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This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.
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Podcast Host Henrik
The problem with radio is we can't show you our new box packed with a KFC snacker, five nuggets, fries and a drink for just $7. So you'll just have to trust us when we say the crispy golden fried breading will make your mouth water. You'll have to trust us when we say this is a ridiculous amount of chicken for such a small price. And you'll have to really trust us when we insist that yes, it really is only $7. Finger licking machine $7 box feast from KFC trust us, it's finger licking good.
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Omid Safi
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Podcast Host Henrik
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Omid Safi
Acast Powers the World's Best Podcasts here's the show
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Podcast Host Henrik
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Omid Safi
you want to be the most interesting person in the room? Then listen to the best one yet, our daily news show of pop culture meets business. We'll tell you why Abercrombie was saved
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by a $100 wedding dress, how keeping
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Omid Safi
a Beyonce style brag book is gonna get you that promotion, and the AI drama that made Reddit our stock pick of the year. Jack and I worked on Wall street,
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Podcast Host Henrik
got mba, sold our last company to Robinhood. Plus we were freshman year roommates, so
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Omid Safi
I can tell you why Jack's a briefs guy, not a boxer's guy. So listen to T boy. The best one yet. It'll be the brightest part of your day. And if this podcast lasts longer than
- [01:27]
Podcast Host Henrik
20 minutes, call your doctor. AC helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com. In mainstream Western consciousness, the religion of Islam isn't perhaps primarily associated with the principle of love. Instead, we have been fed a picture of the religion that often seems to represent the opposite. But in the tradition known as Sufism, which has been an essential part of mainstream Islam for most of history, the idea and concept of love is actually at the very forefront. The majority of Sufi poetry talks about love love for God, but also the resulting love for God's creation and the practical implications that that has for the way we live together as humans and creatures in general. This can be said to be one of the most prominent characteristics of Sufism, which I hope many of my earlier episodes on the topic has shown. But Within Sufism, there is a sub movement or a sub movement within Sufism where the concept of love is taken to even further extremes, where love is not only a prominent aspect, but is the very core and all encompassing reality of not just Sufism, but reality itself. This movement is often referred to as the Madhab al ISHQ in Arabic or the Madhabi ISHQ in Persian. And it can be translated as something like the school of Love or the path of Love, represented by figures like Rumi Attar and Ahmad Ghazali. This is one of the most prominent and interesting aspects of Islam historically and is one of the most profound celebrations of love and that's ever been created by human beings. So today let's explore the fascinating Madhab', Iishq, the School of Love. In Sufism, being a lover means your heart must ache. No sickness hurts as much as when hearts break. The lover's ailments totally unique. Love is the astrolabe of all we seek, whether you feel divine or earthly love. Ultimately we're destined for above to capture love. Whatever words I say make me ashamed when love arrives my way. While explanations sometimes make things clear, true love through silence only one can hear. The pen would smoothly write the things it knew, but when it came to love, it split in two. A donkey stuck in mud is logic's fate. Love's nature only love can demonstrate. Thus writes Rumi near the opening to his poetic masterpiece the Masnavi, a six volume magnum opus primarily dedicated precisely to love. And as we can see from this quote, this is not merely human love that you feel for a person you have a crush on, although it doesn't exclude that kind of love either, but something much bigger and more profound. Love is a mystery that lies at the very foundation of existence, and yet is one that, as Rumi says here, can never be put into words. It might be strange to think that after saying this, he then goes on to write six full books about precisely the topic that he just said cannot be put into words. But that's also exactly another aspect of this Love is that it longs to be expressed. It can't help itself, but to express itself somehow, even if those expressions can never truly represent what that love is on a direct experiential level. So where does this come from? What is Rumi drawing from here? And what is the role that love plays in Sufism? Well, first of all, Sufism is a part of Islam, and thus its teachings are primarily based on the teachings of that wider religion, including in the sacred scripture of the Quran and the hadiths. Here we find many indications of the importance of love as something inherent in the divine and its impulse to create. Love is a divine attribute. One of the names of God in the Quran is Al Wadud, the loving. And another one, perhaps one of the most primary and most important names, is Ar Rahman. Now, Ar Rahman is usually translated as the merciful or the compassionate. And this is surely an accurate translation. But it fails to capture the extent of what Rahman or rahmat means. When we think of mercy, most of us might think of some, I don't know, some arrogant king that might on occasion choose to be merciful to his subject. But the word rahma in Arabic comes from the same root as the word rahm, meaning womb. So it must thus be understood that rahma has also the quality of a motherly, caring love, thus giving another important dimension to the name Ar Rahman. And the school of love will take this attribute even further. As we will see later on in the Quran, it says that he that is God loves them and they love him, thus establishing that the relationship between God and creation is essentially one of love. And this is further expanded upon in a hadith Qudsi, that is frequently quoted by Sufis. Now, a hadith is of course a tradition about the sayings and doings of the Prophet Muhammad. It's traditions about the prophet hadith quds, which literally means a sacred hadith or a holy hadith. It's a bit different. A hadith qudsi is a saying of Muhammad, but it is God speaking through the mouth