Insight Editions · No. 111
Divine Love
Islamic Literature and the Path to God
William C. Chittick
William C. Chittick presents medieval Persian and Arabic Sufi writings on love, divine-human relations, and the spiritual path toward God.
A study guide to Divine Love by William C. Chittick. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
About the Book
William C. Chittick's Divine Love: Islamic Literature and the Path to God (Yale University Press, 2013) is an anthology with an argument. It gathers Persian and Arabic prose on love from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, chiefly Maybudi, Samani, Ansari and Ahmad Ghazali, and sets it inside a theology in which love is the bridge between the One and the many.
In one sentence: for Chittick's authors, love is the creative force behind everything ("He loves them" comes first), the human task is to direct an inescapable love toward its only worthy object by following the Prophet, and the path ends where love began, in tawhid, where lover and Beloved both disappear and love alone remains.
The argument
The argument runs in five steps. First, tawhid: since God alone is truly real, He alone is truly lovable, and every other love is a metaphor, a "bridge to the reality". Second, the two commands: the creative command (Be!) brings everything into existence loving, because God loves; the religious command (Follow me) asks people to direct that love freely. Third, the human peculiarity: only Adam, taught all the names and made of humble dust, could carry the Trust, and so only Adamites can love God in Himself and suffer for it. Fourth, the path: remembrance, states and stations, trial and jealousy burn away every "other", beginning with the self. Fifth, the goal: annihilation and subsistence, poverty, and colorlessness, where nothing remains but love, which is God's own Essence.
Chapter map
Chittick translates consistently: mahabba is "love", ishq "passion", dusti "friendship", marifa "recognition", and the Persian "Pir of the Tariqah" is Ansari as quoted by Maybudi. Kashf means Maybudi's commentary, Rawh Samani's Repose of the Spirits, Sawanih Ahmad Ghazali's Apparitions, Manazil and Maydan Ansari's Way Stations and One Hundred Fields. Maybudi's commentary has three "stages" per passage; the third, mystical one is the one quoted.
1. Foreword, Preface and the Theological Context
Nasr's foreword and Chittick's preface explain why a book on love in Islam needs writing at all, which sources it uses and how its words for love are translated. Chapter 1 then lays the theological ground: tawhid, the two commands, the two verses on love, Essence and attributes, the complementary names, mercy, beginningless love and the primordial Muhammad.
- Few people link love with Islam, yet Chittick now holds that if any single word sums up Islamic spirituality, "it should surely be love."
- The book is an anthology of Persian and Arabic prose on divine love from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, set inside a theological vision that gives love the role of bridging the divine and the human.
- Its chief sources are Maybudi's Qur'an commentary Unveiling of the Secrets, Samani's Repose of the Spirits, Ansari, and Ahmad Ghazali's Apparitions.
- The Shahadah gives three issues: lovers, the Beloved and love.
- Two divine commands: the creative command (Be!), which cannot be disobeyed, and the religious command, which can.
- Two verses ground all talk of love: "He loves them, and they love Him" (5:54) and "If you love God, follow me; God will love you" (3:31).
- Mercy, the womb-love of the All-Merciful, takes precedence over wrath; God's love has no beginning.
- Muhammad is the beloved for whose sake the spheres were created: the first in thought and the last in act.
The foreword: love before knowledge, and fear before love
Nasr opens with Hafiz and with a question: can one who has not loved write of love? His answer is that everyone loves, but writing that conveys love's reality needs a writer who has gone beyond love of self. Realization means an ever-widening circle of what one loves until it reaches the shore of Divinity and one sees that God's love is the only real love (al-ishq al-haqiqi) and all other love is metaphorical (al-ishq al-majazi). For Nasr, love and knowledge cannot be separated: to love God is to know Him, and God, whose name al-Wadud means Love, cannot be known without being loved. Following Ahmad Ghazali's Sawanih, he reads the "and" of 5:54 as "therefore": God's love comes first.
He explains the Western neglect of love in Islam partly by the old Christian polemic that pictured a God of judgment only, and he insists that Islam, as a complete religion, also stresses fear. Citing Muhammad Ghazali, he notes that one who fears a creature runs from it, but one who fears the Creator runs toward Him. He defends the book's limits (prose only, up to the sixth/twelfth century) on the ground that this century was a watershed, and calls it "one of the most perceptive and authentic works written in English on the theme of love in Islamic spirituality." He signs it July 2012, Ramadan 1433.
The preface: sources, method and words
Chittick explains that he first thought knowledge deserved the honour of summing up the tradition (he cites Franz Rosenthal's Knowledge Triumphant), but now thinks love "does a better job of conveying the nature of the quest for God that lies at the tradition's heart." His path into the subject ran through Rumi, then Iraqi's Lamaat (Divine Flashes, 1981) and The Sufi Path of Love (1983). A National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, approved in November 2009, let him read and translate widely. He translated philosophers (the Ikhwan al-Safa, Avicenna, Suhrawardi, Mulla Sadra) and Ibn al-Arabi's followers, then set most of that aside for a separate study, and dropped everything from the thirteenth century onward.
| Source | What the preface says about it |
|---|---|
| Maybudi, Unveiling of the Secrets (Kashf al-asrar) | One of the earliest and longest Persian Qur'an commentaries; final draft begun 1126; three stages (literal translation, transmitted explanations, allusions); Stage Three runs to 1,500 pages. Drew from Samani from Surah 17 onward, often without saying so, and from Qushayri's Subtle Allusions without naming him. |
| Samani, Repose of the Spirits (Rawh al-arwah) | Commentary on the divine names, apparently the earliest in Persian; ties almost every name back to love; Chittick's favourite twelfth-century Persian text. Samani died aged forty-six in 1140. |
| Ansari (d. 1088) of Herat | Way Stations of the Travelers (one hundred stages, three levels each), One Hundred Fields, the whispered prayers (munajat), and The Book of Love (Mahabbat-nama), perhaps the first independent Persian treatise on love. Maybudi calls him "Pir of the Tariqah". |
| Ahmad Ghazali (d. 1126), Apparitions (Sawanih) | Often called the classic Persian text on love; included for sweetness of expression, while Muhammad Ghazali's fuller treatment is mostly set aside. |
| Others | Ikhwan al-Safa, Avicenna, Abu Ibrahim Bukhari, Hujwiri, Mansur Abbadi, Ruzbihan Baqli; Daylami used only once because of the Bell and Al Shafie translation. |
The book is arranged around three questions the authors were answering: where love comes from, how people can live up to it, and where it takes them in the end. Hence three parts, the origin, the life and the goal of love. Chittick never tries to define love, because his authors insist it cannot be defined, only described by its symptoms. On vocabulary: hubb and mahabba are the Qur'anic words; wudd and mawadda give the name Loving (wadud); hawa is caprice; ishq, passion, is the most important extra-Qur'anic word; the Persian mihr and dusti also appear. He translates hubb as "love", ishq as "passion", mihr as "love" and dusti as "friendship", and when dust refers to God, as "the Friend". Iraqi's line settles the quarrel over ishq: "Call it mahabba or ishq— let us not quarrel over words."
Chittick stresses that in this period the word Sufi named certain outstanding individuals, not a general category, and that most authors quoted in the book would not have called themselves Sufis. Maybudi was "an accomplished master of the various fields of Islamic learning", and Samani's nephew describes him as an eloquent preacher and master of Islamic learning without suggesting he was a Sufi. So "Sufism" is a convenient label for an approach, not a membership.
Lovers, the Beloved and love
Chittick defines theology as discussion of the divine reality and its relationship with the universe. Kalam stressed God's transcendence and fled the Qur'an's imagery; theologians of love tied the discussion back to scripture and the soul's experience. He quotes Ibn al-Arabi's view that rational proofs, which say God is "not like this", would never make anyone love Him: "By God, were it not for the Shariah that came with the divine report-giving, no one would recognize God!"
The Shahadah gives three issues: human beings, Ultimate Reality and the tie that binds them; "or lovers, the Beloved, and love." The theologians' three principles, tawhid, prophecy and the Return, together describe "the circle of existence" (dairat al-wujud), descending from God and ascending back to Him. The force that drives this circle was frequently called love.
The two commands and the two verses
The distinction between what is and what ought to be appears as two divine commands. The creative or engendering command (al-amr al-takwini) cannot be disobeyed: "His only command, when He desires a thing, is to say to it 'Be!,' and it comes to be" (36:82). The religious or prescriptive command (al-amr al-dini, al-amr al-taklifi) comes through prophets and can be obeyed or not; otherwise people would be angels. A note traces the formulation of the two commands to the Mu'tazilite Abu'l-Hudhayl (d. ca. 841), following Wolfson.
| Creative command | Religious command | |
|---|---|---|
| Formula | "No god but God" (tawhid) | "Muhammad is God's messenger" |
| Concerns | The way things are | The way people ought to be |
| Can it be disobeyed? | No | Yes |
| Key verse on love | "He loves them, and they love Him" (5:54) | "If you love God, follow me; God will love you" (3:31) |
| Mercy | All-Merciful: mercy that embraces everything | Ever-Merciful: special mercy for those who follow guidance |
Read through tawhid, 5:54 yields four themes: "God's eternally loving nature, humans as the specific object of God's love, human beings' innate loving nature, and God as the true object of human love." When God is the subject of the verb love in the Qur'an, the only object of His love is human beings. People cannot avoid loving Him because they cannot avoid coming to be, but they can lose sight of what they love; 3:31 tells those who see this to follow guidance. The goal is the hadith of the servant whom God loves: "I am the hearing with which he hears, the eyesight with which he sees", called proximity (qurb), union (wisal) or unification (ittihad).
Tawhid, nonbeing and the proof of God
Maybudi on 2:163 celebrates God as one in every respect: "one in love and friendship." The wonder, he says, is not that God calls people "My servants" but that He ascribes Himself to them as "Your God": "we are not suited for Him— He is suited for us." Ansari's whispered prayer follows: "Do not bring to fruit what we ourselves have planted! Keep blights away from what You planted for us!"
Tawhid means there is nothing real but the Real (haqq); everything else is batil. Labid's verse, which the Prophet called the truest sung by the Arabs, sums it up: "Is not everything less than God unreal, and every bliss inescapably passing?" Things are not absolutely unreal, but their true reality is nonexistence (adam). Samani reads the name Gentle (latif) this way: God's greatest gentleness was to create, while people were still "in the concealment of nonexistence"; He "was tossing the secret hook of He loves them into the ocean of they love Him". Samani also holds that only God can show the road to God: "In reality, the road-shower is God, and intellect is an instrument, not a cause."
Essence, attributes and the Hidden Treasure
The Essence (dhat) is God in His unity, unknown to any but Himself; the names and attributes point toward it. Maybudi on "Of everything We created a pair" (51:49) argues that God made creatures in pairs, male and female, light and darkness, so that their attributes would not resemble His: "His exaltation has no abasement, His power no incapacity". Ghani, "unneedy", marks His independence: He tells the servant, through Maybudi, "I have no need for your faith."
Why then create? Chittick notes that the hadith of the Hidden Treasure "is not in fact found in the standard collections of the Prophet's sayings." Early authors attribute it to stories about David, and the earliest citation he knows is in the Ikhwan al-Safa; Ibn al-Arabi, though a master of Hadith, said its authenticity was proved to him by visionary unveiling. Maybudi gives David's question and the answer: "I was a hidden treasure, and I loved to be recognized", adding that "recognition is built on love." Following Samani, he explains that the other creatures "had nothing to do with love, for they never saw in themselves a high aspiration. The one with high aspiration is you."
Complementary names: majesty and beauty
Samani constantly pairs names of majesty and beauty, severity and gentleness, wrath and mercy, justice and bounty. Wisdom holds the reins of power; the attributes that are the creatures' "antagonists" (exaltedness, unneediness, severity) are held back by their "interceders" (wisdom, mercy, gentleness, generosity). His images are concrete.
| Image (Repose of the Spirits) | What it shows |
|---|---|
| The rich man must carry alms to the poor man's hut | God sends open alms through prophets and secret alms of guidance to hearts. |
| The candle of invitation and the moths | A thousand thousand burned, and the candle neither diminished nor grew. |
| The lioness and the ants | Tenderness and sharp claws belong together: "She has the love of a mother, but she is also a lion." |
| The rooster and the falcon | The rooster cries out because it has seen chickens on spits: only Adamites taste both severity and gentleness. |
| Power and wisdom in an embrace | "Many in the world see the power, but few see the wisdom." |
Mercy and the hundred parts
Mercy (rahma) derives from rahim, womb: "Mercy is a mother's love for her children." The difference from love is that God's love returns to Him as human love, whereas people cannot have mercy on God, only extend His mercy to others. Chittick counts: the Qur'an uses mercy and its derivatives 325 times as against 110 for the two basic love words, and only a handful of verses ascribe mercy to creatures. Qushayri and Maybudi give a different reading for each of the 113 consecration formulas; the All-Merciful is universal mercy, the Ever-Merciful the particular mercy of the next world.
