The Persian Mystics: Jalálu'd-dín Rúmí — Rumi — John Shaqi
The Persian Mystics: Jalálu'd-dín Rúmí
Rumi · en
It may be questioned that if the earthly object of Love was a mere
passing shadow of God, the man who loved that object was equally
insignificant. And again, how can God be the All-One when, according
to the Súfí thesis, He divided Himself into creation? The part is not
equal to the whole. These questions are easily answered. The stars
shine in the sky, and on the bosom of the sea without diminution.
Let the sea pass away, and the star-shadows pass away too; but the
stars are still there. So when the world shall pass away it will only
be the fading of innumerable shadows we call Humanity. God will still
be there, and we shall still be there because we came alone from Him.
There was a Voice that sounded in men and women, in mountains and in
seas, in the beasts of the jungle and the swinging of the stars. It was
the Voice of Love, the great beckoning in the Hereafter to which all
things must go. That Voice to the Súfí was God calling His lovers into
one chamber, one mighty love-feast. Jámí has expressed the finality of
Love in the following lines:
Gaze, till Gazing out of Gazing
Grew to BEING Her I gaze on,
She and I no more, but in One
Undivided Being blended.
All that is not One must ever
Suffer with the Wound of Absence;
And whoever in Love's City
Enters, finds but Room for One,
And but in ONENESS Union.
The Rev. Professor W. R. Inge, in _Christian Mysticism_, has brought a
good deal of adverse criticism to bear upon Súfíism. He remarks: "The
Súfís, or Mohammedan Mystics, use erotic language very freely, and
appear, like true Asiatics, to have attempted to give a sacramental
or symbolic character to the indulgence of their passions." The same
writer accuses Emerson of "playing with pantheistic Mysticism of the
Oriental type," and goes on to compare him with the Persian Súfís on
account of his self-deification. This critic, in his desire to defame
the Súfís, states that they are among the most shocking and blasphemous
of the mystics, because they believe that state is present with them
even in their earthly life. This, however, is no teaching of the
Súfís, and, rightly considered, we cannot even except the sayings of
Bayázíd already referred to, because here he undoubtedly denies all
claim to human personality, admitting God only. _Self_-deification is
no teaching of the Súfís. As the Buddhist's belief in Nirvana was a
state only to be reached by degrees, after much striving and severe
discipline, so was the fusion of the Beloved and His lover a belief
and a beautiful hope far out on the spiritual horizon. Hadj Khan, in
his interesting book _With the Pilgrims to Mecca_, briefly touches
upon this sect and mentions "seven stages" in the spiritual growth
of the Súfí, and not an arrogant proclamation of Deity and man being
coequal in the earthly existence. The gradually ascending scale of
the Súfí's heaven is another point in favour of this argument. "For