of Muhammad. And in one such hadith, God, I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be known. So I created the world that I might be known. And the important word here is I loved to be known. This is reflected in the original Arabic as well, which says literally, I loved to be known. So the whole creation comes about through this impulse of love, a love that God has for himself as the hidden treasure, but also a love for that hidden treasure to become manifest and experienced by himself through the eyes of another. So love is the cause of existence and its very purpose. And these are some of the sources that many of the Sufis based themselves on as they further developed the doctrine of mystical love. While the fully developed metaphysics of love would be elaborated a bit later on in history, the theme itself is present. From the time of some of the earliest Sufis. As poetry became a popular form of mystical expression, authors would use profane language to try to capture in words the unspeakable Thus, we see in Sufi poetry, themes like wine and intoxication function as metaphors for being mystically intoxicated by God's love or presence. And another metaphor was indeed that of love, that the relationship between God and the human being was a love affair between lover and beloved, the lover desperately seeking to come closer to and to unite with her beloved. Now, the person that's often considered to be the first to pioneer this kind of language was actually a woman, a fascinating early Sufismystic named Rabia al Basri, or Rabia al Adawiya. She was, as her name suggests, from Basra in modern Iraq, and was a really unique and enigmatic figure. There are many stories about Rabia that we find in some of the great works of Sufi hagiographies, most of them from quite later than the time she lived, sadly. And there's also a bunch of poetry attributed to her as well. It is said Rabia's love for God was so strong that she never married, but instead stayed devoted to the divine for her whole life, even turning down offers of marriage from some of the great scholars of the day, including Hassan al Basri. This would have been quite unusual in an Islamic environment, where even in a Sufi context, people are usually expected to get married and have a family. We will dedicate a full episode to Rabia a bit later on, but for now we can say that her mysticism was one that was primarily based on a very intense love, a very strong love for God, and that love was able to bring her closer to her beloved in a very intimate kind of way. This was a love that even transcended most of the classical aims of Muslims of wanting to avoid paradise or. Sorry, wanting to avoid hell or wanting to go to Paradise. For example, one of the most famous stories about Rabia that's often retold is that someone once saw her walking along with a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other hand, and they asked her, what are you doing with these things, Rabia? And Rabia said that she would use the torch to burn down paradise, and she would use the bucket of water to quench the fires of hell. Our only reason to worship God should be out of love and not for an egotistical desire for reward in paradise or out of fear of punishment in hell. This is also the core meaning of what is perhaps her most famous attributed saying that we find in the Taskirat al Awliya from Attar, where she said, if I love you out of fear of hell, then throw me in hell. If I worship you out of desire for paradise, then lock its doors. But if I worship you out of love for you alone, then do not deprive me of your everlasting beauty. People who are obsessed with reward and punishment are not genuine worshippers or lovers, but are acting out of ego instead. True devotion is when the ego is completely subdued, so that it cannot see or desire anything but. But the beloved themselves. Rabia was staggering one morning. Like one who's drunk, she was asked, what makes you stagger? She said, I got intoxicated from the love of God last night. His love is making me tipsy. And here's another poem often attributed to her, which has also been put to music many times over the years. I only knew love when I knew love of thee, I sealed up my heart against thy enemy. I stood long in converse with thee, who doth see my heart's inner secrets but thou I don't see. My love is twin loves, yet the twain are for thee. The first for thy love, and the other is for thee. And as for the first, which is love of thy love remembrance complete, not distracted from thee. And as for the second, my true love of thee, I see thou as present in all that I see. Another early figure who is important for employing the language of love is Halaj, the ecstatic mystic, famous for his daring poems and for uttering the phrase an al Haqq or I am the real Halaj, was then famously executed in Baghdad in a quite gruesome way. But when we read some of those poems of Halaj, we find a person who is deeply in love with God and who places an emphasis on the complete annihilation of the individual ego in union with Go. Or rather a realization of the fact that there exists nothing but God in reality, and that annihilation is portrayed as one of love. The lover cannot think of anything but his beloved and disappears into them. You are the viewpoint from which I gaze, but you are the place that's secret from my mind. You are the all of the. All the. All of which is dearer to me than part of me or the rest of me. Can you see yourself mourning for him whose heart is grasped by the claws of a bird? Madly in love, bewildered, rendered savage, he flees from one desert to another. He steals forth unconsciously while his secrets steal forward like a blazing flash of lightning as imagination speeds to one, imagining the subtleness of ancient mystery in the abyss of the ocean of thought where flow graces from the power of the Almighty. And Halaj even gets to the point of indicating the metaphysical or ontological status of love in what I think is probably one of his most beautiful and profound. Love is in primordial eternity, eternally in him, by him, from him it begins in him. Love is not temporal, since it was an attribute, an attribute of the one whose martyrs are alive. His attributes are from him, in him, but not temporal. For temporality is what begins in things. When the beginning began, his love began as an attribute in that which began, and in him gleamed a shining so clearly. Even in the earliest Sufi writers, the theme of love was present and had become part and parcel of the vocabulary of Sufism. Now, love can, of course, mean many different things, and in the Arabic and Persian languages that were primarily used by these Sufis, there are many different words for love which can all have. Have different meanings and connotations. There is the very common word hub, which is