Ansari, in Forty-Two Chapters, comments on the hadith that God made mercy in a hundred parts and sent one into the earth, by which "Even the mare lifts her hoof from her colt in fear of harming it." Everything kind in the world, from a sultan's justice to repairing a bridge, is a trace of this one part; the ninety-nine wait in the station of "at-ness". The inscription on the Throne, "My mercy takes precedence over My wrath", means that the point of return is the point of origin, and all will go back to mercy. Ansari also reads the hadith "I am the times" as a demand for courtesy (adab): to see beauty in God's work and say "How beautiful is Your doing!"
Ibn al-Arabi identifies mercy per se with the Real Existence; the All-Merciful's mercy is the being showered on all things, the Ever-Merciful's is earned by following guidance. Ruzbihan Baqli (d. 1209) grades the general mercy: inanimate things in the light of His act, animals in the light of His attributes, intelligent beings in the light of His Essence, and the Prophet, who "reached the all in the all", a mercy to the worlds.
Beginningless love and the primordial Muhammad
God's love has no beginning or end; people's love for Him has a beginning but no end. Ansari prays: "O God, where was I when You called me? I am not I when You remain for me." Maybudi: "For Him, from the Beginningless to the Endless is less than one breath". Samani: "In terms of sonship, our lineage goes back to Adam, but in terms of love, it goes back to beginningless gentleness." He reports his father's saying that God's love "does not attach to dust", since there is plenty of dust in the world.
The second verse, 3:31, has its cosmic counterpart in the Islamic Logos doctrine. Muhammad is habib, both beloved and lover, and the divine saying runs "But for thee, I would not have created the spheres." Samani explains "We are the last, the foremost" with the philosophers' formula that the first in thought is the last in act: the roof is planned first and built last. Maybudi tells of the light of Muhammad gazed upon "70,000 times a day", and Samani pictures the compass of power with one leg fixed at the Muhammadan Center: "I was a prophet when Adam was between water and clay."
Keep the two commands in view. Whenever an author says that everything is as it must be, he speaks from the creative command and tawhid; whenever he exhorts the reader to strive, he speaks from the religious command. Much apparent contradiction in the love literature dissolves once one asks which command a sentence is speaking from.
2. The Story of Love
Chapter 2 retells the Islamic myth as a love affair between God and man: the Covenant of Alast, the Trust, the creation of Adam, the virtues of dust, the wisdom of the fall, human sinfulness, the role of Iblis, the tension between command and decree, and the last word of divine forgiveness.
- Shams-i Tabrizi called the Qur'an "the Book of Passion"; Maybudi had already called it a book "whose purport is the story of love and lovers."
- At the Covenant (7:172) God asked "Am I not your Lord?" and inculcated the answer in the question.
- The Trust that heaven, earth and mountains refused (33:72) is love; Adam took it because he was "burnt".
- Angels are servants; Adamites are servants and lovers. "Everyone came by the road of creation, and he alone came by the road of love".
- Dust beats fire: it conceals defects, joins, is humble and gives back grain a hundredfold.
- The fall was the way to know majesty as well as beauty; "great wrongdoer, deeply ignorant" is read as praise.
- The command (religious) and the decree (creative) pull in different directions; the creed holds neither free will nor predestination.
- God forgives because forgiving is His attribute: "I am I and you are you."
The Covenant of Alast
The verse of the Covenant (7:172) has God take the progeny of Adam from their loins and ask, "Am I not your Lord?" Maybudi reads it as "the binding of the compact and covenant of love" on the first day, and has God tell the Prophet to remind people of the day when their spirits drank "the wine of passion for Me from the cup of love in the assembly of intimacy." The angels admitted they had never tasted this wine.
The grammar of the question is itself mercy. God said "Am I not your Lord?", not "Are you not My servants?", tying the bond to His perfect Godhood rather than to the servant's faltering servanthood, so the bond can never break. Nor did He ask "Who am I?", which would have left the servant bewildered; He "asked while inculcating the answer." Ansari: "Generosity said, 'Am I not your Lord?' Kindness said, 'Yes indeed.'"
Samani, like Maybudi, usually places the Day of Alast in beginningless eternity rather than between Adam's creation and his entry into the world. In his image God's love is a veiled virgin whom no master gives to a serving boy: the angels were servants, the Adamites friends. Outwardly the address was "Am I not your Lord?"; inwardly it was "He loves them, and they love Him": "I am your friend— by day I am the sultan, by night we are brothers." A covenant demands loyalty (wafa); its failure is disloyalty (jafa). Samani's comfort is that even when people fail, God never fails to be a Lord: "If you do not have enough capital to be loyal to Our covenant, you do have enough capital to be happy in Our loyalty."
The Trust
Maybudi, drawing on Samani, holds that the Trust of 33:72 is love. Iblis shook Adam's clay, found it empty, and judged that nothing could come of it; he "saw Adam's clay but did not see his heart." When the heavens and mountains refused the Trust, Adam put out his hand: "Because I am burnt, and someone burnt can only receive." The seal (muhr) placed on the Trust at Alast was the seal of love (mihr), examined in the grave by the question "Who is your Lord?" The burden is carried "by aspiration, not strength".
Samani explains why the verse ends by calling man "a great wrongdoer, deeply ignorant". Adam was at ease in paradise until "the petitioner of passion, the deputy of love" knocked on his heart's door and told him to go into the field of severity. The offer to heaven and earth was made so that their refusal would shake Adam's love: "Things are offered first to the unworthy so that the worthy will get moving." Once man carried the Trust, a hundred thousand betrayals could not destroy the foundation, as a slave girl carrying her master's child can no longer be sold. Fire dies to useless ash; broken clay is mended with a few drops of water.
The creation of Adam and the angels
Samani elaborates the divine saying "I created the whole world for you, and I created you for Me." The Throne received no message, the Footstool no mission; a hundred thousand prophets were sent as entreaties to the door of a handful of dust. "But not everyone who is worthy for service is also worthy for love." Love works like the alchemist's elixir on copper: "If the clay that you knead yields roses, why are you surprised that the clay He kneads yields a heart?"
Adam was created to be a lover, and the first thing he did with the religious command was to disobey it. The angels, proud of their glorification, protested. Maybudi pictures the Throne, the Footstool and the eight paradises each hoping the vicegerency was meant for them; in Adam's oyster shell every prophet's pearl had a black bead strung beside it (Abraham and Nimrod, Moses and Pharaoh, Muhammad and Abu Jahl). God commands the angels to serve, weep for and give water to Adam's progeny. In another passage the angels circled the Kaabah of Invincibility for 700,000 years without knowing the names of love; "Other than Adam's heart, there was no oyster shell for the pearl of love." Samani has God say He will not hand the brokenhearted "in the hands of stuffy-headed Qur'an-reciters."
| Angels | Adamites | |
|---|---|---|
| Made of | Light, holiness | Dust and water (clay) |
| Relation to God | Sheer servanthood, "honored servants" (21:26), not ascribed to Him | Servanthood ascribed to Him ("O My servants!") plus love |
| Names shown | Severity and Invincibility, behind veils of awe | Clemency and mercy, on the carpet of expansiveness |
| Pride lies in | Works (their attribute) | Knowledge of the names (God's attribute) |
| Image | Serving boys; chickens worth one dirham (dry-brained reciters) | Friends; falcons that come and go, worth a thousand dinars |
God taught Adam the names, as Zulaykha adorned Joseph before showing him to the women of Egypt. "Tell Me the names", He said to the angels; to Adam, "Tell them". Samani's homely parallel: a man waits for a dear friend to name his newborn child, and God waited to bring His friend out of nonexistence: "O Adam! Whatever name you give, We have given."
The virtues of dust
Iblis has been called "the first to use a syllogism" for arguing that fire is better than clay. Maybudi and Samani dismantle the premise.
| Fire (Iblis) | Dust (Adam) |
|---|---|
| Shows defects (assays gold) | Conceals defects, as the tombs do |
| Cuts off and burns | Joins and keeps |
| Seeks to be higher: "I am better" (38:76) | Seeks to be lower: "Our Lord, we have wronged ourselves" (7:23) |
| Burns whatever is given | Returns a grain a hundredfold (2:261) |
| Dies to ash beyond repair | Renewed by a few drops of water |
| Debased by God's foot (hadith of the Fire) | Honoured by God's two hands (38:75) |
Maybudi's summary is a sentence each: Iblis said "I and my substance"; Adam said "Not I, rather my God." He puns that "eminence lies in nurture [tarbiya], not in dirt [turba]." Samani adds that Adam's failing was ontological, not moral: it grows from the creative command. The world before Adam was "a tasteless stew. The salt of pain was missing." In a litany he makes dust the hidden cause of everything eschatological: paradise is the excess of dust's secret caress, hell the surplus of its sorrow, the Narrow Path one of its footsteps. And it was all prepared before dust existed: "There was no mouth, but the wine was ready."
The wisdom of the fall
To be worthy of love, Adam had to actualize all the names, not just the gentle ones, and the quickest way out of paradise was disobedience. Maybudi has God tell him to take his hands from Eve's neck, "for you must use your hands for the neck of love's crocodile." Samani supplies a run of explanations:
"Surely God chose Adam" was his beautiful face; "great wrongdoer, deeply ignorant" was the mole on it.
The frightened schoolboy hides after another is beaten, and his father carries him back with an excuse ready: "But he forgot".
The porter lifts a heavy load and we say "You will hurt yourself!": in this case the words are "praise, not blame, for he carried it with his aspiration, not his capacity."
The tree of trial (bala) was really the tree of friendship (wala), a road-worthy steed.
Ansari, through Maybudi, says Adam was more complete in this world than in paradise, and that he left not from lowliness "because of the grandeur of his aspiration." The veiled virgin of recognition found no match among the eighteen thousand worlds, so God raised the thrown-down dust to be her fiancé, as a king raises a slave to command his army before giving him his daughter. Asked what provisions he would have for exile, Adam was told: "your supplies in the land of exile will be My remembrance."
Human sinfulness and the mother with soap in hand
The command not to approach the tree was clearly religious, since it was disobeyed; the decree had already gone out. For Maybudi the hope in 17:84, "Each acts according to his own manner", is that "The servant returns to sin, and the Lord returns to forgiveness." His parable of the mother who sends her child out in new clothes knowing he will dirty them, saying "I sent you outside only after I had the soap and water in hand", sums up the chapter. Samani: "sin is your attribute, and love is His attribute." Musk, rebuked for being fragrant with everyone, replies: "I do not look at the one I am with. I look at who I am."
Both authors cite the hadith "If you did not sin, God would bring a people who did sin, and then He would forgive them", so that creatures would know that mercy "comes as a gift, not at a price." Maybudi notes that 39:53 conceals the sins under "who have been immoderate" and keeps the name "servant". Samani's falcon image praises those who slip and repent: "The worth of the falcon lies in the fact that it comes and goes."
Iblis, and the command against the decree
Without Satan there would be no misguidance, and without misguidance no guidance and no freedom. Samani derides the rationalists who explain sin by causes, like an ant that thinks the pen wrote the line. Adam and Iblis meet later; Iblis asks, "Tell me then, who took me from the road?" Maybudi grades their faults: Adam slipped from appetite, Iblis from pride, and "When a sin arises from pride, faith gets lost in it."
Samani: "All proofs rise up from the world of the command, and all excuses rise up from the world of the decree." And: the free-willers "want to take away" the first half of the Shahadah, and the predestinarians "want to quarrel with" the second. Jafar al-Sadiq, asked whether God predestined the servants, answered that He is too just to predestine and then punish, and too wise to disregard them. Samani's tablet image explains acquisition: God writes the script and puts the pen of acquisition in the child's hand, "but you cannot put in the dots without My knowledge and decree." He praises Wasiti's "I would not worship a Lord who works on the basis of causality". The human position is a drunkard told to walk straight, or a one-winged mosquito thrown into an ocean of fire and told not to burn. Maybudi, following Samani on 64:16, says the command is finite and passes with this world, while God's rightful due is infinite; that is why He judges by the command, "so that He may then pardon their acts."
Divine forgiveness
The chapter ends with forgiveness (maghfira, from a root meaning to conceal and protect, hence mighfar, helmet). Maybudi has God say, "Others call out for the loyal, but I call out for the disloyal." At the resurrection a group will be halted at paradise's door and handed a letter titled "The Eternal Love", all rebuke of the friends, ending: "Go: I have forgiven you so that you will know that I am I and you are you." An unnamed pir calls 25:23, "make it scattered dust", the sweetest verse in the Qur'an, because it frees us from our unworthy works.
Chittick shows Maybudi conflating two Samani passages here. Samani's conclusion: God accepts us not for the form of our practice but "because of the readiness that He gazed upon in His beginningless knowledge." Today the carpet of "Am I not your Lord?" is unrolled with prayer, fasting and hajj; tomorrow the carpet of "He loves them, and they love Him", with "no fasting and no prayer— only love and joy." Mahmud and Ayaz are master and slave by day, equals by night. The beggar given the sultan's daughter has no dower worthy of her, so the sultan sends the dower from his own treasury.
