Reynold Alleyne Nicholson

“ I may add by way of explanation that, according to a well-known mystical belief, God has inspired every created thing to praise Him in its own language, so that all the sounds in the universe form, as it were, one vast choral hymn by which He glorifies Himself. Consequently those whose hearts He has opened and endowed with spiritual perception hear His voice everywhere, and ecstasy overcomes them as they listen to the rhythmic chant of the muezzin, or the street cry of the saqqā shouldering his water-skin, or, perchance, to the noise of wind or the bleating of a sheep or the piping of a bird. ”

“ Love, like gnosis, is in its essence a divine gift, not anything that can be acquired. “If the whole world wished to attract love, they could not; and if they made the utmost efforts to repel it, they could not.” Those who love God are those whom God loves. “I fancied that I loved Him,” said Bāyazīd, “but on consideration I saw that His love preceded mine.” Junayd defined love as the substitution of the qualities of the Beloved for the qualities of the lover. In other words, love signifies the passing-away of the individual self ”

“ The love thus symbolised is the emotional element in religion, the rapture of the seer, the courage of the martyr, the faith of the saint, the only basis of moral perfection and spiritual knowledge. Practically, it is self-renunciation and self-sacrifice, the giving up of all possessions—wealth, honour, will, life, and whatever else men value—for the Beloved’s sake without any thought of reward. I have already referred to love as the supreme principle in Sūfī ethics, and now let me give some illustrations. ”

“ As the rain-drop absorbed in the ocean is not annihilated but ceases to exist individually, so the disembodied soul becomes indistinguishable from the universal Deity. It is true that when Sūfī writers translate mystical union into terms of love and marriage, they do not, indeed they cannot, expunge the notion of personality, but such metaphorical phrases are not necessarily inconsistent with a pantheism which excludes all difference. To be united, here and now, with the World-Soul is the utmost imaginable bliss for souls that love each other on earth. ”

“ So long as he is a captive in the snare of passion and lust, it is hard for him to maintain this relation to God, but when the subtle influence of that attraction becomes manifest in him, expelling preoccupation with objects of sense and cognition from his inward being, delight in that divine communion prevails over bodily pleasures and spiritual joys; the painful task of self-mortification is ended, and the sweetness of contemplation enravishes his soul. ”

“ In a magnificent ode Jalāluddīn Rūmī describes how the One Light shines in myriad forms through the whole universe, and how [p. 153] the One Essence, remaining ever the same, clothes itself from age to age in the prophets and saints who are its witnesses to mankind.
“Every moment the robber Beauty rises in a different shape, ravishes the soul, and disappears.
Every instant that Loved One assumes a new garment, now of eld, now of youth. ”

“ For some Sūfīs, absorption in the ecstasy of fanā is the end of their pilgrimage. Thenceforth no relation exists between them and the world. Nothing of themselves is left in them; as individuals, they are dead. Immersed in Unity, they know neither law nor religion nor any form of phenomenal [p. 163] being. But those God-intoxicated devotees who never return to sobriety have fallen short of the highest perfection. The full circle of deification must comprehend both the inward and outward aspects of Deity—the One and the Many, the Truth and the Law. ”

“ Bāyazīd said that when God loves a man, He endows him with three qualities in token thereof: a bounty like that of the sea, a sympathy like that of the sun, and a humility like that of the earth. No suffering can be too great, no devotion too high, for the piercing insight and burning faith of a true lover.
Ibn al-ʿArabī claims that Islam is peculiarly the religion of love, inasmuch as the Prophet Mohammed is called God’s beloved (Habīb) , but though some traces of this doctrine occur in the Koran, its main impulse was unquestionably derived from Christianity. ”

“ This revelation, however, is a comparatively rare experience. [p. 69] Normally, the heart is ‘veiled,’ blackened by sin, tarnished by sensual impressions and images, pulled to and fro between reason and passion: a battlefield on which the armies of God and the Devil contend for victory. Through one gate, the heart receives immediate knowledge of God; through another, it lets in the illusions of sense. “Here a world and there a world,” says Jalāluddīn Rūmī. “I am seated on the threshold.” Therefore man is potentially lower than the brutes and higher than the angels. ”