maybe the most general term for love. So if you were to say I love you in Arabic, you would normally say essentially using that same word or that root. There is also the closely connected word mahaba from the same root, which is sometimes translated as something like loving kindness. And this kind of love is indeed very important in Sufi teachings to practice Mahabba, or loving kindness to God's creation is an essential part of the path. There is also wad, as in al wadud, the loving. This word for love is harder to pin down in its meaning, but it's often explained as a kind of unconditional love. Ibn Arabi very beautifully connects it to the awtad or pegs that pin down the tents to the ground, thus indicating that wad is the kind of love that is steadfast and immovable, just like the unconditional love of a parent for a child, for instance. One can also include uns, or intimacy, as another kind of word for love, or at least close to it, and also hawa, which means desire, and many other words with nuanced meanings and uses. But the word that is perhaps most central to this, Madhabel, Ishq, is found precisely in that name, ishq, meaning something like passionate love, or in Omid Safi's writings, radical love. It is when ordinary love transcends all boundaries, the kind of love that a passionate lover feels for their beloved, that intense desire that we can have for another person. Now, all aspects of love are part of the wider theology and psychology of the Sufis, from Mahabha to wad, and so on. And all these forms of love are of course connected, but it is the expression of ishq, or passionate Radical love that primarily characterizes those on the path of love, the path of Ishq. So getting back to our narrative, it is a bit later on in the 12th century that this language of love is taken to the next level and is given an even more prominent role in the metaphysics of Sufis and Sufi poets. And it is also here that we can say that the Madhab Iishq, the School of Love, properly begins. And perhaps the most important figure for this is Ahmad Ghazali. This is, of course, the younger brother of the more widely famous Abu Hamid Muhammad Al Ghazali, the theologian and opponent of the philosophers who also wrote the monumental Islamic work Ihia Ulumuddin, the Revival of the Religious Sciences. His brother Ahmad was also very significant, though while not as globally famous, he was an accomplished Sufi master and poet who would have a massive impact on Sufi literature going forward. Not least for his elaboration on the metaphysics of love. I spoke with one of the leading scholars of Sufism in the world, Omid Safi, about this school of Love, and Ahmad Ghazali in particular.
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Omid Safi
So, you know, as his last name, Ghazali is already familiar to many of your listeners. He is one of the two Al Ghazali brothers. And it's the older brother, Abu Hamad, sometimes called Muhammad, Muhammad Al Ghazali, who, you know, can probably be considered the most influential scholar in the history of Sunni Islam. And, you know, he famously writes the Ihyalu med Deen, the Revival of the Religious Sciences, in which he sort of says, sums up a way of harmonizing the law and philosophy and theology and Sufism. And he's well known as the foremost madrasa scholar. A good while before Oxford and Cambridge were Oxford and Cambridge. This older brother, Abu Hamid Al Ghazali, has the highest professorship in the most famous network of universities in the world at that time. So a very prominent scholar with a lot of Sufi flavor to his teachings. But it's the younger brother, Ahmad, Ahmad Al Ghazali, who's really the lover. And it's Ahmad Al Ghazali who writes the first book that we have in Sufism on this concept of ishq explicitly. And the Sufi tradition is filled with a lot of references that document how while Abu Hamad Ghazali, the older brother, is the greater scholar, the younger brother, Ahmad, is the far superior mystic. And this is exactly what Rumi says. He says in this very beautiful passage, he says the older brother, Abu Hamad Ghazali, he dove to the Depth of the ocean of knowledge. He raised the banner of learning. He's become a model for the whole world. And then he pauses. But if he had one atom of Eshq, the way that his younger brother had, it would have been better. And then here's the connection to the Prophet. And he would have known the secret of intimacy with Muhammad, of the secret of Muhammadan intimacy, the way that his brother did. Because nothing guides you to God, Rumi says, the way that love does. So, you know, in this Sufi tradition, it's Ahmad Ghazali who appears in the Silsilahs, in the initiatic chains of so many of the Sufi groups that connect present day Sufis back to the Prophet. So many of them go through Ahmad Ghazali. The other thing that he is known for is that he was an extraordinary preacher. And just as you know, we were talking a few minutes ago about how poetry was not some niche kind of a pursuit, but it was simply the ideal Muslim language to talk about sublime realities. I think it's also really important for people to know that this kind of love and path of love and radical love wasn't something that people had to whisper about in basements. Abu Hamid Al Ghazali, the older brother, famously has his spiritual crisis, right? I think today we would call it a nervous breakdown. You know, he's at the top of his game. He's got thousands of students from all over the world. And then he has like one of those epistemological crises. This is why people shouldn't just study philosophy alone. And he's like, how do I know that which I know? How do I know anything is real? And he dresses all in black and drinks espresso in a cafe and gets all depressed and he runs away to Jerusalem in a Sufi hanka, in a zawiya, in a Sufi lodge, until, you know, he gets his act together again. What happens to his classes? What happens to all his students? What happens to his wife? What happens to his family? It's the younger brother who takes over all of them. It's Ahmad Al Ghazali who is in Baghdad when Baghdad is, if not the largest city in the world, one of the two largest city in the world. When Baghdad is the seat of the Sunni Caliphate and Ahmad Al Ghazali is simultaneously the most visible scholar and the most noted Sufi under the Abbasid Caliphate. He is being visited by both the Sultan and the Caliph. And he's preaching these passages on radical love from the highest pulpits in the capital. And I think those kind of examples are really important so that people know that a thousand years ago these teachings of radical love were absolutely not just mainstream, but at the center of what it meant to be Muslim. Yeah, and there's, you know, there's lots of stories about Ahmad Al Ghazali that kind of give you a sense of. There's something.