The chapter turns the usual sermon around: obedience matters, but it is not the centre. Its practical counsel is to repent often without despair, to treat one's failures as occasions of poverty rather than as proof of worthlessness, and to stop expecting good works to buy anything.
3. Spiritual Psychology
Chapter 3 maps the human self as the authors saw it: a microcosm, a subtlety with many names (soul, heart, spirit, intellect, secret core), a heart that fluctuates between two of God's fingers, a commanding soul to be fought, the poison of self-admiration, and ascending levels that end in what only God knows.
- Ilm al-nafs is better called "spiritual psychology"; Sufi teachers were spiritual psychotherapists using the Prophet's Sunnah as template.
- Soul, heart, spirit and intellect name one reality, "the human subtlety", from different standpoints (Muhammad Ghazali).
- Man is an abridged transcription of the cosmos: "Everything is found in the Adamite, but the Adamite is not found in anything."
- The heart (qalb, "fluctuation") sits between spirit and soul, and between God's two fingers, bounty and justice.
- God bought the soul, not the heart, because the heart is an endowment (waqf) dedicated to His love.
- The commanding soul is the worst enemy; the greater struggle is against it.
- Self-admiration (ujb) is "the ghoul of the road"; the dervish is the one who knows he is poor.
From faculties to the human subtlety
The philosophers used nafs neutrally for any interiority short of actual intellect, and arranged vegetal, animal and human souls by their potencies (quwwa). The summit is the actual intellect, conjunction (ittisal) with the agent intellect, which Chittick compares to the nous of Plotinus and to purusha in Samkhya; the philosophers called this realization deiformity (taalluh). Early Sufis preferred to meditate rather than systematize. Calling the inner self "the human subtlety" says that it cannot be pinned down by definition, still less by physiology: bodies are sediments of subtle realities, "As above, so below".
The microcosm
Samani: "The Adamite is an all-comprehensive city." Because the cosmos is too vast for a short life to travel, wisdom asked power to make "an abridged transcription" of the macrocosm and set it before the child, the intellect. The Adamite is lion and rabbit, fox and sheep, nightingale and owl; one who claims to know things but not himself "is like someone who gives food to others but is himself hungry". Maybudi, also following Samani, reads 41:53 as two movements: "one is showing on the part of the Real, and the other traveling on the part of the servant." He catalogues the face, the thirty-two teeth and "twenty-nine way stations" of the mouth for the twenty-nine letters, then insists all this is only the robe of outwardness.
Body, soul, spirit, heart
God molded Adam with His two hands and blew His spirit into him (15:29). For many authors the soul is the child of that marriage of light and clay, neither spiritual nor bodily, pulled both ways. The key verse is 91:7-10: God inspired the soul "to its depravity and its godwariness". Forgetfulness comes from gazing downward; the cure is dhikr, remembrance, which is also the word for the prophetic "reminder".
Maybudi tells how the spirit, entering Adam's clay, found darkness and wanted to leave; its breath made Adam sneeze, he praised God, God answered with mercy, and the spirit stayed: "If this is worthy of God's praise and mercy, it is worthy to be my place." When it reached the navel Adam wanted the fruit of paradise and tried to stand too soon: "Man was created of haste" (21:37). At death, he says, the spirit rises like a bird from its cage while the body takes the road of the earth.
| Image | Author | Point |
|---|---|---|
| Mount and rider | Samani | The soul is the mount, the spirit the rider; angels travel without mounts and so always keep to the road, while the Adamite can take "the roadless road." |
| The ugly man and the beautiful wife | Samani, quoting a Shaykh al-Islam (probably his father) | Their child got the father's face and the mother's disposition: a warning of what a bad mixture of spirit and dust would be. |
| Azrael takes the handful of dust | Samani | Gabriel, Seraphiel and Michael turned back when the earth sought refuge; Azrael took the dust by severity. Dust curtains the secrets so the outward-looking (Iblis) is thrown off. |
| Rose and thorn | Maybudi | Clay is a rose garden; every rose has its thorn (Abraham and Nimrod, Muhammad and Abu Jahl). |
| The citadel of clay | Samani | Others knock on the clay door and never suspect the pearl inside: "Which pearl was it? The pearl of love." |
The secrets deposited in dust are the divine attributes in whose form Adam was made. Hence Samani's daring conclusion, which Chittick supports with Muhammad Ghazali and Avicenna: "He loves only Himself, for everyone who loves his own artisanry loves himself." Samani sets frames and hearts side by side in a litany: "O frames, I am God! O hearts, I am the Friend!" and "O frames, surrender the body on credit! O hearts, deal only in hard cash!"
The heart's fluctuation
The Qur'an places intelligence in the heart, not the brain. The verb qalb means to turn over, and the Prophet called God "Fluctuater of Hearts". Two themes recur: the heart is caught between soul and spirit, and it is the place of mutual seeing between God and man (Maybudi's Persian hamdidari, used for muayana). The divine saying, not found in the standard books, runs: "Neither the heavens nor the earth embraces Me, but the heart of My faithful servant does embrace Me."
Samani: the heart's mark is knowledge and recognition, since feeding and procreation belong to plants, senses to animals, and beautiful form "is found on walls." Ridwan, Malik and the angels each asked God for the heart; He kept it for Himself. Why does it never rest? "Because the brand of severity's ruling power has been placed upon it." His butcher image: the butcher ties three legs of the sheep and leaves one free, "a gentleness in severity, a severity in gentleness." And: "The heart is like a feather in a desert. The winds make it fluctuate from side to side." His father's teaching: the inborn life and the life from the Unseen together give birth to a third, "Recognition is the heart's life with God." The heart is a clay cup that must pass through "the fire of passion" before it can hold the drink of love; and a cup full of water has no room for air.
The commanding soul
The Sufis use nafs mostly for the self's downward pull. Maybudi on 12:53 lists four souls: commanding, deceiving, sorcerous and peaceful. The commanding soul "knows nothing other than eating, sleeping, and gratifying its desires." The Prophet's saying about returning from the lesser struggle to the greater struggle makes the soul the real enemy, because "you can avoid the enemy, but you cannot avoid the soul." Even the prophets and friends stand only by protection and kind favor; withdrawn for an instant, the same would appear from them as from Pharaoh. Solomon's prayer for an unrivalled kingdom (38:35) was a prayer for kingship over his own soul. "This world" is defined by its effect: "What blocks you from your Protector— that is your 'this world.'" Bastami would ask for leave to enter hell to punish his soul. The soul is the reverse of an ordinary enemy: treat it well here and it will be your antagonist there.
Self-admiration
The angels' "We glorify Thy praise" and Iblis's "I am better" are the prototypes. Maybudi holds two truths together, citing Ibn Khafif: "When you are in the station of the Shariah, say 'I.' When you are on the road of the Haqiqah, say 'He.'" Iblis's advice to a great man: "Do not say 'I,' lest you become like me." Samani reports a consensus that anyone who sees himself as superior to Pharaoh is worse than Pharaoh. Ansari prays to avoid two claims: "fancying that I have something of my own and fancying that I have a right against You." The Prophet feared for his community something worse than sin: "self-admiration, self-admiration!"
Samani's sharpest satire targets the "empty-headed Qur'an-reciter who makes two cycles of prayer at night" and wants the world to hear of it, while the man of realization "fills the East and the West with prostrations of sincerity and throws them into the water of unneediness." Kharaqani hoped to dive into the Ocean of Unity "so that the One may be, and Abu'l-Hasan may not be." The cure is to see one's own obedience in the colour of disobedience and to remember that clothes come off at night, but "what can he do with his skin?"
Dervish (darwish) translates faqir, poor. Maybudi on 47:38: all the good works of earth and heaven would not weigh a mosquito's wing, and the Prophet himself said "None of you will be saved by his deeds."
Ascending levels of self
Maybudi gives three tiers: "The body is the place of the Trust, the heart is the threshold of being addressed, and the spirit is the center-point of contemplation." A fourth, the secret core (sirr), Ansari defines as "man's quintessence with the Real". Hujwiri (d. ca. 1077) preserves a myth from Amr ibn Uthman Makki's lost Book of Love: God created the secret cores, spirits and hearts seven thousand years apart, each before the next and all before bodies. They grew vain and were jailed one inside the other, until prayer reunited them.
Later lists give seven subtleties: body, soul, spirit, heart, secret core, hidden and most hidden. Maybudi on 20:7 follows Qushayri: the secret core is "the place where love puts down its saddlebags", and the most hidden is known to God alone. Provision differs by level and by person. The chapter closes with the secret core swinging between annihilation and subsistence, saying in one state "Who is more miserable than I?" and in the other "Who is greater than I?"
Chittick remarks that despite all our sciences "the human self remains as much a mystery as ever." The chapter's map is not a rival to neuroscience but a different question: not how the self works, but what it is for. Its answer, recognition and love, makes the heart's restlessness a feature rather than a fault.
4. The Search
Part Two, "The Life of Love", opens with the search for God. Chapter 4 takes the Prophet's ascent (miraj) as the paradigm of the inward journey and then treats the levels of tawhid, the stages of the path, aspiration, seeking and finding, and the difference between the desirer who travels and the desired who is pulled.
- Everything returns to God; humans alone return with some freedom, and so with responsibility.
- The miraj is the template: Adam was told "Fall down!" so that Muhammad could be told "Ascend!"
- Tawhid has levels, from the tongue's words to seeing nothing in existence but the One (Ghazali's four, Ansari's three).
- Emigration (hijra) is outward (seeking knowledge) and inward (soul to heart to secret core to spirit to the Real).
- Stations (maqamat) lead to the Prophet's "station of no station".
- Your worth is set by your aspiration (himma): "Aspiration is a bird that hunts only on high."
- "Seeking comes from finding, not finding from seeking."
- Wayfaring is always governed by attraction: "The one who comes can never be like the one who is brought."
Origin, Return and the miraj
The creative command is timeless; things are renewed by it moment by moment, as the Ash'arite occasionalists held, while Ibn al-Arabi and Mulla Sadra offered subtler accounts. For Muslim scholars "the only self-evident truth is tawhid". Humans, once adult, are addressed by prophetic messages and their own intelligence, and the answer to what to do with freedom is 3:31.
Avicenna and some philosophers read the miraj as a symbol of the soul becoming actual intellect; theologians and Sufis took it literally. Either way, Muhammad climbed the spheres while plumbing his own secret core, and the later seven subtleties echo his seven heavens. Samani on "He stood upright" (53:6): soul straight with heart, heart with secret core, secret core with the Real, for "There is no way to be the companion of something straight without straightness." Jafar al-Sadiq on "two bows' length": "the utmost awe can be endured only with the utmost gentleness." Samani explains the tales of the prophets as a meal eaten before a hungry man: "there's no law against hoping."
Samani pairs the two ends of the story: Adam was told to fall so that Muhammad could be told to ascend. And he keeps both faces of the Prophet in view: from the community's side, "I am the master of Adam's children"; from God's majesty, "I am the son of a woman of Quraysh who used to eat jerky." "When His majesty charges forth, two bows' length is like the bottom of the earth."
The levels of tawhid
From about the twelfth century the tradition was described as Shariah (broad avenue), Tariqah (narrow path) and Haqiqah (Divine Reality); Chittick notes that the eleventh-century scheme was less clear and the purported hadith "The Shariah is my words, the Tariqah my acts, and the Haqiqah my states" does not appear. One-pointedness is called solitariness (tafrid) or togetherness (jam), against dispersion (farq).
| Level | Muhammad Ghazali (Giving Life, book 35) | Ansari (Way Stations, station 100) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The tongue says "No god but God" while the heart is heedless or denies (hypocrites). Protects from sword and spear. | Tawhid of the common people: bearing witness, rectified by the marks (the Message and God's artisanries). |
| 2 | The heart assents; belief is a knot (uqda) on the heart. Kalam defends the knot against innovators. | Tawhid of the elect: eliminating outward causes, witnessing God's precedence; rectified by the knowledge of annihilation. |
| 3 | Witnessing by unveiling that there is no actor but One (those given proximity). | Tawhid God singles out for Himself; any intimation of it is a defect. "No one has voiced the unity of the One". |
| 4 | Seeing nothing in existence but One: annihilation in tawhid (the sincerely truthful). | (none: three faces only) |
Ghazali's verdict on Kalam is cool: "There is no difference between the Kalam experts and the common man in belief, only in the art of putting words together". Maybudi's simpler formula: "Tawhid is that you say that God is One and that you be one for Him." Ansari's three words for Muslim belief are "affirmation of attributes without excess, negation of similarity without declaring ineffectuality, and going forward according to the outward sense without mixing." The recognizers' tawhid comes unbidden: "Finding comes in heedlessness." Moses went for fire and found "I made you for Myself"; Muhammad was asleep when the good news came. Ansari's prayer: "Yours kept on increasing and mine decreasing until at last there remained only what was there at first."
