qur’an. In the second we see that love “takes humans to God.”

While the Qur’an shows that love is an attribute of God, for many adherents of the Sufi tradition love is God’s most important attribute because for the spiritual journey of the wayfarer, love provides the path that takes them to reunion with God. In Rumi’s “spiritual masterpiece,” the Masnavi, the poet seeks to show that “God is known primarily through love.” The significance given to love in this part of the Islamic tradition has allowed some to suggest simply that “God is Love.” However, it is important to note that love is not the only attribute of God:

…He is Mercy, Knowledge, Life, Power and Will. He possesses all these qualities; His Being is the same as their Being; but we may not say that God is Mercy and nothing else, or that He is Knowledge and nothing else… He possesses all His Attributes absolutely, yet in His Essence He is beyond them all.

More than a generation before Rumi the mystic Farid al-Din Attar (d.1220) wrote a variation of the shahada (testimony of faith) as la ilaha illa ishq – No God but Love. In his Divan Rumi shows that he did not believe God could be defined as such. In fact, this excerpt from the Divan could be commenting on the above phrase of Attar:

Others call Thee Love, but I call Thee the Sultan of Love – oh Thou who are beyond the concept of this or that, do not go without me!

Rumi’s poetry not only shows that God cannot be defined but He can only be described with symbol, metaphor or analogy, which eventually also proves to be inadequate:

All of these are symbols – I mean that the other
world keeps coming into this world.
Like cream hidden in the soul of milk, No place
keeps coming into this place.
Like intellect concealed in blood and skin, the
Traceless keeps entering into traces.
And from beyond the intellect, beautiful Love
comes dragging its skirts, a cup of wine in its hand.
And from beyond Love, that Indescribable One
who can only be called “That” keeps coming.

In this piece of sublime verse Rumi uses analogy to communicate a sense of God. We also see an explanation of the variance of love and intellect, but most importantly, embedded in the poetry, Rumi presents the difference between love as an attribute of God, and “the Indescribable One who can only be called ‘That'” which is God.

As we saw in one of the couplets quoted above, Rumi believed that love, “real or metaphorical, ultimately takes humans to God.” 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.” 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.”

For the Sufi mystic, however, the demand of reunion with God was to “qualify yourself with the qualities of God,” which was achieved by constant mental struggle to exchange the base qualities of the mystic for the praiseworthy qualities by which God has described himself in the Qur’anic revelation. The Mevlevi Sufi, Sefik Can, suggests this is achieved when “The goal of the Sufi mystic is to understand and love The One who has created humankind.” The connection of love to reunion with God is explained when Sefik Can says “In the Sufi tradition, love is described as annihilation in the Beloved.” Again, the poetry of Rumi makes a vivid representation of this teaching:

Love came and it made me empty.
Love came and it filled me with the Beloved.
It became the blood in my body
It became my arms and my legs.
It became everything!
Now all I have is a name,
The rest belongs to the Beloved.

The verse describes the progressive, experiential knowledge of love. First came abandonment of the ego. Then, came submission whereby one no longer acts according to the ego, but in submission to the Beloved who now becomes “… his hearing with which he hears, his seeing with which he sees, his hand with which he strikes and his foot with which he walks…” as in the well-known hadith qudsi. 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. Annemarie Schimmel suggests that “to declare that God is One is the goal of religious life for the Muslim in general and the Sufi in particular.” An elaboration of this idea leads to the assertion that only God has real existence and hence only God has the right to say “I,” for “God is the only true subject.”

It is the tawhid that underpins the expression of love in Sufi poetry because “the true lover sees everything as pertaining to his beloved.” This is a teaching that Rumi sought to convey in the Masnavi-ye Ma’navi, for he intended

… to coax out of his readers the misapprehension that the world is made up of a multitude of separate selves apart from God and into the knowledge that all reality subsists only in relation to God.

It is a state of mind whereby “the poets recognized God everywhere,” as Annemarie Schimmel said, citing the verse of the Qur’an that inspired this awareness: “Withersoever ye turn, there is the face of God” (Surah 2/109). Two couplets quoted by Schimmel use the above-mentioned symbolism of wine to begin their explanation of tawhid:

The glass is all and the wine is naught,
Or the glass is naught and the wine is all –
but the vocabulary of religion concludes the realization:
That all that is, is He indeed:
Soul and loved one and heart and creed.

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. Furthermore, God’s love for the Prophet is evident in this saying, “But for thee I would not have made the celestial spheres.” Ultimately, God’s desire to be revealed through the prophets and the saints “was the motivating force in His creation of the universe,” and all the world’s forms, movements and activities result from that original love. On this Rumi wrote:

The creatures are set in motion by Love, Love by Eternity-without-beginning; the wind dances because of the spheres, the trees because of the wind.

When we use the metaphor of the spiritual journey, we know from Sufi poetry that love is the vehicle par excellence for the traveller.

Bibliography

• Can, Sefik. 2005. The Fundamentals of Rumi’s Thought: A Mevlevi Sufi Perspective. Translated by Cuneyt Eroglu and Zeki Saritoprak, New Jersey: The Light Inc.
• Chittick, William C. 1983. The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, Albany: State University of New York Press.
• Lumbard, J.E.B. 2007. “From Hubb to Ishq: The Development of Love in Early Sufism.” Journal of Islamic Studies, 18:3, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Murata, S. and Chittick, W.C. 1994. The Vision of Islam, London: I.B. TAURIS.
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• Rumi. 2006. Spiritual Verses: The First Book of the Masnavi-ye Ma’navi, translated by Alan Williams, London: Penguin,.
• Schimmel, A. 1975. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. University of North Carolina Press.
• Schimmel, A. 1982. As Through a Veil, Mystical Poetry in Islam. New York: Columbia University Press.
• von Donzel, E., Lewis, B., and Pellat, C. (eds). 1978. The Encyclopedia of Islam, New Edition, Vol. 4, Leidin, Netherlands: E.J. Brill.
• Yunus Emre, trans. Turgut Durduran. http://www.stwing.upenn.edu. Accessed 17/5/08.