“ The historian of Sūfism must acknowledge, however deeply he may deplore, the fundamental position occupied by the doctrine of saintship and the tremendous influence which it has exerted in its practical results—grovelling submission to the authority of an ecstatic class of men, dependence on their favour, pilgrimage to their shrines, adoration of their relics, devotion of every mental and spiritual faculty to their service. It may be dangerous to worship God by one’s own inner light, but it is far more deadly to seek Him by the inner light of another. ”

“ Therefore the universe is the outward visible expression of the Real, and the Real is the inner unseen reality of the universe. The universe before it was evolved to outward view was identical with the Real; and the Real after this evolution is identical with the universe.”
Phenomena, as such, are not-being and only derive a contingent existence from the qualities of Absolute Being by which they are irradiated. The sensible world resembles the fiery circle made by a single spark whirling round rapidly.
Man is the crown and final cause of the universe. ”

“ Therefore the life of contemplatives is the time during which they enjoy contemplation; time spent in ocular vision they do not reckon as life, for that to them is really death. Thus, when Bāyazīd was asked how old he was, he replied, ‘Four years.’ They said to him, ‘How can that be?’ He answered, ‘I have been veiled from God by this world for seventy years, but I have seen Him during the last four years: the period in which one is veiled does not belong to one’s life.’ ”

“ Evil has no real existence; it is not-being, which is the privation and absence of being, just as darkness is the absence of light. “Once,” said Nūrī, “I beheld the Light, and I fixed my gaze upon it until I became the Light.” No wonder that such illuminated souls, supremely indifferent to [p. 95] the shadow-shows of religion and morality in a phantom world, are ready to cry with Jalāluddīn:
“The man of God is made wise by the Truth,
The man of God is not learned from book. ”

“ What Jalāluddīn utters in a moment of ecstatic vision Henry More describes as a past experience:
“How lovely” (he says) , “how magnificent a state is the soul of man in, when the life of God inactuating her shoots her along with Himself through heaven and earth; makes her unite with, and after a sort feel herself animate, the whole world. He that is here looks upon all things as One, and on himself, if he can then mind himself, as a part of the Whole.” ”

“ If he be a [p. 104] religious artist, a spiritual poet, his ideas of reality are likely to clothe themselves instinctively in forms of beauty and glowing images of human love. To him the rosy cheek of the beloved represents the divine essence manifested through its attributes; her dark curls signify the One veiled by the Many; when he says, “Drink wine that it may set you free from yourself,” he means, “Lose your phenomenal self in the rapture of divine contemplation.” ”

“ Strange as it may seem to our Western egoism, the prospect of sharing in the general, impersonal immortality of the human soul kindles in the Sūfī an enthusiasm as deep and triumphant as that of the most ardent believer in a personal life continuing beyond the grave. Jalāluddīn, after describing the evolution of man in the material world and anticipating his further growth in the spiritual universe, utters a heartfelt prayer—for what?—for self-annihilation in the ocean of the Godhead. ”

“ To abandon all secondary causes is like plunging in the sea. The mystic who makes this venture is in jeopardy, for two reasons: he may regard himself, not God, as initiating and carrying out the action of abandonment,—and one who renounces a thing through ‘self’ is in worse case than if he had not renounced it,—or he may abandon secondary causes (good works, hope of Paradise, etc.) ”

“ The maʿrifat of the Sūfīs is the ‘gnosis’ of Hellenistic theosophy, i.e. direct knowledge of God based on revelation or apocalyptic vision. It is not the result of any mental process, but depends entirely on the will and favour of God, who bestows it as a gift from Himself upon those whom He has created with the capacity for receiving it. It is a light of divine grace that flashes into the heart and overwhelms every human faculty in its dazzling beams. “He who knows God is dumb.” ”