Emigration and the stations
Maybudi distinguishes three emigrants: for this world (trade), for the next (renunciants, zahid), and for God (recognizers, arif), who emigrate within their own makeup. Inward emigration runs "from the soul to the heart, from the heart to the secret core, from the secret core to the spirit, and from the spirit to the Real." Bastami, told that still water stagnates, answered: "You should be the ocean, and then you will never become stagnant."
Ansari's Way Stations describes one hundred stations in three degrees each. He considered explicating Kattani's "one thousand stations of light and darkness" but judged it too much; Ruzbihan later described 1,001. The three basic degrees are taking up the journey, entering exile, and contemplation, tied to three hadiths, the last being ihsan, worshiping God as if you see Him. Chittick notes here that the Arabic book was written about twenty-five years after the Persian One Hundred Fields; the preface had said about thirty (see the slips list). One Hundred Fields itself began as sermons on 3:31 in Muharram 448 [March 1056]. Ansari insists: "Without the Haqiqah, the Shariah is useless, and without the Shariah, the Haqiqah is useless."
| Scheme | Source | Stages |
|---|---|---|
| Preliminaries and ends | Maybudi on 27:59 | Means: repentance, patience, fear, abstinence, poverty, self-examination. Ends: love, yearning, contentment, tawhid, trust, praise (these survive into paradise). |
| House of submission | Maybudi on 5:3 | Four gates (obligations, avoiding the forbidden, confidence, patience), four bridges (contentment, trust, gratitude, sincerity), then degrees. |
| Three movements | Common | Purification (tazkiya), adornment (tahliya), disclosure (tajliya); "No god" is the negation, "but God" the affirmation. |
| Two oceans | Maybudi on 35:12 | Five ships of perdition (avarice, eye-service, persistence, heedlessness, despair) and five of salvation (fear, hope, renunciation, recognition, tawhid). |
| Seven oceans | Maybudi on 37:164 | Gratitude for ecstasies through to the reality of solitariness; compared with Attar's seven mountains in The Language of the Birds. |
At the top stands the Prophet's "station of no station" (maqam la maqam), which Ibn al-Arabi explains as the condition of a guide who could lead to every station because he stood in none. Samani: watering a ripened field is an error. He traces stationlessness (bi-maqami) through the Prophet's supplication, from "I seek refuge in Thy approval from Thy anger" through "I seek refuge in Thee from Thee" to "Thou art as Thou hast lauded Thyself", each phrase passing a station. On complaint he distinguishes three kinds, concluding that "Lamenting to the Friend about the Friend is tawhid itself." Maybudi adds a group beyond all gardens who "desire what the Beloved desires".
Aspiration, seeking and finding
Does foreknowledge make effort pointless? Ansari's comment on the hadith "No one will enter the Garden because of his deeds" says no: do not wish for death to escape the work, because "the work is the cause of good fortune, and the burden the cause of elevation." Good deeds are a mirror in which bounty is seen: "Your only path is to become a mirror."
Maybudi, from One Hundred Fields, sorts people by aspiration: this world, the afterworld (the wage earner), or God. On the night of the miraj the Prophet saw this world adorned as a bride; Gabriel said only one in 70,000 would buy back his spirit from love of her. Samani: Solomon given a kingdom and content with it would be "a man of mean aspiration".
Samani's story: an afflicted man followed a beautiful woman home and declared his love. She promised an answer the next day, then came with a maid holding a mirror: with that face, he wanted union with her? "you want to mate with a white falcon!" The point is not despair but scale: no act of worship, set beside the divine beauty, is more than "the noise of an old woman's spindle." Still, "There is no consultation in love."
Ansari: "He is not found by seeking, but the seeker will find Him." And yet: "To suppose that you have the ability not to sin stands at the head of all sin. To fancy that these words excuse the sinner is also a sin." Samani has God say that a sweeper fresh from the toilet is not seated on the sultan's throne, so He dresses the servant in His own robe of success before receiving him.
The desirer and the desired
Wayfaring (suluk) is set against attraction (jadhba). The disciple is murid, "desirer", and Chittick notes that irada is the same desire whether God or a human is the subject; translators who render it "will" for God obscure that human desire reflects the divine. The shaykh is murad, "desired", because he has been snatched away (rubuda). Maybudi on the Fatiha: "first showing, then traveling, then being pulled." "One attraction of the Real is equal to the works of jinn and men."
| Moses: the comer | Muhammad: the brought |
|---|---|
| "When Moses came to Our appointed time" (7:143) | "Glory be to Him who took His servant by night" (17:1) |
| Asked to see and was told "Thou shalt not see Me!" | The eyesight did not swerve (53:17) |
| Fell thunderstruck: abiding through his own attributes, he could be overcome | Saw paradise and hell and did not budge: abiding through the Real's attributes |
| Name ascribed to the sea and the bush | Name ascribed to God: "His servant" |
| Seeker, desirer, rememberer | Sought, desired, remembered |
For Maybudi, the knowers find their hearts and the recognizers lose them: "the heart is the road, and the Friend is the homeland." Samani holds that servanthood is the highest robe: had there been a better one, it would have been given to Muhammad on the night of the miraj. His ladder of the Prophet's own ascent runs: need, aspiration, seeking, then the realities of No god but God, just as the sperm drop becomes clot and flesh. The Prophet's miraj began when he was called "Muhammad the trustworthy" and reached poverty and indigence. The chapter ends with Samani's demand: seek in the shop, the mosque and the tavern, and if the angel of death comes, "You do your work, I'll do mine."
Two things are asked at once: work as if everything depends on you, and know that nothing does. The chapter's practical test is the direction of one's gaze. Looking at one's practice breeds either pride or despair; looking at the bounty that the practice reflects breeds gratitude and more effort.
5. The Path
Chapter 5 describes the religion as a ladder: submission, faith and doing the beautiful; Shariah, Tariqah and Haqiqah; common people, elect and elect of the elect. Its centre is the beauty of deiformity, becoming characterized by God's character traits, and its last sections separate transmitted knowledge from recognition.
- Classifications of people are tools for judging oneself, not others: "busy yourself with the defects of your own soul."
- Religion (din) names all paths set down by God; the Hadith of Gabriel gives its three dimensions: islam, iman, ihsan.
- Faith embraces understanding: "Faith is certainly not blind belief."
- God loves human beings because of beauty: ontologically they manifest His beauty; ethically He loves them in the measure of their beauty.
- The path is takhalluq bi-akhlaq allah, "becoming characterized by God's character traits".
- God says five times that He loves the beautiful-doers, never that He loves the submitters or the faithful.
- Three groups of vicegerents see that "all is from Him", "all is in Him", "all is He".
- Transmitted knowledge (taqlid) is hearsay; recognition (marifa) is realization (tahqiq).
Religion and its three dimensions
The faithful can be ranked (faithful, friends, prophets, messengers), but Chittick warns that these schemes are ways of thinking about ourselves; real knowledge of others belongs to God. Maybudi quotes the Prophet to Ali: "When you see people busy with the defects of others, busy yourself with the defects of your own soul."
For Maybudi, religion "is a comprehensive word" covering submission, faith, the Sunnah and worship; it is the religion of the angels and of every prophet from Adam to Muhammad (42:13), and it rests on "listening and following." The Hadith of Gabriel gives three dimensions: islam (practice, body), iman (faith and understanding, soul) and ihsan (doing the beautiful, spirit). Chittick insists that faith is defined by its objects: God, angels, books, messengers, the Last Day and the measuring out. Maybudi's tree of recognition has roots (assent in the heart), trunk (acts) and branches (speech). The innermost dimension is sincerity (ikhlas); its opposite, hypocrisy (nifaq), "can claim the name" of mother of sins in Islam, as pride does in Christianity.
| Dimension | Domain | Faculty | Experts | Light (Maybudi on 24:35) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Islam, submission | Right activity | Body | Jurists | Light of submission with light of sincerity |
| Iman, faith | Right understanding | Soul | Theologians | Light of faith with light of truthfulness |
| Ihsan, doing the beautiful | Realization, transformation by love | Spirit | Sufi teachers | Light of beautiful-doing with light of certainty |
Islam may mean the universal submission of all things (3:83), the practices, the voluntary submission of any prophet's follower (the Qur'an calls Abraham and Jesus's apostles Muslims), or the historical religion. Junayd tested Shibli's "God!": if it was only the tongue, "Iblis says the same thing you do." Maybudi: "The religion is all ease because in the end it is that which conveys to ease." His three teachers: learn the Shariah from the ulama, discipline from the possessors of wisdom, recognition from the great ones.
The beauty of deiformity
What attracts lover to beloved is beauty. Chittick translates husn consistently as "beauty" and su as "ugliness", because "good" has been debased and is needed for khayr. Why does God love human beings? "the answer boils down to one word: beauty." From the creative command He loves them as manifestations of His own beauty; from the religious command He loves them in the measure of their beauty, since He does not love the ugly. The hadith "God created Adam in His form" was read by transcendence-minded scholars as "in his form" (adult form); the second reading, that God's form is the set of His most beautiful names, does not contradict it.
Akhlaq, ethics, is the plural of khuluq, character, written in unvoweled script exactly like khalq, creation: character traits are the inner qualities of created nature. God's traits (akhlaq allah) are all beautiful; the Prophet's "magnificent character" (68:4) gathers all beautiful human traits, as he stood in the station of no station. His prayer: "O God, Thou hast made my creation beautiful, so make my character beautiful too." Maybudi on 6:120 pairs outward blessing (perfect creation) with inward blessing (beautiful character), and says that for the chevaliers even seeking paradise is an inward sin, citing Sanai: "Whatever talk keeps you back from the road— let it be unbelief or faith!"
On Joseph sold for twenty dirhams, the commentary observes that what counts is showing, not seeing. Ibn Ata distinguishes outward beauty (form) from inward (character). Joseph once admired himself in a mirror and asked what his price would be; he was sold for twenty dirhams. Ansari: "Do not look at yourself, for self-seeing has no worth!" Maybudi on 3:79, "Be you lordly ones!", cites "Become characterized by the character traits of God!" and the hadith that whoever takes on one of God's traits enters the Garden; the folk of knowledge say these traits are the ninety-nine names. Kurragani warns that while one is still acquiring the names, one is still on the road: "As long as he is seeking love, he is unaware of the Beloved." Samani's four doors (beautiful-doing, blessings, obedience, love) are each shut by the servant and reopened with a key sent by God.
Doing the beautiful
Ansari calls the definition of ihsan "an all-comprehensive allusion to the position of this group". Every beautiful-doer has faith, but not everyone with faith is a beautiful-doer; and God says five times that He loves the beautiful-doers, never once that He loves the submitters or the faithful. Samani: "The measure and worth of discharging servanthood lies in seeing God." Maybudi ties ihsan to loyalty to Alast: "When an eye has seen Him, how can it busy itself with glancing at others?" Towards people it means pardon, in its double sense of effacing and of giving from one's bounty. The godwary and beautiful-doers "have a festival with every breath."
| Neighbour (Maybudi on 4:36) | Who | Their right |
|---|---|---|
| Of the house | The human being | Care that keeps them thankful and at ease |
| Of the soul | The guardian angel (82:10) | Keep them happy with obedience |
| Of the heart | The tranquility of recognition (48:4) | Keep recognition pure, adorned with the Sunnah |
| Of the spirit | The Real, "with you wherever you are" (57:4) | Rectify your character, escape yourself, become one for Him |
Shariah, Tariqah, Haqiqah
Maybudi: "The Shariah is servanthood, the Tariqah is selflessness, and the Haqiqah is freedom in the midst of both." The apparent verses belong to the majesty of the Shariah, the ambiguous ones to the beauty of the Haqiqah. The avenue is what Muhammad brought; the method "is a lamp that the Real holds next to the heart." Knowledge of the Shariah is learned from a teacher, of the Tariqah from a pir, of the Haqiqah from God alone; to deny the first is heresy, the second temptation, the third delusion.
| Group (Maybudi on 24:55) | Who | Their tawhid |
|---|---|---|
| Common people | Ulama, jurists, guardians of the creed; "those who mimic the folk of No god but God" | The sincere: "all is from Him" |
| Elect | The recognizers; still see themselves in the mirror of limpidness | "all is in Him" |
| Elect of the elect | Abide by the Real's making them abide; balls in the bend of the sultan's polo stick | The tawhid-voicers: "all is He" |
Each group has its own "indecency": for the common people, what the Shariah punishes; for the elect, looking at permitted pleasures; for the elect of the elect, gazing at anything but God. Maybudi distinguishes faith by demonstration from faith by face-to-face vision, and lists contrasts: "The Shariah is a lamp, the Haqiqah a burn." "The Shariah is not having evil, the Haqiqah is not having self." Burdens follow capacity (23:62): concessions for the weak, "the rightful due of His struggle" for the lords of the Haqiqah. Samani: a mulberry leaf travels from its own makeup and becomes the emperor's robe; "If you desire the station of the saints, you must transform your attributes." He also explains Adam's wheat as Tariqah against Shariah: the other foods of paradise flirted with Adam, and only the wheat told him the truth.