- [25:10]
Progressive Insurance Announcer
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- [26:03]
Omid Safi
Provocative. There's something bold, there's something fresh. You know, our society, our contemporary world, of course, you know, we don't need to name them, but there are scandals every day and scandals that connect the world of politics and academia and entertainment and everything. Muslim societies, and I would say even today, care about reputation. They care about honor, they care about dignity, they care about making sure that that which appears from you and that is what is in your heart are consistent. And yet Ahmad Ghazali would do things like, you know, this is one of the stories that comes up from him. He once hears that there's a man who's going to hire a prostitute for an evening and he goes to that prostitute and he says, how much was he going to give you? And she says, however many dirhams. And he says, well, come home with me. And he brings the prostitute to his own home, pays her more than the man would have paid her, offers her his own bed, says please have a good night of rest and have a meal, and then spends his own night in prayer, worship, devotion and dhikr. And this is so that the man would not have accumulated sins and the woman would not have been forced into situation that she really did not wish to be. But imagine the scenario of how that might have appeared in public in a society where adab and refinement and propriety and manners, all these things are, they are the whole path, right? The Sufis Always say the whole of the Sufi tradition is adapt, is refinement. And then here's our greatest Sufi being seen walking to his own home with a prostitute. It's not a good look. It won't do well on Instagram, but, you know, part of it is he's not intentionally courting controversy, but he's going to put the immediate act of compassion and concern above concern about his own reputation.
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Podcast Host Henrik
Ahmad Ghazali accomplishes this and establishes this metaphysics of love primarily in a work called the Savone, a beautiful little work consisting of 77 short chapters that combines both poetry and prose in Persian.
- [29:08]
Omid Safi
You know, he's known for this very short book. I've got a copy of it here, the Sabaneh. Even with all the footnotes and things like that, it's a slender volume. The vast majority of Sufi writings, at least in the east, have been poetry works. But when we have prose works, they are directly imitating the Sawaneh, and they say so. So, for example, the single most influential prose text in the east is Saadi's Rose Garden, the Golestan, which, you know, for 700 years, everywhere from India to the Ottoman Empire, this was the model of how you learn to write prose as a learned person. And Sa'di says that I am imitating Ahmad Ghazali of I will have a few paragraphs and then a poem that either serves as a commentary or challenges it. And so that goes back to Ahmad Ghazali, and he starts out this book in a very simple way. He says, you know, friends of mine came to me, and here's what they told me. They said, when we're with you, it's all real. God is real. Love is real. I feel that when I'm chanting the name of Allah, I am actually with God. And then I go home. And then, you know, where's that wonderful Buddhist book? You know, after the ecstasy comes laundry, right? And it's then we go home and how do I keep this stuff real? Can you please write us something that when I'm home, I can read and it will make love real again. And so Ahmad Ghazali says, you know, if it was up to me, I would have never written a book, because writing has an element of ego in it. But my friends begged me, and for their sake, I agreed, with one stipulation, and this sets the tone for the whole entire book. I will write you a book on eshq, on radical love, on one condition. That you will never again make a distinction between the love of God and the love of creation. And that is directly going against 400 years of Islamic and Sufi teachings, which used to say up until his time that the love of God is haqiqi, it's real. And the love that we have for each other as human beings or for the natural world is majazi. It's a metaphor that the love that we have for other humans is like the Alphabet that we have to master in order to compose the sonnets of love for God. Right. That was the earlier view. And, you know, it's not as if it ever entirely disappears from the later Sufi tradition. But Ahmad Ghazali marks this transition point that there is one love, and it's the same one love that is the very being of God. It's the very essence of God. It's the very wacha, the core being, the face of God that is unleashed upon creation that sustains us here. So fundamentally, there is no great difference between loving another human being or loving a stream, or loving a tree or a butterfly or a child loving God. And then when he begins the book proper, he goes right back to that verse of the Quran that we talk about. Qala ta' ala yuhibbuhumma yuhubbu nahu. God Almighty says that God loves them and they love God. And he gives this beautiful little quatrain that it's short enough that maybe I will just, you know, read it for us. Here, The steed of our being, meaning the spirit, started flowing from pre eternity alongside radical love. So as long as there has been, love has been and our spirit has been, and these two have been linked together. Roshan zecheror vas do em shabemo. Our night has always been illuminated from the lamp of union. So when would you have a lamp on in the middle of the night during a session of lovemaking? Right. And so he's using that erotic metaphor to talk about the experience of love with God and with one another, and that this lovemaking has been as long as there has been time, There has been reality, there has been creation. And here he uses that common Sufi metaphor of wine, which of course, in a literal sense is forbidden in this world, permissible in paradise in form of intoxication of love that does not cloud the judgment. So he says, from that love which is unforbidden in our path from now until post eternity, you will never find our lips without it. And so the wine that he's talking about is esh, is radical love. And I love this metaphor that, you know, he's talking about our spirit. You know, our task in this life is not