“ It is an axiom of the Sūfīs that what is not in a man he cannot know. The gnostic—Man par excellence—could not know God and all the mysteries of the universe, unless he found them in himself. He is the microcosm, [p. 85] ‘a copy made in the image of God,’ ‘the eye of the world whereby God sees His own works.’ In knowing himself as he really is, he knows God, and he knows himself through God, who is nearer to everything than its knowledge of itself. Knowledge of God precedes, and is the cause of, self-knowledge. ”

“ So little does knowledge of the infinite revealed in ecstatic vision need an artificial disguise that it cannot be communicated at all except through types and emblems drawn from the sensible world, which, imperfect as they are, may suggest and shadow forth a deeper meaning than appears on the surface. “Gnostics,” says Ibn al-ʿArabī, “cannot impart their feelings to other men; they can only indicate them symbolically to those who have begun to experience the like.” What kind of symbolism each mystic will prefer depends on his temperament and character. ”

“ Any Mohammedan director of souls would tell his pupils that to think humbly and remorsefully of one’s sins is a sovereign remedy against spiritual pride, but he himself might very well believe that real repentance consists in forgetting everything except God.
“The penitent,” says Hujwīrī, “is a lover of God, and the lover of God is in contemplation of God: in contemplation it is wrong to remember [p. 32] sin, for recollection of sin is a veil between God and the contemplative.”
Sin appertains to self-existence, which itself is the greatest of all sins. To forget sin is to forget self. ”

“ Otherwise I am quit both of prayer and Kaʿba.”
(Jalāluddīn Rūmī.)
Love, again, is the divine instinct of the soul impelling it to realise its nature and destiny. The soul is the first-born of God: before the creation of the universe it lived and moved and had its being in Him, and during its earthly manifestation it is a stranger in exile, ever pining to return to its home. ”

“ The earliest Sūfīs were, in fact, ascetics and quietists rather than mystics. An overwhelming consciousness of sin, combined with a dread—which it is hard for us to realise—of Judgment Day and the torments of Hell-fire, so vividly painted in the Koran, drove them to seek salvation in flight from the world. On the other hand, the Koran warned them that salvation depended entirely on the inscrutable will of Allah, who guides aright the good and leads astray the wicked. ”

“ In the Moslem scheme, however, the Logos doctrine occupies a subordinate place, as it obviously must when the whole duty of man is believed to consist in realising the unity of God. The most distinctive feature of Oriental as opposed to European mysticism is its profound consciousness of an omnipresent, all-pervading unity in which every vestige of individuality is swallowed up. Not to become like God or personally to participate in the divine nature is the Sūfī’s aim, but to escape from the bondage of his unreal selfhood and thereby to be reunited with the One infinite Being. ”

“ But the whole purpose of Sūfism, the Way of the dervish, is to give him an escape from this prison, an apocalypse of the Seventy Thousand Veils, a recovery of the original unity with The One, while still in this body. The body is not to be put off; it is to be refined and made spiritual—a help and not a hindrance to the spirit. ”

“ If you act a single jot of your actions for the sake of another, your thought and speech are corrupt, since your motive in acting for another’s sake must be hope or fear; and when you act from hope or fear of other than God, who is the lord and sustainer of all things, you have taken to yourself another god to honour and venerate.
“Secondly, that while you speak and act in the sincere belief that there is no God except Him, you should trust Him more than the world or money or uncle or father or mother or any one on the face of the earth. ”

“ In addressing you we speak according to the measure of your understanding, since what is meat for gnostics is poison to the uninitiated, and the highest mysteries ought to be jealously guarded from profane ears. It is only human reason that sees the single as double, and balances the Law against the Truth. Pass away from the world of opposites and become one with God, who has no opposite. ”

“ That God divides the one substance of His love and bestows a particle thereof, as a peculiar gift, upon every one of His friends in proportion to their enravishment with Him; then he lets down upon that particle the shrouds of fleshliness and human nature and temperament and spirit, in order that by its powerful working it may transmute to its own quality all the particles that are attached to it, until the lover’s clay is wholly converted into love and all his acts and looks become so many properties of love. ”