Knowledge and recognition
All knowledge is from God; Maybudi lists what God taught Adam, David, Jesus, Khidr and Muhammad. Transmitted knowledge (naqli) comes by taqlid, imitation; intellectual knowledge (aqli) by tahqiq, realization, from the root of haqq. By this measure anything we quote from others, scripture and scientists included, is hearsay. Maybudi's three knowledges are reported (ears), inspired (hearts) and of the Unseen (spirits), and beyond them God's knowledge of Himself. He grades knowledge of the Haqiqah, eye of the Haqiqah and truth of the Haqiqah, and says "Between recognition and finding are more than a thousand valleys." Asked how one finds Him, Junayd simply stood up.
Chittick, who once translated marifa as "gnosis" himself, now prefers "recognition". The Qur'an and Hadith use the word as a verb, and English has no verb from gnosis; everyday Arabic uses it for ordinary recognition; and "gnosis" suggests a secret elite, whereas the texts say everyone should strive for it. Recognition also carries the sense of recalling what one already knows, close to Plato's anamnesis and to fitra. The saying "He who recognizes his soul recognizes his Lord" is usually called a hadith, though Chittick thinks it more likely by Ali. Bastami: "You take your knowledge dead from the dead, but I take my knowledge from the Living who does not die."
Abraham's star, moon and sun (6:76-79) model the ascent from inference to vision; a chevalier of the Tariqah faults him for looking back at the plunder strewn on the road of "I am going to my Lord", where Muhammad's eyesight did not swerve. Wasiti: "The world's creatures are going to Him, but the recognizers are coming from Him." Certainty has three pillars: knowledge, eye and truth. Chittick adds a sober note: scholars of the formal sciences and teachers of Sufism and philosophy have always been in tension, partly because "learning can quickly become an end in itself"; love cannot be explained, only lived. Samani ends the chapter by satirizing praise that costs nothing: a singer tells his patron that applause buys no flour.
Maybudi's three-teacher scheme (rules from scholars, practice from a mentor, insight from experience) maps neatly onto any craft. The chapter's warning applies too: the one who learns the rules and never practises them has made his learning an argument against himself.
6. The States of the Travelers
Chapter 6 maps the inner weather of the path: the gap between those who serve for a wage and those who love, the life of remembrance, the alternation of fear and hope, contraction and expansion, the pull from dispersion to togetherness, annihilation and subsistence, and finally vision and proximity, which the great friends claim "in hard cash".
- Wage earners serve for recompense; recognizers serve for the Beloved, and consider recompense "a freckle on the face of the act."
- Serving God for the reward is a hidden associationism: one loves the reward instead of God or along with Him.
- Life is recognition and death is ignorance; voluntary death ("Die before you die!") is the soul's surrender.
- Remembrance (dhikr) rises from the tongue to the heart to witnessing God's remembrance of you.
- Stations remain, states change; opposing states trace back to the names of majesty and beauty.
- Fear and hope belong to the common people, contraction and expansion to the elect, awe and intimacy to the elect of the elect.
- Whatever comes from the servant is dispersion; whatever comes from God is togetherness. Neither can be skipped.
- God is seen only in the measure of the seer: "He spoke to Moses in respect of Moses."
Wage earners and recognizers
Sufi teachers contrast the majority who follow the Shariah with the minority advanced on the Tariqah. Maybudi puts it simply: "The worshiper wants everything from Him, the recognizer wants Him Himself." The Haqiqah is to the Shariah as spirit to body, and "The distance from service and worship to veneration and contemplation is the same as that from familiarity to love." When the Shariah is asked how to spend property it answers with the alms rates (5 dirhams in 200); the Haqiqah answers that one will not be with Him along with body and spirit. The Pir of the Tariqah: "How should I have known that reward is a freckle on the face of love?"
Chittick adds a caution. The names do not exclude each other: recognizers are also lovers and also worshipers, since they do all that a worshiper does; the worshiper simply stops short. Behind this lies the ladder image, where each rung depends on the one below. Maybudi, drawing on Qushayri, runs the chain backward: those who do not hope for the encounter have not yearned, have not loved, have not recognized, have not sought, because "the Real has not brought them into seeking and has shut the door of seeking."
Samani pairs the distinction with angels and humans. Angels are perfect in servanthood; the robe of friendship belongs to Adamites with faith. God calls angels servants without attribution, and this community "servants with attribution", My servants (15:42). "People talk in secret to friends, not to servants."
Why criticize the wage earner at all? Because serving for reward misreads tawhid: there is no beloved but the True Beloved, so loving the reward is a form of shirk, though God forgives it in weak creatures. Avicenna's Allusions and Remarks gives the philosophical version: "The recognizer has neither desire nor fear." Were he to have them, the Real would become a means. Samani's version is earthier: love based on bribery is not love. To a child one promises ten for one; to an adult, "Every loan that attracts profit is usury." The intelligent man says "I take one and I give one, and the one is I." This demands disengagement (tajrid) and solitariness (tafrid). "if someone lets go of something in the present state while seeking something else as compensation, he is a merchant, not disengaged."
Life, death and remembrance
The Qur'an makes life strictly God's attribute and uses life and death as symbols of knowledge and ignorance. Sufis cite "Die before you die!" and the greater jihad against the enemy in the breast. Maybudi: inward death is "that a man dies in himself from himself without himself and comes to life from the Real in the Real with the Real." Ansari's seventy-third field, life, has three parts (fear, hope and friendship, each with knowledge); without knowledge they become the fear of the Kharijites, the hope of the Murji'ites and the friendship of the libertines. Samani compresses it: "Life is recognition, death ignorance." Kharaqani said his shroud had been brought from heaven twenty years earlier.
Recognition recovers a forgotten knowledge, so it overlaps with dhikr (remembrance, reminder, mention). Adam slipped because he forgot (20:115). In Maybudi's dramatization, Adam pleads that remembrance needs a heart, "but You took away my heart." The prophetic reminder must come before the human response.
| Degree (Maybudi on 3:41, after Ansari) | Proof text | Remembrancer (on 3:191 and 35:32) |
|---|---|---|
| Outward, with the tongue of laudation | Remember thy Lord often (3:41) | Wrongdoer: tongue remembers, heart heedless |
| Concealed, in the heart | Or with more intense remembrance (2:200) | Moderate, the wage earner: tongue remembers, heart present |
| True: witnessing God's remembrance of you | Remember thy Lord when thou forgettest (18:24) | Front-runner: heart filled, tongue silent |
Maybudi has a compact image: "Remembrance set a trap whose bait was jealousy." The wage earner sees the trap and flees; the recognizer sees the bait and clings to the trap. The same practice repels or captures depending on what one is looking at.
Changing states
A station (maqam) is a permanent acquisition; a state (hal), from a root meaning "to change", is a gift that enters the heart and leaves. Chittick warns that usage is loose, since one person's state may be another's station. Opposing states trace back to opposing names: fear and awe answer majesty and severity, hope and intimacy beauty and gentleness. On 22:1, "Be wary" is severity and "your Lord" gentleness, keeping the servant between fear and hope.
Samani, following Tustari, gives fear the attribute of masculinity and hope of femininity; Chittick notes that both are present in any soul, one predominating at a time. Too much hope breeds laziness, too much fear toughness; losing both leaves security or despair, both attributes of unbelievers. His image is a lamp: fear the fire, hope the oil, faith the wick, the heart the lamp holder.
Contraction (qabd) and expansion (bast) could be called depression and elation, but Chittick objects that this turns them into "emotional vagaries, curable perhaps with a bit of chemical intervention." The texts see them as deposits of the names Contractor and Expander. Samani: "Contentment is that you drink down goblets of pure poison without wailing and crying."
States change because the names contrast, because the creative command is renewed without end, and because the servant looks now at himself, now at God. Joseph saw God's protection, Zulaykha her own shortcoming; the servant must pass between gratitude and apology. The Pir: "O God, when I look at myself, I ask who is more miserable than I. When I look at You, I ask who is greater than I." Samani, in a way Chittick says prefigures Ibn al-Arabi, gives man two eyes, one for God's gifts and one for his own nothingness. The Prophet himself shows the alternation: "I am the master of Adam's children" in expansion, "I do not know what He will do with me or with you" (46:9) in contraction. Qushayri and the Pir add that the road is a circle: spring, then darkness, then rain after despair (42:28), "and the last of the work goes back to the first."
Annihilation and subsistence
Western writing has given fana and baqa a high profile; Chittick notes the suggestion that annihilation is nirvana brought from India, while the Sufis themselves read it from 55:26-27. "All undergoes annihilation" matches the negation "No god", and "there subsists the face of thy Lord" the affirmation "but God". Ansari's early One Hundred Fields puts annihilation and subsistence at the very end (fields 99 and 100); the later Way Stations makes them 93 and 94.
| Term | Ansari, One Hundred Fields | Way Stations | Definition quoted |
|---|---|---|---|
| Life | 73 | (not given) | fear, hope, friendship, each with knowledge |
| Annihilation | 99 | 93 | seeking ceases in the Found, recognition in the Recognized, seeing in the Seen |
| Subsistence | 100 | 94 | "God, and that is all" |
| Togetherness | (not given) | 99 | eliminates dispersion; three degrees |
| Tawhid | (not given) | 100 | (chapter 9) |
Ansari's annihilation: "When rain arrives at the ocean, it arrives. Stars disappear in daytime." Abraham, the bosom friend (khalil), shows it in 26:77-78, where Maybudi hears "He is guiding me from me to Him". Samani treats annihilation as our created reality, since we are essentially nonexistent, so clinging to what perishes is folly; the attributes must be "swallowed down by the dragon of No, which is the doorkeeper of the world of But." On the miraj he traces a chain of attraction (secret core, spirit, heart, soul) and assigns stations: "The soul has the station of service, the heart the station of love, the spirit the station of proximity, and the secret core the station of contemplation."
Vision and proximity
The Kalam experts denied vision of God in this world, the Mu'tazilites even in paradise. Sufism took the hadith of ihsan as a program. God is seen only as He discloses Himself (tajalli), and Makki's Food of the Hearts insists "He does not disclose Himself twice in one description". Samani: God gives vision "in the measure of your eyes' capacity". Chittick reminds readers that Ansari's definitions are "pointers designed to open the souls of the travelers", not scholarly precision. Contemplation (mushahada) is "the falling away of the veil once and for all"; face-to-face vision has three levels: of eyesight, of the heart's eye, of the spirit's eye.
The Pir's prayers turn paradoxical: "Everyone suffers tribulation because of distance, but this poor wretch because of nearness." And: "all love is between two, with no room for a third. In this love, all is You, with no room for me." Proximity (qurb) has two sides: the servant's, which is describable, and the Real's (2:186, 50:16), which is not. Maybudi summarizes the three witnesses: "The person of sincerity sees that all is from Him, the recognizer sees that all is in Him, and the tawhid-voicer sees that all is He." The chapter ends with Samani and Kharaqani: the great friends do not worship "as if" they see; "The body surrenders itself for credit, but the heart deals only in hard cash."
Samani's usury joke is a fair test of motive in any job: if every effort is a loan expecting ten for one, the relationship is commercial. The chapter does not condemn the wage earner (God forgives him), but it marks the ceiling. The two-eye practice (look at the gift, then at your own share in the shortfall) is a workable habit for reviews and retrospectives.
7. The Reality of Love
Chapter 7 opens Part Three, "The Goal of Love". It sets Sufi love theory beside the philosophers (al-Farabi, the Brethren of Purity, Avicenna), surveys early Sufi treatments (Bukhari, Hujwiri, Ansari), gathers descriptions of love, insists that love is chosen by God rather than by the lover, explains why lovers speak in allusions, lays out ladders of love, and ends with human friendship as the corollary of love for God.
- Kalam read God's love as kindness and man's as obedience; Sufis and philosophers saw love as the force that creates, sustains and returns all things.
- Human love is a metaphor (majaz): "A metaphor is the bridge to the reality."
- In God, lover, beloved and love are one (al-Farabi, Daylami); everything else loves its own perfection and so loves the Good (Avicenna).
- Obedience is not love but its influence: the disobedient believer is still a lover (Bukhari).
- Love cannot be defined, only described; it has no cause outside God: "There is no consultation in love."
- He loves them comes before they love Him: the Sought must seek first.
- Love ascends by stages: Bukhari's seven, Ansari's three degrees, Maybudi's caprice, love and passion, Abbadi's yearning to passion.
- Love for others is legitimate and required, but as a corollary of love for God: love what He loves.
Philosophers on love
Kalam experts paid little attention to the creative command; for them God's love meant the kindness of the religious command, and man's love meant obedience. Sufis and philosophers instead saw love as "the dynamic force that brings the universe into existence, sustains it constantly, and drives all things back to the One." Chittick, who has set aside most philosophical material for another occasion, rejects the usual split of philosophy and Sufism into rationalism and mysticism: they shared more with each other than either did with Kalam. Both sought transformation of the soul, both saw the self as a hierarchy, and both held God, the Sheer Good, to be source and object of all love.
