If there had not been love,
How should there have been existence?
How should bread have attached itself to you
and become (assimilated to) you.

The perfected pattern of the human form is coherence with God’s love. Humanity drinks from the spring inspired by God. The drink inspired by God will remain forever, until perpetuity (Abad).

When we talk about love our aim is true love (ishq haqiqi), not metaphorical love (ishq majazi). Ishq Majazi is related to the material transient world, but the real or true love, ishq haqiqi, is the love which is felt toward the infinite God. The real love is eternal and infinite.

The love, if its purpose is color, won’t be love.
Eventually it will be shame…

A lover acquainted and faced with true love will get burned in the heat and realize that the material world is temporary and inconstant. The lover will think how to reach the truth (Mashooq Haqiqi) day and night, and his/her feelings, respect, and appreciation toward any element in the world will grow stronger as they will be connected to the original existence.

Elements which were once valuable can lose their value. But not love: it increases the lover’s power from within. Love is an important and powerful element, powering the body inward (Batn) and outward (Zaaher) until it evolves and love can be the medicine of all causes, strengthening faith and relieving sorrow and anxiety.

Whoever tears clothes due to love
Will be completely clean and clear from greed and fault.
Be happy, lover of a happy trade,
You are the physician of all of our causes.
Love raised dust to sky,
And made mountains start dancing.

A lover like Rumi will have a special desire to become Gnostic; he or she will be drawn to this hard journey and fight their way through, driven by the ecstasies of desire. The Gnostic lover will arrange life’s style and other activities.

The Gnostic experiences a state of pain and heartache that burns from within. The burning becomes so strong and painful that it forces the lover to scream and shout. But these shouts emerge as symphonic rhymes and poems.

Search us in love, and search love in us
Sometimes we praise love, and sometimes love praises us

Rumi believed that love clears the heart, brings harmony, decreases prejudice, and brings people closer to each other.

The Gnostic love is love of humanity. It’s not lust or heartache, but love without prejudice. It’s the kind of love that takes away selfishness and brings one closer to God. Rumi’s love and understanding started at a place of spiritual retreat (Khaaneqa). Singing (semah) in the retreat made his love stronger.

Poems, music, and dance are resources of Gnostic, not the target; the aim is to reach the truth. Rumi told us the good news: that one day the religion of love will capture the entire world.

We are all witnessing the love Rumi predicted, and most people are in love with his words.

The lover’s ailment is different from all other ailments;
Love is an astrolabe of God’s mysteries.
Love may be from this side or that side;
in the end it leads us to that King.
Though the expression of the tongue is enlightening,
the tongue-less love is more expressive.

Love is the only way to recognize God, and after the power of God, love is the only power. Mansur al-Hallaj said, “The ascension of men is love!”

Whoever does not have love of the lover in his head,
Bring that person a pack-saddle and bridle.

Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali wrote about love: “Love is eagerness to find something that you love; therefore, love has variety. But love in the Gnostic and spiritual world is love of God. Love is the base of success.”

After Rumi discovered his self and felt what was inside of him, he began to see in others what was in him; this way, he unified the love of God with the love of humanity. He came to the conclusion that to love human beings is to love God.

Rumi said:

A servant is in desire of freedom.
A lover does not want freedom until perpetuity.

Rumi was a Gnostic poet. Rumi did all things with love: he prayed with love, and he died with love, only to reach the only Lover.

God created me from the wine of love,
I will still be love even I am dead.

I do not think that there is one human being in the entire world without love. Every human being is in love either with worldly materials or in love with God.

The description of Gnostic love is with those worlds that describes ishq majazi, but if readers do not pay attention or they are not familiar with these kinds of poems, poets and their aim, readers might think that the aim of these Gnostic poets are ishq majazi, not true love.

Love is the fundamental of the Gnostic and without love we are not able to find a Gnostic.

Rumi developed his perfection through boundless love and then he taught that love to thousands of students and followers through his poems and other works. He became a guide to mankind: from East to West, North to South, the world became his territory. He conquered the world with love, and as the sound of his feet still reflecting in the corridor of the times, Rumi describes how love remains forever:

Whatever is in this world, love is its soul.
Whatever you see is not permanent, except love.
The only way to reach the sky is from inside. Move the wings of love.
When the wings of love became strong, there is no need for a ladder.

Gnostic lovers like Rumi drink from the cup of truth and are cleansed by the truth, which has been inspired by God; their hearts are clear as crystal.

Gnostics drink from the cup of truth,
They knew the secrets and covered those secrets.
Whenever they taught the mystery of truth to anybody,
They sealed and sewed up his lips.”

Furthermore, love of these true men cannot be described in writing or speaking, as Rumi said:

Love cannot be contained in an exchange of words.
Love is a fathomless ocean.

Every Gnostic can be a poet, but not every poet is a Gnostic, as they might be in love, but their love may be ishq majazi. I would like to conclude this article with another poem from Rumi:

There is no end to describe these words.

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.
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• 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.