to find love. We have been accompanying Esch from pre eternity. We've been joined together. And then he says, you know, love was made for our sake, and the whole reason that love was brought into existence was for our sake. And then the rest of the book, which is relatively short, is unpacking and opening these themes of love and lover and beloved. He talks about the necessity of putting up with affliction and pain on the path of love. Because, of course, you know, every spiritual tradition has to deal with the question of suffering. You know, religion cannot be just for the good times and for the easy times. The other theme that he introduces in the Savone, which later poets like Attar, and also specifically Rumi's mentor Shams, all of them are reading Ahmad al Ghazali. They end up elaborating on it, is that in Ahmad Ghazali's view, the lover and the beloved are not perfectly symmetric. They're playing a role. And in the course of love, you keep switching roles. But, you know, it's not exactly a notion that I'm a perfectly happy whole person by myself, and you're a perfectly happy whole person by yourself. And in love, we just come to make each other happier. Right? That's not the Sufi model, really. The Sufi model that Ahmad Ghazali and almost all the great Sufi poets use is that there's an asymmetry between lover and the beloved. And the beloved gets to play hard to get. The beloved can say, you know, well, it's wonderful that you bring me your heart and soul, but look outside my door. There's a thousand would be lovers, each of them younger and more handsome than you. But don't go, stay and burn a little bit more because you're not quite done cooking in the fire of love. And whereas the lover, the very first, the beginning of the task of the lover is to say things like, this is from Iraqi, without you, I do not breathe well. So, you know, relationship therapists are like, rolling over, you know, in their graves, being like, this is so unhealthy, and this is codependent. But if it only stayed in that fixed state where one person is like, look outside my door, I have a thousand would be lovers. And then the lover is like, you are every need and dependence that I have. Okay, that's not really a love story. It becomes a love story when the lover becomes the beloved and the beloved becomes the lover, and you keep switching roles. And I think this is probably the most radical conception that the path of radical love brings. And Ahmad Ghazali already starts to talk about this. It's easy enough to see ourselves in this love relationship with God, where God is the divine beloved and we are bringing all of our need, all of our dependence. And of course, that's true. We are all dependent on God. And Evan Arabi would say the reason that we are poor in front of God is that our very being, our very existence, is dependent on God being the rich. But what if we conceive of the relationship between the human and the divine as one in which God is playing both the lover and the beloved, and that it's not just us merely chasing after God, but God also chasing after us?
- [41:09]
Podcast Host Henrik
This language of love as the metaphysical basis of reality, where lover and beloved are both expressions of the overarching reality of love, would become very popular among the followers of this path of love. Indeed, it is what kind of defines them and characterizes them going forward. And this would influence so many of the great poets and mystics and saints of the Islamic tradition, especially in the Islamic East. Ahmad Ghazali had many spiritual disciples who would go on to make an impact on their own, including Abu Najib as Suhrawardi, the foundational figure of the major Suhrawardi Sufi order, as well as the Sufi philosopher Aynan Khuzat al Hamadani, another one of the most foundational, interesting, and sometimes radical Sufi philosophers. One of the earliest proper Sufi philosophers
- [42:08]
Omid Safi
in history, Ainul Kazat, as his name would, his honorific would suggest the eye of judges, the essence of judges, also the spring of judges. He's a judge. And so sometimes he playfully, in the same way that Rumi does, uses legal terminology to talk about love. So he's got this paragraph, and he says, oh, my precious one in law, we're concerned with what is fart, what is a religious obligation. And he says, well, you know, for those of us who are on a path, the main obligation is to arrive at God. Whatever it is that delivers the servant to the divine is an obligation. What is it that delivers the servant to God? It's love. So henceforth I declare love as a religious obligation for any and all beings on the path. You know, that's the kind of language, and you can see almost like a twinkle in his eye, a sort of slight, a joyful smirk on his face as he's playing with this, you know, this kind of language. I've been translating Enl Ghazat's masterpiece the Tamhidat for 30 years. So say a prayer for me that I'll get to finish it inshallah by next year. And I should say Ein Al Ghazat was killed when he was 33. I mean, it's unthinkable for me that by the time he was 33, he had written this extraordinary book, which is the single most important book I've ever seen, that talks about how the Quran and the teachings of the Prophet and the works of the earlier Sufis are really all about Ishq. And that's what Ahmad Ghazali, and even more explicitly his student Ain Al Ghazat say, where they look back on the earlier Sufi tradition and they say things like, they put this in the mouth of people like Bayazid Albistami, you know, the near contemporary of Halaj, where they say things like, you know, for 60 years I thought that I was loving God. And then I heard God say to me, I have been loving you and chasing after you since before there was a thing called time. So all of a sudden, their relationship with God becomes something dynamic, something in which God is also yearning after the human longing for humanity. And they come to reinterpret every part of the tradition along these lines. And my favorite example is that when Ahmad Ghazali's student, Ainul Ghazat is interpreting and reinterpreting the archetypal Muslim mystical experience, which is the mi', Raj, the heavenly ascension, he says, God just wanted to be close to the Prophet. So the whole purpose of bringing the Prophet to the divine presence was actually because God was yearning for Muhammad.