Al-Farabi (d. 950) says that in the First Cause "the lover is the same as the beloved"; in us the lover is a potency distinct from the virtue and beauty it loves. Daylami says the same in Sufi idiom. The Brethren of Purity (Chittick would call them the Brethren of Limpidness, from safa, the opposite of opacity) accept "intense yearning for unification" as the best definition while admitting love cannot be defined, and map three loves onto three souls.
| Soul (Brethren of Purity) | Its love | People it rules |
|---|---|---|
| Vegetal (shahwa, appetite) | food, drink, reproduction | those who gratify the senses |
| Animal (ghadab, wrath) | domination and control | those who love power |
| Rational | recognizing the Real, acquiring virtues | those who seek knowledge and virtue |
Their last chapter traces the light of beauty from the Creator to the Universal Intellect, Universal Soul and Prime Matter, like moonlight borrowed from the sun. Avicenna, in the Treatise on Love, builds on self-disclosure (tajalli): "there is no veil except in those who are veiled." Every existent innately loves its own perfection and so loves the Absolute Good; each level receives the disclosure in its measure and strives to gain similarity to the Good in its final goal. Hence the political contrast: "the Most Tremendous King is pleased when things gain similarity to Him, whereas perishing kings become angry at those who become similar to them."
Early Sufism: love is not obedience
Bukhari's Persian commentary on Kalabadhi, apparently the oldest book on Sufi teachings in Persian, opens its love chapter with what seems the oldest surviving Persian essay on love. Between creatures, love rises through seven degrees, each with its etymology.
| No. | Degree (Bukhari) | Note given |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | conformity (muwafaqa) of nature | nature is at ease |
| 2 | inclination (mayl) | belongs to the soul |
| 3 | affection (wudd) | wishing and hungering |
| 4 | love (mahabba) | from erasing and severing, from jar (hubb), or from seed (habb) |
| 5 | distraction (walah) | bewilderment, like a mother who has lost her child |
| 6 | caprice (hawa) | from limpid air, from falling, or from desire |
| 7 | passion (ishq) | love past the limit; from ashaqa, a vine that dries its tree |
He then sets the Folk of the Principles (Kalam) against the Folk of Recognition. For Kalam, God's love is a desire for good and man's is obedience; God's love and enmity are one unchanging desire, named differently by adjacency. The Sufis reply that a servant can be empty of obedience but not of love, for that would be unbelief: "obedience is not love, but obedience is the influence of love." And love cannot be described: a non-lover has not seen it, a lover is too busy burning. Hujwiri reports Samnun al-Muhibb's view that love is the root of the road and the stations its way stations, and that the shaykhs renamed love Sufism (safwa) and the lover a poor man to conceal it. Ansari's Way Stations puts love at station sixty-one, which led some scholars to underrate it; Chittick answers with Ghazali's reason (love is the furthest station; later ones are its fruits, earlier ones its preliminaries) and with One Hundred Fields, whose hundred fields "are all drowned in the field of love." Love there has three stations: truthfulness, drunkenness and nonbeing.
Describing the indescribable
Samani, after mentioning love for some 450 pages, comes closest to a definition in his chapter on the Friend: God's love is "desire for a specific bounty and conjunction with a specific secret and kindness", and the servant's love is a state whose outcome is conformity to the commandments. Then: "As for the reality, love is a state that cannot be expressed in words." Angels' work was upright "because there was no talk of love with them"; all human up-and-downness comes from the talk of love being with Adam's children. Muhasibi defines love as inclining with your entirety and knowing you fall short.
Maybudi lists four marks of love: following the Messenger, hoping for death, constant remembrance, and loving all that relates to the Beloved. Samani's fire image is the most vivid: new cloth and fine silk will not catch; love needs "a worn-out patch, halfway between existence and nonexistence". Hallaj said the fire of God was struck in him seventy years before it burned. Ruzbihan Baqli summarizes the root (incineration, repose, drowning, purification, vision, becoming characterized by the Beloved's traits), the branch (conformity, contentment, surrender, the Sunnah) and the courtesies; love born of blessings "is love with a cause."
Ansari stages a dialogue Maybudi quotes: vision says to love, "You are like fire, for you burn the world." Love answers, "Well, when I settle down in the heart, I plunder it." Vision belongs to those who reach God through His artisanries; love to those who come from Him to the artisanries.
Chosen by love
Love comes without known reason: "Love is what comes, not what is learned". Its only cause (illa) is God, who loved to be recognized; worldly factors are secondary causes (sabab), so we find correlations, not explanations. Seekers can repent, pray and fast; they cannot choose to love, because love belongs to the creative command. Samani: "In the shariah of love, repentance is folly". The lover who keeps his repentance hears "Good for you, O weary man!", and the one who breaks it "Bravo, O covenant breaker!" Our love abides through His love as a mirror image through the form.
Jacob's love for Joseph gives the model. "The Sought must begin to seek in order for the seeker to have seeking." Mount Sinai sought Moses first; the two bows' length yearned for Muhammad before Buraq came. Bayazid: "For a long time I fancied that I wanted Him. In fact, He first wanted me."
Allusion and the imaginal
Ansari's Book of Love tells the tale before creation, when "The beauty of He loves them had no use for the mole of they love Him." Ahmad Ghazali's Apparitions, perhaps the greatest Persian classic on love, deliberately puzzles: love's meanings are virgin and only tasters (dhawq) understand. Love waited at the border of existence for the spirit; "Love found the house empty and took over." Its kiblah varies only accidentally, with the present moment (waqt). Knowledge reaches only the shore of love: "knowledge is love's moth." Love shows marks in the World of Imagination (tress, cheek, mole, eyes, eyebrow), each signalling the level of the lover's seeking; Chittick notes, after Corbin, that the imaginal is not the imaginary. Samani explains the code: lovers are jealous for the virgin brides of meaning and hide them as Layla's locks or Majnun's madness; "These words, expressions, and letters are the containers for the fine wine of realizing the meanings."
Stages of love
Abbadi (d. 1152), Samani's younger compatriot from Merv, writes soberly in Making Limpid: "Know that the cause of all seeking is love." He holds that passion must not be ascribed to the Creator, since Qur'an and reports speak of love and bosom friendship; love, given to Muhammad, outranks bosom friendship, given to Abraham. His second passage frames passion as the final goal (ghaya, Aristotle's telos) of friendship, with a cosmic ladder from minerals through plants, animals and humans to prophecy; Chittick grants that philosophers would criticize it for "massive oversimplification" but finds the thrust a good summary. The heaven-dwellers move from passion; when they reach its goal they will be still, "and then the resurrection will take place."
Human friendship
Since people cannot escape loving, they must get love right, giving it its rightful due (haqq). The formula "There is no true beloved but God" does not make love for others illegitimate, "quite the contrary." Chittick frames it with the two commands: the creative command demands that we love, and the religious command directs our love to worthy objects. Ontologically we love others because we glimpse God's beauty in them; morally we should love those whose beauty conforms to God's character traits, and hate what He hates. Maybudi: "The reality of friendship is conformity, that is, being a friend of His friend and an enemy of His enemy." Those who love each other in God sit on seats around the Throne. On 4:114 he praises a goodness whose profit reaches others: "the wonder and chivalry are that you should open a door to yourself for another." Dhu'l-Nun's companion owns nothing, censures nothing, and does not change when you change, which finally points to the Real alone.
Ansari's Forty-Two Chapters makes cutting the womb (qat al-rahim) an image of cutting oneself off from the Friend and His friends; the lovers "are mirrors, not veils, for one another." On "A man will be with the one he loves" he argues that through friendship one reaches what one's own capacity cannot. Uways Qarani, far from the Prophet in form, was with him when his teeth were broken. Balaam fell to a dog's standing by one disrespect to a friend; the dog of the Companions of the Cave rose by respect.
Ansari's advice is practical: if you notice an inclination toward a corrupt person, repel it quickly; if you notice one toward the worthy, add to it. "A man will be with the one he loves" works as a rule for teams and mentorship: you travel, in part, on the effort of those you attach yourself to.
8. The Suffering of Love
Chapter 8 explains why love brings pain. Separation follows from the creative command and from God's majesty; trial is the price of carrying the Trust; the prophets, being the greatest lovers, suffered most; following the Prophet means engaging the world while keeping the heart with God; lovers die to themselves and God is their wergild; and, as Ansari says, suffering is "the mother of joy".
- "the worth of a man lies in his trial" (Qushayri): soul, heart, spirit and secret core each have their trial.
- Separation and union are relative: no absolute union (only the One is absolute), no absolute separation (He is with you wherever you are).
- Majesty demands separation, beauty calls for union; love is first honey, then poison.
- Seeking does not end in paradise: love and praise of God outlast all the shariahs.
- Trial (bala) echoes the "Yes indeed" (bala) of Alast; love (mahabba) and tribulation (mihna) differ by one dot.
- The more perfect someone is, the more he suffers: prophets, then friends, then the next best.
- Love demands following, which means living among people with the heart on God: "There is no monasticism in Islam."
- "When someone loves Me, I kill him, and when I kill him, I am his wergild."
Separation and union
Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl: the story resonates because we know we have lost something. Rumi's Mathnawi opens with the reed telling "the tale of separations." Maybudi: "Whoever is veiled from the Friend is in trial itself, even if he has the keys to the kingdom's treasuries in his sleeve." Many Kalam experts found talk of union (wisal) anathema; Chittick insists the word implies no unity of substance, any more than sexual union makes two people literally one. What separates people from God is failure to recognize His presence, and recognition has degrees. God in His mercy wants people to suffer, "Otherwise they will stay lackadaisical and live beneath themselves." Rumi: "Seek pain! Seek pain, pain, pain!"
Only Adamites, taught all the names, can love God in Himself, and so only they see that they are out of kilter. Samani: before Adam, the earth was gardens; "It is you who have thrown yourself into distress, and the creatures have been thrown into distress by you."
Separation is a foretaste of hellfire: on the divorce verse (65:1), Maybudi notes that God hates divorce because it causes separation, and Iblis drank the full cup of severance. Rabia: "Unbelief has the flavor of separation, and faith has the pleasure of union." Chittick finds Rabia's picture too static, and Samani supplies the correction: "Know that in reality, this world and that world are both for the sake of seeking." Prayer and fasting will be abrogated, but not love and praise of God; in paradise every day will open a new world of recognizing the Real. The finite never reaches the Infinite, so the arc of ascent goes on forever.
The trials of Adam
Maybudi on 33:11 imagines Adam's progeny sifted by thousands: most stay with this world, most of the remnant with the afterworld, most of the rest flee at the sight of trial's lane; one group enters "like the passionate". Samani links trial (bala) with the "Yes indeed" (bala) of Alast. At the first address the servants spoke; at the last, "Whose is the kingdom today?", they will be silent and God will answer for them. "You can buy a nightingale, which calls out night and day, for one dirham. But a falcon, which does not call out once in its lifetime, costs a thousand dinars." Mahabba and mihna differ by a dot; "the realizing man lifts his eyes from the dot and makes his spirit busy with the work of meaning."
| Day of Alast | Day of Resurrection | |
|---|---|---|
| Address | "Am I not your Lord?" (7:172) | "Whose is the kingdom today?" (40:16) |
| Who answers | the servants: "Yes indeed" | God Himself: "God's, the One, the Severe" |
| Regime | Shariah, an affirmation of man | Haqiqah, the negation of man |
| State | sobriety and being | effacement and nonbeing |
| Effect | this world is open to annihilation and blights | the next world receives subsistence |
Samani on Adam's fall: the angels who prostrated before his chair put their hands on his back to evict him, while unconditional love was saying: "O passionate man, seek, and have no fear!" The forbidden tree was the tree of love, a stranger in paradise, and Adam too was a stranger; their one hot breath burned the eight paradises.
The tribulation of the prophets
Islamic theology holds that God protected all 124,000 prophets from sin. Against what Chittick calls prosperity theology, the religion of love says "The more perfect someone may be, the more he or she will suffer." The Gospel points the same way. Samani: see the remorse of Adam, the cries of Noah, Joseph's well, "the saw on Zachariah's head and the blade on John's neck". Maybudi on Job: friends spare their friends every hardship, "The divine custom is contrary to this."
Samani draws a rule from the hadith of the two glances: the first gaze belongs to the secret core, the second is your own share. Abraham said "This is my Lord" of the star with the eye of his secret core; when he looked again it had set. Moses' meeting at the appointed time (7:142-44) is Maybudi's showpiece. Thirty nights became forty and Moses counted the ten as profit; on the journey to Khidr he could not bear half a day's hunger, because there he was carrying, not carried. Angels scolded him: "O child of menstruating women! Do you hope to see the Exalted Lord?" His answer echoes the Pir: "First He wanted me". On "Thou shalt not see Me", Maybudi says his station was higher at the refusal than at the request, since then he was in what the Real desired; the "but look at the mountain" was balm. Moses returns to service: "When someone is perplexed in his own work, he had best go back to the beginning of the thread."
