Sufism, That Fearful Love

"Those who love God shall have, on the Day of Resurrection, a place in the shade of the heavenly Throne."

The Arabs did not teach the Christian Middle Ages the principles of courtship and the rules of love alone; they gave the peoples of Europe, and especially Spain and France, the capacity to understand the divine Truth, and to love the Creator in a way pure of skirt, clean of intention, and overflowing with feeling.

Did not the Sufis of the eighth century (Ibn Adham, al-Radi, al-Sari al-Sa'ani, al-Bistami, etc.) and their disciples of the tenth and eleventh centuries (al-Hujwiri, al-Sarraj, al-Qushayri, etc.) hold the Creator to be their sole chosen one — not out of fear of torment or hope of Paradise, but by the power of love, which drives the lover to kneel at the feet of his master to serve him, expecting from him not the least favor?

Divine love is a passion imaginary in principle and real in its beginnings. It arises from a meeting of outward emotions, or from a heart's inclination toward a person who unites beauty and tenderness — but that inclination, which circumstances did not help to grow and flourish, turned instead toward the Creator, because He is the source of all power and all feeling. The man who contemplates and loves beauty is created anew, and by going deeper he draws near to the Creator, who is Love and who is Beauty — and sometimes he attains union with Him. This kind of mysticism is possible because the person who loves is lit by inner lights that purify him to a degree that raises him above the level of other men.

"Love is a ray of the divine beauty," said al-Mas'udi (tenth century) in his book "Muruj al-Dhahab" (The Meadows of Gold), where the scholars of all the schools discourse on love at the house of Yahya the Barmakid, as the members of Plato's "table" used to do. God created the world for beauty and for love. God, the creator of all, looks upon His creatures with the admiring gaze one gives to the beauty that has issued from Him and that is a ray of His gracious names. And the creatures admire one another's beauty until they arrive at the love that lifts them above the common level, and they reach the Creator, that they may contemplate His beauty, submit to Him, and serve Him. That submission and that service the creature counts as a testimony of love toward the Creator; for love does not reach perfection, or any part of it, except through sacrifice, and the service of the beloved is a kind of sacrifice on the part of the lover.

Jalal al-Din al-Rumi al-Aflaki recorded a story which the companions of the king of France, Saint Louis, heard on his crusade in Egypt; Joinville set it down in the thirteenth century in his memoirs, and in the seventeenth century J. P. Camus wrote it in his book "La Caritée" — the story of a woman, Rabia, the saint of the city of Basra, who wished to ascend to heaven bearing in her right hand a torch of fire and in her left a bucket of water: the first to burn heaven and the second to quench hell — this to prove to God the strength of her love for Him, the measure of her service to Him as the fruit of her love of Him, and her sacrifice of her pride, that by her feeling she might work miracles so that the Beloved might be pleased with her. For love is always in fear of finding no favor with the one it worships.

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The world was created, and divine love was created with it; hence the love of God is the most beautiful and the sweetest love on this earth. Does not the Koran say, "He loves them and they love Him"? And the Sufis said: God loved first, and that love has not changed through the ages — a love of the kind that contemplates and gives without reckoning or greed or selfishness. Al-Qushayri described that love as purity, patience, and perfection; as blazing fire, as oneness, as constancy... and so on; and al-Nuri went further, likening divine love to the piercing of the veils and the lifting of the secrets.

Al-Mas'udi said that certain Sufis found in the torment of earthly, sensual love — in its misery, its sorrows, and its joys — the only road by which to reach the love of the Creator. One sheikh even refused to accept as a disciple anyone who had not fallen into the nets of love; and his opinion is the right one, for in ordinary love a person learns contemplation, and grows used to sacrificing himself for the joy of the one he loves.

Abu Hamza relates, quoting the book "Masari' al-'Ushshaq" of Abu Bakr al-Sarraj, that the Sufi Abu Nadar al-Ghanawi met a youth whose beauty passed the ordinary bounds. The sheikh was taken with him and pressed him to remain near him, for he did not wish to turn his gaze from his heavenly face. And when the youth had gone, the sheikh wept, and said that the boy's face had reminded him of the Face that has no equal, of which one never tires and which is never renewed; that he would do everything in his power to please Him; that he would fight His enemies until the day should come that would allow him to contemplate the divine Face. And that venerable sheikh asked of his Lord that He show him His gracious face — and let him pass his life thereafter in hell!

The things that are upon the earth are the ray of the Beauty that is in heaven, and they are worthy of a passing worship. For this reason the dervishes would enter into deep contemplation at the sight of a flower, or of a green field in spring,

or on hearing a musical air or a verse of song — as happened to Abu Hamza, who fainted away on hearing a beautiful singing. And many times the ecstasy (extase) began for al-Nuri and Abu Hamza, and they uttered the pilgrims' cry, "Labbayk — here I am, Thine!" — because they had seen a dog howling or a bird warbling.

This is a love of the stuff of legend, but it is not the only one of its kind. The "Annals of the Capuchins" (Le Annals des Capucins) record the story of certain Franciscan brothers who would exult in the Lord at any sign of nature whatever. Brother Arsene of Milan contemplated God and His beauty in all creatures, and for this reason he would move the earthworms out of the way of walkers and carts, for fear those little images of the Creator should be trodden underfoot. As for Brother Vito of the city of Ragusa (Raquse), he would exult in his Lord, and sometimes enter into a rapture (extase) of the spirit, through his deep contemplation of burning branches; and sometimes he would hold the live coals without feeling his fingers burn, in his delight at that beauty which God has bestowed even upon the least of things, and which He allowed him, poor servant that he was, to behold!

This is a fearsome degree of love; if every person could reach it, the whole inhabited world would be a house of madmen. But the perfection of Sufism is the love that wipes out social boundaries, the love which is the renewal of life and its true meaning — that love which God created for beauty, and for woman, because she is the most beautiful of His gracious images; because love for woman is a kind of thanksgiving to the Creator for the delicacy and softness, the beauty and sweetness, He has placed in our hands; and because God prefers love to prayer and to holy wars — for He is merciful and does not desire the shedding of blood, and because a moment of love is worth years of worship.