- [45:55]
Progressive Insurance Announcer
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.
- [46:18]
Omid Safi
So they use these kinds of teachings about love to reinterpret every single part of the tradition.
- [46:31]
Podcast Host Henrik
As I hope is clear, the idea of this school of love is in no way a school in a physical or even organized way. Right? It's just a designation for a certain tendency within certain circles of Sufi poets and mystics across history that put a heavy and a special emphasis on the role of love, not just as an attribute of God or as a path to God, but love as identified with the very essence of God. God is love. It is his very countenance. Right? And that that love is the basis of reality in every sense of that word and that particular language that goes back primarily to Ahmad Ghazali, of lover, beloved and love, that kind of triad almost. This is what characterizes this school of love. This is how we can spot that school of love. But it's not a school in the sense of being a lineage in that way. Right. It's just that many people continue to be influenced by this language, this way of conceiving of reality based on this metaphysics, this language of Ghazali, for instance, and this trickle down across history to many of the great Sufi poets, like Rumi, for instance. But because this school is so loose, right? It's not a school. It's just this. It becomes sometimes hard to know who we can fit into this category. So, for instance, is Ibn Arabi, the great Arabic Sufi mystic and poet as well, from the Islamic East? Is he part of the school of love? Well, most people would say no, because there is no evidence that he had any contact with Ghazali or that he read his works even, or was influenced by that language in any way. And he lived about 100 years after him a bit more. At the same time, Ibn Arabi also puts a very heavy emphasis on love in his metaphysics and his famous metaphysics of Wahdat al Wujud, where love also is this driving force behind reality. Everything is love. He says that every motion is the motion of love. Right? So it's a similar language, rather a similar idea, similar metaphysics may be expressed in a different language. This is perhaps most famously expressed in what is by far his most famous poetic section, which in Arabic sounds like this. My heart has become capable of every form. It is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks and a temple for idols, and the pilgrim's Kaaba and the scrolls of the Torah and the pages of the Quran. I follow the religion of love. Whatever way love's camels take, that is my religion and my faith. We have a pattern in Bishr, the lover of Hind and her sister, and in Qays and Lubna, and in Maya and Raylan. The deeper interpretation of this poem I will leave for a separate episode. But you can see here that love is essential, right? He even claims to be following the religion of love. Now, importantly, that religion is not different from the religion of Islam to him. So it's very easy to misunderstand this poem. He doesn't mean that he's following some other religion than Islam, but rather it's a statement about partly the very nature of Islam itself, but also this essential nature of love as foundational to reality, to the mystical experience, and to the inner reality of the accomplished mystic. If you remember before, the word rahma or mercy can also be translated to something like love in the sense that it is connected with the word for womb. I sometimes like to translate rahmah as loving mercy, and this attribute is very central to Ibn Arabi's thought. The name attribute of Ar Rahman is one of the primary names, and it's especially connected and responsible for the creation of the universe. It is through the Nafasurah, the breath of the all mercifully loving that God creates. Thus everything is rahma and everything is love. Love, as we saw from the Hadith of the hidden Treasure here in the sense of hub, is the very cause and purpose of creation. And in the Fusus El Hekam, one of his major works, and especially in the chapter on Moses, he beautifully explains that everything is an expression of or indeed is love. It is because of love that God gives existence to things, and it is because of love for perfection that we act in our lives. Everything we do and feel is based on love in an inward sense, even though outwardly we may say it is for another reason. This is exemplified by Moses fleeing from Egypt from fear of the Pharaoh. This is the outward sense. But inwardly fleeing out of fear is nothing other than fleeing out of love to preserve life. So fear is like the shadow of love. Similarly, feelings of hate only stem from love, because you only hate that which offends what you love. Love is the essence of every reality and every action. Were it not for this love, the world would not have been manifest in his identity. Its motion from non existence into existence is the motion of the existentiator's love for it. The world also loves to witness itself in existence as it did in immutability in every respect. Its motion from immutable non existence into existence is a motion of love from the side of the reality and from its own side. Perfection is beloved in itself. Thus it is established that motion belongs to love. For there is no motion in being that is not that of love. All of reality is thus a love affair where he loves them and they love him, whether we realize it or not. Because if there is one thing that most of the proponents of love agree on, it is that love is one. We all love things in our lives, but that love is always our love for God, but directed at his specific manifestations, which most of us confuse as the actual source of that which we love. He says in the Futahat al Maqiyah that none but God is loved in the existent things. It is he who is manifest within every beloved, to the eye of every lover. And there is no existent thing that is not a lover. So the universe is all lover and beloved, and all of it goes back to Him. No one loves anyone but his own Creator, but He is veiled from him by love. For Zayneb Suad Hind Layla, this world, money, position and everything loved in the world. We all love the Divine and seek the Divine whether we know it or not, and with the same love that he loves us. And the same idea is also found in the writings of Aynun Khozat, who also extends this idea to a command that to love love God is to love all of God's creation. A lover loves the handwriting and every action of the beloved. All of the creatures are his handicraft and action. Loving them for the sake of following his love is no polytheism. So as you can see, while Ibn Arabi doesn't necessarily adopt the specific language of Ghazali and the school of love as such, in terms of lover, beloved and love in that specific way, and he doesn't neither does he necessarily identify the essence of God with love. Love remains an attribute of God rather than being his very essence, although it certainly can be argued that that is implied in some of his writings. But at the same time, love is clearly at the very forefront of his writing, of his metaphysics, as the very core and driving force behind existence. Many people who have maybe read Ibn Arabi or who are a bit familiar with him might mostly associate him with like really dense metaphysics and difficult philosophy. And that's certainly there too. But the deeper you dive into him, the more you realize that it's really all about love. It's all about love and the ways that love expresses and manifests itself, that's really at the core, core of all of his philosophy. And so for that reason, while we can't really say that Ibn Arabi belongs to the school of love without kind of making that school mean nothing anymore, maybe I will sort of make my case for having Ibn Arabi being an honorary member of this school of love. And perhaps this indirect connection between Ibn Arabi and the school of love is most principally represented in the writings of a man called Fahreddin Iraqi, a second generation student of the school of Ibn Arabi. He studied under the primary successor and stepson of Ibn Arabi, Sadr Uddin Al Qunawi, and was Also deeply influenced by the writings of Ahmad Ghazali. As a result, his masterpiece called the Lama' at the Divine Flashes is a perfect marriage of the mystical vision of Ibn Arabi, usually referred to as Wahdat al Wujud, the Oneness of Being and the Metaphysics of Love as developed by Ghazali and the School of Love. This is a work that really defies any simple summary like this. But what Iraqi is doing here is to paint the relationship between God and the seeker as that of lover and beloved. But the question of who's who is a bit complex. He is the lover who seeks God as the beloved. And just like two mirrors facing each other, the lover can reflect and see himself in the mirror of the beloved. But just in the same way God loves and seeks us. So from one perspective, God is the lover and we are the beloved. Two lovers eternally gazing into each other's mirrors and finding themselves there. God sees his own attributes and names reflected in the mirror of the human being and the human being sees her essential oneness in the mirror of the divine. They seek to come closer to each other until there is union or a realization that both lover and beloved were only two characters being played in the drama of creation. In reality they were both only expressions of love itself. And remember, love itself here is identified as the very being and reality of God. Iraqi Here indeed the lover is the very beloved, for he has no existence of his own to call the lover. He still sleeps in his original non existence. Just as the beloved remains forever in his eternity, he is now as he was. The whole work is a celebration of love. And in the introduction he gives a beautiful musical Love plays its lute behind the screen where is a lover to listen to its tune? With every breath a new song, each split second a new string plucked the world has spilled love's secret. When could music ever hold its tongue? Every atom babbles the mystery. Listen yourself, for I am no tattletale. And it is indeed with the major Persian Sufi poets that the Madhhabi Ishq found its most successful and famous expression. Particularly with figures like Farid Uddin Attar and Jalaluddin Rumi. And through their influence it became a standard expression of Sufism in the Persian speaking world. For the rest of history, Rumi is probably the most internationally famous Sufi in the world. He has also become one of the best selling poets in the world in a general sense through modern English translations. Whether you have read some of those reworkings of his poetry or more accurate renditions you will probably know that the theme of love is at the very core, and indeed Rumi is firmly within that school of love and employs its language in all of his works. In one poem he from the beginning, when I heard the story of being in love, I wore up my soul, heart and eyes in its path. I said, perhaps the lover and the beloved are two, but both were one. And I was seeing double. Through the influence of these figures, Atta, Rumi, Ghazali and so on. The Madhabi ishq became an essential part of Islam and Sufism in certain regions and for certain schools and tariqahs. This is especially true for the Eastern Persianate part of the Islamic world, which stretches all the way from Ottoman Anatolia to India. Naturally, the Mevlevi order of Sufism has love as a core principle, since they are based on the lineage and teachings and poetry of Rumi. But there are other Torukh or Tariqas that have also strongly inherited this approach. One of the most prominent is the so called Chishti order or Chishtiya, which is especially prominent in India. The order traces its origins to a 10th century Syrian Sufi called Abu Ishaq al Shami. But it is a few centuries later that the order's most central figure, Moynuddin Chishti, properly takes the Tariqah to India where it would prosper. And already with him and some of the earliest chishtis in India, we see how the school of love seems to already course through the veins of this order. This is perhaps natural since the worlds of Persia and India were strongly interconnected back in the day, not least because of the shared language of Persian, but also therefore its literature. So the writings of Ahmad Ghazali, Ayn al Khadzat, Rumi and others were and are still very popular in the Indian subcontinent. In an article Omid Safi, the masters of the Chishtiya, perhaps to a greater degree than any other order in India or Persia, developed the themes of the Path of love with depth and artistry. And indeed, when we look at the general characteristics of the Chishti order, we can see that they emphasize perhaps above all a love for music and sama, the musical ritual of Sufism, which in their tariqah is most famously represented by qawali music, for instance, right? So that music, sama and love both love in a literary sense, right in terms of the language of love and the metaphysics of love, but also as a path, love as a path to God. This is indicated by sayings of Moineuddin Shishti that very clearly place him in the Madhabi ishq. The lover and the beloved are indeed one and the same, and this is the glory of the one. In other words, the one saw the One or God at first, manifested himself in Himself, and separating one light from his own light, showed himself in Himself and showed himself his glory. They were the lover, love, and the beloved, but also in this important sense of love, not just being a metaphysical reality. It's not just the identity of God, the essence of God, and the very core driving force and impulse behind creation, that which holds creation together. It's also an embodied outward action. As Ghazali said in the beginning of the Savannah, to love God must mean to love God's creation, to love your fellow creature, and thus to serve other people. This is also heavily emphasized in the Chistu. Love other humans, and you love all of God's creatures on this earth, and you want the best for them. So you feed the hungry, you comfort the grieving, and you are there when people need you. You serve others. The best type of prayer is one, to hear the complaints of the aggrieved and to assist them, two, to help the needy and oppressed, to feed the hungry and to release the captives. And in his final sermon that's attributed to him, the one that he gave right before he passed away, he's reported to have told his followers that with your spiritual light, dispel the darkness of ignorance, dissolve the clouds of discord and war, and spread goodwill, peace and harmony among the people. People never seek any help, charity or favors from anybody except God. Never go to the courts of kings and rulers, but never refuse to bless and help the needy and the poor, the widow and the orphan, if they come to your door. This is your mission of peace, to serve the people. And these teachings have very much been embodied across history in this Tariqah, as well as in other orders and other parts of the Islamic world and beyond. We could quote many great figures of history in the Chishti Tariqa especially, but also in many other Tariqas, the Mevlevi order. Love, as we've said, is a core aspect of Sufism, whether or not it is the specific school of love or not. In the Chistu Order, there's the Nizamuddin Awliya. There's also the modern, contemporary universalist Sufi figure Inayat Khan, who is a very interesting late Chishti figure and the first Sufi to bring Sufism to the west, and also in a way that modified it to a certain extent to a Western audience, giving it a much more universalist flavor. I have a video on Inayat Khan that you can check out to find out more about him, but to him, the core of his message were the interconnected themes of love, harmony and beauty. This was at the center of his universalist interpretation of Chishti influenced Sufism. He said, I bowed my head low in humility, and on my knees I begged of love. Disclose to me, I pray thee, O love, thy secret. She took me gently by my arms and lifted me above the earth and spoke softly in my ear, my dear one. Thou thyself art love art lover, and thyself art the beloved whom thou has adored. In other words, this is a tradition that's very much alive today, and the path of love and its language remains a core aspect of Sufism even in the contemporary world. Of course, figures like Rumi and Attar are very famous and popular internationally around the world. They've come out in translations in English and other languages and are best sellers even though they are 800 years old. So this seems to indicate that there is something about their writings that clearly still speaks to people regardless of their background, regardless if they're Muslim or not, you know, if they share the religious affiliation of these poets or not. There's something about the poetry that just seems to speak to people, and maybe that's just testament to the power of love itself. And when it is expressed in such a profound and subtle way that it will speak to people regardless of their background. And even if many of the people who are drawn to the poetry don't read it as pertaining to God or as mystical love, does that really matter all that much? At the end of the day, even if Rumi's poetry makes you think about your ex, at least part of the purpose has come across. Because if there is anything we have learned from the school of love, it's that love does not discriminate and that love will always be love, regardless of where it is directed. And I'll see you next time,
- [67:47]
Omid Safi
Sam.
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Omid Safi
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Podcast Host Henrik
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Omid Safi
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Omid Safi
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Podcast Host Henrik
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Omid Safi
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Podcast Host Henrik
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Omid Safi
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