Kalam experts, jurists and modern political activists have called the path of love otherworldly. Chittick's reply is pointed: premodern critics feared impudence toward God, while modern ideologues who put utopian social engineering at the centre of Islam "most likely fear that their own empty promises will be recognized for what they are." He cites Wilfred Cantwell Smith on devotion to a "fanciful notion" of a religion in place of engagement with God, and insists love demands both Shariah and Tariqah.
The path of following
Part of the prophets' suffering, the authors say, is that obeying the religious command pulls them from exclusive focus on the Real into the world. Samani's Muhammad is told at Hira that there is "a steep climb ahead": companionship with people along with disengagement from them. "He who keeps his heart with God in the mosque is not like him who keeps his heart with God in the bazaar." A man rides into town on a lion with a viper for a whip; the baker tells him that the real work is to sit between the two pans of a scale with one's heart on God. Abu Dharr: "How beloved are the three hated things", illness, poverty and death.
God burdens no soul beyond its capacity (23:62), yet love is trial "like salt in the pot." Ezra is told to thank God for an apricot because he was remembered on the day provisions were divided. "A beautiful trial" (8:17) is beautiful "because it is from Him". Mercy is always present: when the sultan starts the talk of love, tribulation becomes ease. Maybudi notes that the weak are shown more caresses because they dare not claim familiarity: "Whoever is more helpless is closer to the Friend." David is told to wash his heart with regret and to bind himself to the broken, who knock all night at the cell of "We are nearer". The angels wonder, "We do the service, but the love goes there."
Life in death
Those who embrace love embrace death: lovers bare their necks to the sword of No god. Even books on profane love dwell on martyrs of love; Giffen gives half her theoretical analysis to martyrdom, and the hadith "He who has passion, stays chaste, conceals the secret, and dies, dies a martyr" is often cited. Maybudi: "In love's shariah, all is severity, harshness, killing, and spilling blood". The Shariah's wergild (diya) becomes in the Tariqah subsistence in the One; the saying "When someone loves Me, I kill him, and when I kill him, I am his wergild" probably goes back to Shibli, Chittick infers from Maybudi's citations. Unlike the one-time killing among the Children of Israel (2:54), "these chevaliers have a killing at every hour and every moment." In Shibli's desert, forty lovers lie dying; God says their wergild "is the vision of My beauty." Samani on the Nourisher: "The first gift of the faithful is death." And God's promise: "Then I will kill you so that I alone remain."
| Shariah | Shariah of friendship (Maybudi, Samani) |
|---|---|
| Retaliation or wergild against the killer | Both are mandatory for the person killed: life as retaliation, all one knows as wergild |
| Wergild in dinars | "the wergild of those killed by passion is seeing" |
| Killing once, then ease | Killing at every moment |
| All gentleness and caressing | All severity and spilling blood |
The mother of joy
Chittick notes the long Western association of amor and mort: to love unconditionally is to die to oneself, and without separation's pain there is no union's joy. Ansari: "How should I have known that suffering is the mother of joy and that beneath a single disappointment lie a thousand treasures?" Samani: without trials, put straight into paradise, "You would not find an iota of pleasure." One day you will sit in paradise pulling thorns from your feet with the tweezers of gentleness, saying "What a pity that these thorns went into my feet instead of my spirit!" On the name Witness, he says that the faithful have a chastisement (adhab) too, but sweet (adhib), because it happens in His presence. Every promise has its counterweight: "He is with you wherever you are" with "High indeed is God", "He is the Outward" with "He is the Inward". "You cannot say that you will not find, for the Shariah disputes that." Zachariah under the saw cries, "I want them to saw me forever!"
9. The Realization of Tawhid
The last chapter returns love to its root: tawhid. It begins with poverty, the creature's utter need; turns to jealousy, the sword that cuts away every other; reviews the levels of tawhid, ending in the oneness of love where lover and Beloved both become "others"; and closes with nonbeing and colorlessness, where God encounters God and nothing remains but love.
- Love is the Qur'an's question of the One and the many put existentially: the pain of not having what we want.
- Only self-knowledge is direct; everything else, even science, is hearsay about others.
- Ontological poverty is universal; recognizing it is a high station. The poor man sees no handhold but the Real.
- Human need is infinite because man was made in God's form; eight paradises do not fill it.
- Jealousy (ghayra) destroys the soul's ties to others (ghayr); it took Adam out of paradise.
- Knowledge, practice and paradise itself can become idols and kiblahs.
- Ahmad Ghazali's blame has three faces: toward creatures, toward the self, toward the Beloved; at the end love alone remains.
- The goal is colorlessness: "God's color" (2:138), the fitra, the Station of No Station.
Historians sometimes order Sufism into stages of activity, love and knowledge; Chittick finds that too neat, since the Qur'an talks of all three throughout. Nor does word count settle the Qur'an's regard for love: "The issue, however, is not word count." Love is the relationship between the One and the many, which is tawhid. "We should not argue about words. Wanting, willing, yearning, wishing, craving, longing, needing", all are love. The question is what we really want, and that requires knowing who we really are. Here Chittick makes his sharpest epistemological claim: "Everything I know about you, all the information I acquire about anything whatsoever, is hearsay." The creative command explains how lovers became separate; the religious command shows how to return.
Recognition of poverty
Once it is seen that the One alone is one, the Real is utterly different from the unreal. Recognizing this asks for more than knowledge of the creed: it demands grasping the unreality of one's own situation and living accordingly, recognizing God as Lord and acting freely as servant. Creatures have absolute need (iftiqar) because they own nothing but nonexistence. Premodern seekers rarely called themselves Sufis, a word for a high station; they called themselves the poor, the dervishes. Samani: "You must not voice the tawhid of your own tawhid-voicing." Even the Prophet was stripped: "Thou hast nothing of the affair" (3:128).
| Poverty | Source | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Of created nature | Maybudi on 35:15, 47:38 | general: every newly arrived thing needs the Creator for creation and nurture |
| Of attributes | 59:8, 2:273 | praised; a disguise of wealth ("Call me Arsalan so that no one will know who I am") |
| Of the heart | "I seek refuge in Thee from poverty" | close to unbelief; the heart in ruins, home of the satans |
| "Poverty is my pride" | Maybudi on 59:8 | close to the Real; disengagement, the sword out of its scabbard |
Ansari makes need itself the fire of love: travelers are like one falling down a well that grows more bottomless as he falls. Samani: human need is infinite because man was created in God's form, while other things manifest only some attributes; heaven, earth and the eight paradises were given to dust, "but its need did not decrease by one iota." "Whoever is not avaricious is not an Adamite." Shibli's need would swallow the eight paradises without a mote showing. Adam: to one who fears hell, paradise is worth a thousand spirits; "When someone fears You, he sees paradise as not worth a grain."
Ahmad Ghazali gives the logic of opposites: love's apportioning gives exaltation and unneediness to the Beloved, abasement and need to the lover, and "As long as the lover does not have need, the Beloved will not show His unneediness." The lover can offer up spirit, religion and world, but not the Beloved: "Property can be offered up, but not the owner." Familiarity would mean being at the same level, which is absurd; any familiarity is the loan of a moment. Union, finally, is with the Beloved's form in the lover's own spirit: "When love reaches perfection, it feeds on itself."
Ansari's Book of Love: "Poverty is a phoenix of which there is only the name." "Poverty is almost unbelief" means not that the dervish has no religion, "but that he has no self." In Forty-Two Chapters he reports Abu Ali al-Katib's judgment that the Mu'tazilites sought God's incomparability with their own intellects and erred, while the Sufis sought it with knowledge (ilm, transmitted learning) and found the road. His instructions: "Be as you appear, and appear as you are." And: "Strive for the nonbeing of your own being. Then you may do justice to the word No."
The sword of jealousy
Ghayra, jealousy, is ghayr, other, with an added vowel. Jealousy has a bad name today because people know only its human form; God's jealousy exists precisely to destroy the soul's ties to anything but the One. The Jealous (ghayur) appears in hadith, and Chittick cites Exodus 34:14. Maybudi: "In the religion of friendship, seeing others in place of the Friend is nothing but associationism". Everyone has a direction (2:148), an object of worship, whether he knows it or not; Chittick links this to what Ibn al-Arabi later called the god of belief. God throws something into each person as a kiblah: wealth, position, a spouse, a lovely face, learning, renunciation, worship. Bayazid passed God's gate and saw no crowding; even the great Sufis were "bewildered and intoxicated". On 14:35, "Whenever something holds you back from the Real, that is your idol." Abraham's rebuke for asking "accept it from us" after building the Kaabah shows that seeing one's own activity is itself an idol.
Maybudi reads the slander against Aisha (24:11) as jealousy at work: when the Prophet and Aisha "busied their hearts with love for each other," the path of perspicacity was shut to him until the trial ran its course, as Abraham failed to recognize the angels and Lot did too. Adam's glance at paradise and Abraham's at Ishmael draw the same rebuke: "Two beloveds cannot fit into one heart." When exonerated, Aisha said she would praise God, not the Prophet or her parents. This is the passage chapter 8's note 1 refers to.
Knowledge too can be an idol. Ansari on al-Razi: the scholar "imagined that he was the friend of knowledge, but in fact he was the friend of boasting and bragging". His questions are a self-audit: "Are you seeking to negate yourself or to affirm yourself?" And: "conceal other people's defects with your defects!" Samani on "No god but He" makes No god the chamberlain who sweeps the house before the sultan of but God arrives, and the crocodile that must swallow all one's attributes, obedient or disobedient. On shame (haya): Abu Bakr Warraq felt like a thief after two cycles of prayer; Sufyan Thawri feared not his sins but whether his tawhid was real. "This work will not be set straight in partnership. Either Me, or you." Samani on power and jealousy: "An existence between two nonexistences is like no existence at all." In the world of the command, sit on the steed of existence to perform the commandments; in the world of love, on the steed of nonexistence. By the Shariah paradise is the sought object; "by the fatwa of the Haqiqah, paradise is both road and thief, and the Real is the only goal." God created Adam for Himself and gave him to nothing; he is made a king, since "no one recognizes a king but a king." "Your body is Mount Sinai, and your heart Moses."
The oneness of love
| Level | Muhammad Ghazali (Alchemy of Happiness) | Analogy: is the master in the house? | Ahmad Ghazali: faces of blame |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | says "No god but God" with the tongue only: the hypocrite | ||
| 2 | believes it in the heart, by imitation (common man) or evidence (Kalam expert) | someone said so; or the horse and servants are at the door | toward creatures: the Beloved's jealousy, so the lover does not look at others |
| 3 | witnesses that all comes from one root; still sees creatures, so dispersion | sees him inside the house | toward the lover: the moment's jealousy, so he does not look at himself |
| 4 | sees only one: annihilation in tawhid | toward the Beloved: love's jealousy, so he is not tied to wanting; love alone remains |
The blameworthy (malamatiyya) made themselves scandalous nonconformists, generally without breaking the Shariah's clear rules; Sufi texts tell seekers to welcome the blame of family and society, whose voice Chittick gives as "Get a job, marry, have children. Don't ruin your life." In Ahmad's final stage, "the lover is the other, and the Beloved is also the other." Love "is lover, beloved, and love"; when the accidents of derivation disappear, the work falls back on the oneness of its reality. Annihilated, the lover becomes master of the moment rather than its prisoner, "a hair in the Beloved's tresses." Hence love is trial: duality is otherness, and jealousy burns otherness. "Know that the lover is an antagonist, not a helper", and so is the Beloved; help lies only in unification. Ansari's chapter on passion anticipates this: "Love burns the lover, but not the beloved. Passion burns both seeker and sought."
Nonbeing and colorlessness
The goal is to return to the beginningless domain of love. Chittick stresses that this is not loss of individuality but "the reintegration of the metaphorical self with the true self." Rumi's fish were thrown on dry land so the ocean could be recognized; they flip and flop and call it love, and return the same fish, now aware of the water. Samani: "You were wanted so that you could be a spectator." Our true life was the forty years Adam's clay was fermenting, a pure gaze "without the intrusion of dust's free choice." Ja'far lost both hands and received wings; Solomon slaughtered his horses and received the wind (the note on p441 adds that God permitted this act though Islamic teachings would forbid it).
Maybudi on 5:35 sets the worshipers' means of approach (practice), the knowers' (unveiling) and the recognizers' (abandoning means). The Pir: "O God, the means of approach to You is You." Ansari, on the hadith of God becoming the servant's hearing, writes "The Sufi is not created"; such a Sufi "is quit of mortal nature." Bayazid, asked "Whose is the kingdom?", answers "Yours" until God says, "Now that you have come to have nothing, you have everything."
The last station is colorlessness. Each state colors the seeker; the goal is the Station of No Station, where God encounters God. Maybudi: "All attributes of selfhood are bonds, every bond is a color, and the chevaliers disdain every color." "God's color" (2:138) was read as a Christian baptism and as the fitra; in Stage Three it is "the color of colorlessness", which turns copper and iron into gold like an elixir. Chittick adds that colorlessness is simply another way to describe the Tariqah, becoming characterized by God's beautiful traits; Maybudi's cow of the Children of Israel (2:68-71) maps them: neither old nor virgin, golden and gladdening the gazers, not abased to plow. Ansari's chapter "I am Thou and Thou art I" alludes to togetherness and is "not fit for every ear". Chittick ends by saying all his authors were lovers, not dissectors of love. Ansari's last word in the book: "O God, when we gaze on You, we are kings wearing crowns, and when we gaze on ourselves, we are dust with dust on our heads."
Ansari's questions to the scholar ("Status? Wealth? Boasting and pride?") are usable as written for any expert. Chittick's hearsay point also cuts for modern readers: information about love, or about anything, is not knowledge for oneself. The chapter's discipline is to notice what one has quietly made one's kiblah.
10. Slips in the Printed Book
Small errors visible in the printed text itself: typos, missing words, inconsistent verse numbers and capitals, and a few internal inconsistencies. Nothing here depends on outside sources; anything that would need outside checking is left alone, and queries are marked as such.
Page numbers are the printed ones (roman for the front matter). The text was read from the publisher's PDF, whose extraction splits ligatures ("fi re"); such splits are artifacts and are not listed.
| # | Page | Slip |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | p. xiii | when, as an undergraduate. I discovered Rumi: a full stop where a comma is needed. |
| 2 | p. xv | At I first I thought I would draw: a stray "I". |
| 3 | p. xviii | Ansari is given as d. 1088 in the preface, while a bibliography entry is titled Abdullah Ansari of Herat (1006- 1089 CE). Two death years in one book. Query. |
| 4 | p. 43 | Muhammad become the model: "become" for "became". |
| 5 | p. 100 | A saying earlier introduced from the commentary on verse 3:8 and cited as (Kashf 2:25), i.e. volume and page, is here said to be in the commentary on 2:25, which reads as a verse number. Query. |
| 6 | p. 136 | Iblis's "I am better" is bracketed [38:6]; everywhere else (pp. 62, 63, 66, 135) the verse is 38:76. |
| 7 | p. 138 | As long the human gaze does not pack its bags: "as" missing. |
| 8 | p. 165 | As noted in the introduction: the description of Way Stations is in the preface; the book has no section called introduction. |
| 9 | p. 166 / p. xx | The Arabic Way Stations was written about twenty-five years after the Persian (p. 166) but about thirty years after it in the preface. |
| 10 | p. 186 | there no desirer but God: "is" missing. |
| 11 | p. 204 | there can be such thing as inherent human existence: "no" missing, as the sentence's own parallel requires. |
| # | Page | Slip |
|---|---|---|
| 12 | p. 204 | The teaching of the names is cited as (2:30); elsewhere (pp. 60, 79, 90, 107) it is 2:31. |
| 13 | p. 204 | when He created Him: capital "Him" for Adam, against the book's convention of capitals for God only. |
| 14 | p. 215 | against each either: "either" for "other". |
| 15 | p. 295 | reaches the nostril's of someone's covenant: stray apostrophe. |
| 16 | p. 326 | Moses is my chosen one: lower-case "my" in a divine saying, between "My bosom friend" and "My beloved". |
| 17 | p. 350 / p. 342 | Samani's line is recalled on p. 350 as At first love is all benevolence, and at last it is all severity; as translated on p. 342 it reads At first it is all benevolence, at last it is all severity. Minor. |
| 18 | p. 379 | Nor can you can say: doubled "can". |
| 19 | p. 412 | but he did not let him loose: lower-case "he" for God, against the capitals around it. |
| 20 | p. 419 | A quotation from 2:260 opens with a double mark and closes with a single one. |
| 21 | p. 432 | Rumi's the dying vat of He, in a passage about color and dye, reads as a slip for "dyeing". Query. |
None of these changes the argument. The verse-number slips (6, 12) are the ones a reader checking references would trip on.
11. Synthesis
The book's ideas gathered: takeaways, frameworks, a closer look, the people, and some connections to present-day work.
Twenty-four takeaways
- Love is the Qur'an's question of the One and the many, asked existentially rather than abstractly.
- Two commands organize everything: the creative command (Be!) cannot be disobeyed; the religious command (Follow me) can.
- "He loves them" precedes "they love Him". Human love is always a response; the Sought seeks first.
- Every love is love for God, but most loves are metaphors; the task is to direct an inescapable love, not to create it.
- Mercy takes precedence over wrath, and God's love has no beginning.
- Adam carried the Trust because he was dust and "burnt"; angels serve, Adamites serve and love.
- The fall was love's school: majesty had to be known as well as beauty.
- The self is one subtlety with many names, and the heart fluctuates between God's two fingers.
- Aspiration sets a person's worth; seeking proves one has already been found.
- Religion is a ladder: islam, iman, ihsan; Shariah, Tariqah, Haqiqah.
- The path is becoming characterized by God's character traits; God loves the beautiful-doers.
- Serving for a wage is not condemned, but it is a ceiling; reward is "a freckle on the face" of love.
- Remembrance moves from tongue to heart to God's remembrance of you.
- States come in pairs traced to majesty and beauty: fear and hope, contraction and expansion, awe and intimacy.
- Dispersion and togetherness both belong to reality; Shariah without Haqiqah is deprivation, Haqiqah without Shariah abandonment.
- Obedience is not love but love's influence; a disobedient believer is still a lover.
- Love cannot be defined, chosen or advised: "There is no consultation in love."
- Philosophers and Sufis agree more than either agrees with Kalam: all things love their own perfection, so all love the Good.
- Love for others is required, as conformity: love what God loves.
- Suffering scales with capacity; the prophets suffered most.
- Seeking never ends, even in paradise.
- Poverty is the creature's truth; human need is infinite because man is made in God's form.
- Jealousy cuts away every other, including knowledge, practice and paradise when they become kiblahs.
- The end is colorlessness: lover and Beloved both become "others", and love alone remains.
Frameworks at a glance
| Framework | Terms | Ch. |
|---|---|---|
| Two commands | creative and religious; decree and command | 1, 2, 7 |
| Two verses of love | 5:54 mutual love; 3:31 following | 1, 7 |
| Levels of the self | soul, heart, spirit, secret core | 3, 6 |
| Levels of tawhid | tongue, belief, witnessing, seeing only One | 4, 9 |
| Three dimensions of religion | islam, iman, ihsan; body, soul, spirit | 5 |
| Three witnesses | all from Him, all in Him, all He | 5, 6 |
| Wage earner and recognizer | familiarity and love; worshiper and lover | 6 |
| Paired states | fear/hope, contraction/expansion, awe/intimacy | 6 |
| Dispersion and togetherness | variegation and stability (Moses, Muhammad) | 6 |
| Ladders of love | Bukhari's seven; Ansari's three; caprice, love, passion | 7 |
| Alast and Resurrection | "Yes indeed" and the silence of "Whose is the kingdom?" | 8 |
| Kinds of poverty | of created nature, of attributes; refuge and pride | 9 |
| Faces of blame | toward creatures, self, Beloved | 9 |
A closer look
- Strengths. The book makes available, in careful and consistent translation, a body of Persian prose on love (Maybudi, Samani, Ansari, Ahmad Ghazali) that Nasr's foreword calls hardly known in the West. The two-commands frame makes a large anthology hang together, and the chapters move from theology to psychology to practice to goal in a clear arc.
- An argued anthology. Chittick is open about his sympathy. Kalam serves mainly as a foil (God's love as kindness, man's as obedience), and modern ideologues and "prosperity theology" are dismissed briskly in chapter 8. Readers wanting the critics' side get it only in summary.
- A deliberate window. The sources are mostly eleventh and twelfth century; Rumi, Ibn al-Arabi and later writers appear as pointers, and most of the philosophical material was, he says, set aside for another occasion. Chapter 7's philosophy section is therefore a sample, not a survey.
- Repetition as method. The same images (Alast, the Trust, the dot between love and tribulation, "He loves them") return many times. That suits a book about a circle but makes the long chapters (7 and 9) heavy going.
- Interpretive confidence. Chittick often states what an author "means" (for instance, that Samani's "one entrusted with this talk" may be angelic) and sometimes infers provenance (the wergild saying "probably" goes back to Shibli); he usually flags these as inferences.
- Small slips. Twenty-one printed slips and queries (Part 10), mostly typos and two verse numbers, never touch the argument.
Who's Who
| Person | Date as printed | Role in the book |
|---|---|---|
| Jafar al-Sadiq | d. 765 | Abraham's prayer against seeing one's own bosom friendship |
| Yahya ibn Muadh Razi | d. 872 | "I depend on sin, not obedience" |
| Sahl Tustari | d. 896 | Fear masculine, hope feminine |
| al-Farabi | d. 950 | Lover, beloved and love one in God |
| Abu Ali al-Katib | d. 951 | Mu'tazilites erred by intellect, Sufis right by knowledge |
| Abu'l-Abbas Sayyari | d. 953 | No enjoyment in contemplation |
| Abdallah al-Razi | d. 964 | Learning without practice |
| Ali al-Husri | d. 981 | Claims refuted by testing |
| Kalabadhi | d. 990 | Introduction to the School of Sufism |
| Abu Talib Makki | d. 996 | Self-disclosure never repeated |
| Hasan al-Daylami | d. ca. 1000 | Early Arabic book on love |
| Avicenna | d. 1037 | Treatise on Love; self-disclosure of the Good |
| Mustamli Bukhari | "about fifty years after Kalabadhi" | Oldest Persian essay on love |
| Person | Date as printed | Role in the book |
|---|---|---|
| Qushayri | d. 1072 | Subtle Allusions, often quoted by Maybudi |
| Hujwiri | d. ca. 1077 | Sufism as another name for love |
| Abdullah Ansari | d. 1088 (preface); see Part 10 | The Pir of the Tariqah; Way Stations, One Hundred Fields |
| Muhammad Ghazali | d. 1111 | Four levels of tawhid |
| Rashid al-Din Maybudi | began final draft 1126 | Unveiling of the Secrets, the chief source |
| Ahmad Ghazali | d. 1126 | Apparitions; blame and love's oneness |
| Sanai | d. 1131 | Persian love poet quoted in passing |
| Ahmad Samani | died at forty-six in 1140 | Repose of the Spirits |
| Mansur Abbadi | d. 1152 | Making Limpid; passion as telos |
| Ruzbihan Baqli | d. 1209 | Root, branch and courtesies of love |
| Ibn al-Arabi | d. 1240 | Two eyes; the god of belief |
| Rumi | not given in the passages used | The reed; seek pain; the fish and the ocean |
12. Glossary
Terms as the book glosses them, in Chittick's translations.
| Term | Meaning in the book |
|---|---|
| Alast | The covenant "Am I not your Lord?" (7:172); answered with bala, "Yes indeed" |
| bala (trial) | Trial, tribulation; pronounced like the "Yes indeed" of Alast |
| baqa / fana | Subsistence / annihilation (55:26-27) |
| dhikr | Remembrance, reminder, mention of God |
| dusti | Persian "friendship", Maybudi's generic word for love |
| faqr | Poverty, the creature's need; the poor = dervishes |
| farq / jam | Dispersion / togetherness |
| ghayra / ghayr | Jealousy / the other |
| hal / maqam | State (changes) / station (remains) |
| Haqiqah | The Reality; the goal beyond Shariah and Tariqah |
| hawa | Caprice, misguided love |
| himma | Aspiration |
| ihsan | Doing the beautiful: worship "as if you see Him" |
| ishq | Passion, love past the limit |
| khalil / habib | Bosom friend (Abraham) / beloved (Muhammad) |
| mahabba | Love, the generic Arabic word |
| majaz | Metaphor; "the bridge to the reality" |
| malama | Blame; the blameworthy (malamatiyya) |
| Term | Meaning in the book |
|---|---|
| marifa / arif | Recognition / recognizer |
| mihna | Tribulation; one dot from mahabba in unvoweled script |
| muzdur, ajir | Wage earner, who serves for recompense |
| nafs | Soul, usually the commanding soul |
| qabd / bast | Contraction / expansion |
| qurb | Proximity, nearness |
| safa | Limpidness, opposite of opacity |
| Shariah / Tariqah | The broad path of the Law / the narrow path of the Sufis |
| tajalli | Self-disclosure ("theophany") |
| tajrid / tafrid | Disengagement / solitariness |
| talwin / tamkin | Variegation / stability |
| taqlid / tahqiq | Imitation, hearsay / realization |
| tawhid | Asserting God's unity: "No god but God" |
| waqt | The present moment |
| wisal / firaq | Union / separation |
| yak-rangi | One-coloredness; colorlessness, "God's color" (2:138) |
About this book
Divine Love: Islamic Literature and the Path to God by William C. Chittick, 2013. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions