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C
orrectly the beginning of study of the Mathnawi always starts
with the very famous opening lines which I am sure you all
know. Traditionally people begin with an explanation of this
very famous opening because in a way it sounds the theme of the
Mathnawi but I want to approach Maulana's work in a completely dif-
ferent way. First of all, what I want you to realise is the nature of the
phenomenon of Maulana Rumi and the nature of the phenomena of
what he left, part of which is of course his enormous output, copris-
ing in the main of Mathnawi and the Diwan of Shamsi-Tabriz.
Incidentally I understand from the people of Konya that the Diwan of
Shamsi-Tabriz has just been published in a Turkish translation so you'
\vill be able to read that. The Diwan is of enormous importance.
What I want to give you is a perspective about this extraordi-
nary event Ll-iat completely turned the world upside down. You have to
understand the background of the presence of Jalaladin in Konya. As
you know he was not from Konya, he was a refugee basically from the
slaughter of the Mongols. His father was a very great 'alim, he was
called the Sultan al-Ulama. He was in the great city of Balkh and to us
it is highly relevant. The great primal Islamic civilisation was not in
the Arab world at all. The great primal Islamic civilisation was in what
we now call either Western Asia or on the other side of the Oxus, over
towards Transoxiana, China. It was all that northern passage above
Afghanistan and what are now the Turkic Islamic Republics of the for-
mer Soviet Union. This was the great Islamic civilisation which preced-
ed the greater Islamic civilisation of the Osmani.
It was a tremendous civilisation. It was something quite extra-
ordinary and the remnants of it are shattering. Now you can see the
remnants. There has never been anything comparable, and Balkh was a
great city, it was called the centre of the world. It was just outside
Mazar-e Sharif which today is insignificant. It was a great city and it
1
had its own school of tasawwuf, it had its own school of hadith, it had
its own school of sciences. It was very, very famous and when Genghis
Khan came hurtling across the deserts he said a very significant thing.
In a famous sentence, he said, "I am the scourge of God" So he did
not say he was a scourge on God, he said he was the scourge of God.
In other words, he was doing God's work in smashing them. He came
down and he smashed the whole of this Islamic civilisation. It was a
civilisation that had got rotten, the leadership and the elite who were
in charge of it had become corrupt and so its descriptions are like the
descriptions ofWestern American cities, in fact, just the same. He came
hurtling out of the East with his men. He was outnumbered 1O to l
by the muslim forces. The muslims outnumbered him 10 to 1 and yet
when he came hurtling down he wiped them all out.
One of the famous stories in Baghdad was that when one of
t..lie Mongols put his foot on the neck of a muslim and went to cut his
head off, he said, "Oh I have not got my sword, stay there, do not
move until I come back." He went away to get his sword and the man
was so scared and so terrified that he was lying there to get his head
cut off when the soldier came back. This was the state of the muslim
spirit.
Before he came to Balich the father of Jalaladin said this thing
has got to come. This thing has to happen and I am no part of this, I
am leaving. I cannot stop it, I have warned them and they do not listen
to me, I am going. He was a great 'alim, he was Sultan al-'Ulama but
they simply did not bother. They made the rules to suit themselves. So
he got up and he went to Baghdad with his sor!.. Now, he left Balkh
and down came Genghis Khan and devastated lt until it was dust, and
it is dust today. It is a ghost ruin outside Mazar-e Sharif to this day. The
city that once was called the centre of the wcrld. A.."'ld when they
arrived in Baghdad the father of Rumi said to the Abbasids, "This is
going to happen to you. Listen to me. Listen to me." But they would not
listen when he said it was going to happen to them. There was no way
that they were going to listen.
When he arrived in Baghdad the Sultan sent him an enormous
basin full of gold sequins, like the ones that the women sewed on
their dresses. It was for him to give to his slave girls to let them put on
sparkly dresses. The father of Rumi sent it back and said, "No" and the
2 3
Sultan said, "What can I give you?" He said, "Give me the mimbar." So
he said, "There you are, you can take the khutba." And he got up on
the mimbar in Baghdad and said that this is going to happen, this is
going to happen, this is going to happen and they all bowed their
heads. He saw they were not going to move, so he said, "We cannot
stay here, this place vvill be destroyed."
The following event shows the strange nature of the .whole
invasion as they came hurtling down, to one of these towns that they
were destroying, killing men, women and children, everything until
there was nothing left, not a human being. Genghis Khan heard that
there was one very famous sufi and 'alim who was a great wali in this
place. He sent a message saying, "I am coming to destroy the city get
out, I do not want to kill you." And he replied, "I cannot leave my
people, I will not leave." And he stayed and so they killed him as well. It
was something implacable.
Finally the father of Jalaladin settled in Konya under the
patronage of the great Saljuq Sultan of the time who welcomed him,
and of course when he came to Konya the father was so renowned that
all the people of Kanya were out in the streets to bring him in. It was
an important event. He had written two famous books and really the
first experience people had of Rumi was just a kind of megaphone of
all the teachings that were in his father's books. He was teaching very
strong Sunni fiqh.
What you have to understand is that the whole power of this
devastating expansion and destruction of the Mongols was not fin-
ished, it was spending itself, it was battering at the gates of the Saljuqs
and of course it went on in its last stages to threaten the first
Ottomans. As you know, it created a crisis for them. From that point to
the collapse of the Saljuqs and the establishment of the growing power
of the Ottoman Islam, at this cross-roads, is this one man in Konya.
Now, what happened there reverberated throughout the whole muslim
world right across the Indian subcontinent, right across these deserts
of the East right over into the Arab world. You could say there was no
more kafir ethos that ever existed than the Mongol hegemony of the
muslim lands nevertheless it was the force that came from Kanya that
turned these people into muslims. So the conquest of the kufr was by
the force of the people who came from another kind of army that
came from Jalaladin Rumi. You have to realise this because you then He shut down the tekke and the grave and made it into a museum.
have to come to the most terrible date in the history of the muslims, And they thought they had finished with the whole affair.
I do not accept that this attack on the Mevlevi was just because
the disaster of the kafir traitor Mustafa Kemal.
If you consider it, he had only one enemy which he, as it they were sufis, that they wanted to stop sufism because what they did
were, met on the field. At the end of World War 1 , the English ~ere all to Mevlevi is not what they did with the Naqshabandi or the Helveti.
going home, they were finished, they had had four years of mass sui- None of them were treated the way they were treated. So if you think
very deeply about it, and think, well if it is not just this brotherhood
cide. The French were collapsing. The famous victory that he had in
they wanted to smash because they were already a kind of secret soci-
Izmir was against a schizophrenic French General who thought his
ety, and they felt this was a muslim secret society, if it was not the
legs were made of glass and if he moved that his legs would break, so
brotherhood, then you really have to mean that this so-called warrior
he was not a ferocious enemy. The only enemy he really had were a
and this so-called gazi was afraid of men in long robes going around
group of old gentlemen in this robe with the farnous hirka of tbe
in circles. What an amazing thing. You must ask, why would he want
Mevlevi tariqa. This was his enemy. Now, what you have to ask is, why
to stop this? They are just men going around in circles! So it cannot be
was he more afraid of Kanya than anything, than anywhere or any-
that he thought, "This was some primitive dung with people spinning
body? Why was he more aware of Kanya and its people than anybody?
around in circles. It is too crazy. We cannot have this, we are modern
He was prepared to face the British, he was prepared to face the
people." That still does not make sense. So then you have to say, well
French, he was prepared even to face the Russian. He had to make
what is it about? What is this book that is the doctrine of the Mevlevi?
peace with the Russians. But with these people he knew he had to
Now there are two books, there is Mathnawi and there is
destroy them and the most powerful event, the most powerful achieve-
Diwan Shamsi-Tabriz. So whatever this contained was the petrol of the
ment, greater even than his destruction of your own language till it
motor and this had to be turned off If you go to it, then you find out.
was left a skeleton, was the destruction of the Mevlevi tariqa. As you
If you look at what is being said in Mathnawi you realise this is the
know, he hanged and hanged until there were none of the shuyukh
unique instrument for the defeat of kufr and that implies immediately
left. He locked up the books in the tekkes that he closed down so the
that it is quintessentially, unequivocally correct, pure Islamic teaching.
whole sufic operation was shut. Nobody could read the books.
In fact, not only that but it is the purest of pure Islamic teaching
Hundreds and thousands of books, commentaries on the Mathnawi,
because not only does it accept the basic fundamentals that we would
which nobody could read within ten years. It was finished and no one
expect of confirming the nature of Qur' an and the nature of the
could get at them to read them while they were still able to read them
Rasul, salallahu alayhi wa salem, and having love of Rasul, salallahu
because they were under lock and key. Now you have to ask, what was
alayhi wa salem, but it is also in conformity with the teachings of the
this? The simplistic answer and the muslim answer had always been,
most strict thinking ofislam in the school of al-Ash'ari. Al-Ash'ari
well he persecuted the sufis, he did not want them because they were
thinking is fundamental to Mathnawi so there is not anything that
the core of Islam and as long as they were there this terrible religion,
would let you imply the sort of things that people are able to charge
which he was so poisonously full of hatred against, would survive. It is
against Muhiyyid-din ibn al-'.Arabi, for example. This is absolutely pure
a further proof that his cannot have been a muslim family, because he
Islamic teaching, at the same time it speaks of a secret. And this secret,
was a man who until her dying day, lived witt1i his mother. So it cannot
if it gets out, then the whole edifice of this other system which is kufr,
be that he would live with his mother and degrade everything that she
which we would say is the correct translation of secularism, is
held precious. This has to be an evidence that they never ever were in
destroyed. If you translate secularism as kufr then you have got a very
their household muslims. He fought his war against the Turkish people
clear picture because it is that al-kufr millatun wahidah, one millat,
when he made a war on the tariqa of the Mevlevi, and he silenced it.
5
4
and this is what it is. Now Maulana came, and he said, you cannot
have this. Maulana said, you cannot have the doctrine of kufr except
that there is the truth. If there was not the truth you could not have
this doctrine which is a lie. So the stronger you get, the more you pre-
sent it, the more the whole thing collapses because eventually people
ask you from where does this come, it has to be the negation of the
truth and thus it can only collapse on its people. It will only destroy its
people, and then people will ask from where does this come? It comes
from the negation of this which is the truth. So it is a negative proof
of the reality of spiritual knowledge. Kufr is the negative proof of the
Haqiqa.
So at the heart of Mathnawi is the fact that Jalaladin Rumi tells
people what is the nature of existence, how it works and most impor-
tant of all he says that the knowledge on which the kafrr system is
built is not adequate and not enough to sustain the process of life and
that you need this other knowledge in order to live, that you cannot
live without it. And having said that, he then said everything has been
turned upside down, and you have to look at everything the other way
from how they look at it. He says, you see, it is like the exact opposite
of democracy. He says that the people do not know anything, they do
not know anything, they do not know anything at all. The oPJy ones
who know are the ones that have light put into their hearts by Allah.
And among these that have had light put into their hearts there is that
one who knows Him and that one is the one who can enlighten all. At
that point, the minute you have said that, you release from slavery
everybody held in bondage by historicity, by the process of the
diminution of others. It is a force that once you unleash it nothing can
stand against it And this is the real theme of Mathnawi.
The real theme of Mathnawi is that you understand the phe-
nomena by their highest manifestation, and then he says this thing on
which all of tasawwuf is based, and without which it is not in the
deep sense Deen, is not religion in the deep sense. He says that the
Prophet came to establish this, but it is a living thing therefore it has
to have living proponents in its time, for every time that man exists,
otherwise it is not possible because what has to be understood is not
an intellectual thesis. What you have to know, the real meaning of
tawhid, you cannot know by reasoning, you can only know it by a
6 7
perception, and you can only perceive by the one who takes you
beyond sensory perception to another kind of understanding. The
minute that you have said this you have flung open the door on what I
would call spiritual freedom, and you have flung open the door on a
people who can become mujahidin, who fight in the way of Allah and
do not fear death, which is the essential phenomenon of the Sahaba
and the Salaf in Madinah.
Let us look at some of these lines from him. He says in the
Fourth Book, 'You are your own bird, your own prey and your own
trap. You are your own seat of honour, you are your own floor and
your own ruin.' In other words, as far down as you can go, it is you.
As high as you can go, it is you. You are your own floor and your roof
You can reach your depth and your heights, nobody else's. You have
got the whole thing. This is the first ne•.vs he gives to the enslaved
masses. This is what turned a whole generation of Mongol warriors
into awliya and salihun and scholars and a whole Islamic civilisation
which in the end led to the Ottoman ummah.
He also says, 'In our Deen' meaning Islam 'the right thing is
war and terror. In the deen ofJesus the right thing is cave and moun-
tain.' So he also indicates that he is not proposing that we follow the
deen of Sayyedina 'Isa. The Mevlevi are not people who go and shut
themselves away and are merely dervishes, it is something else,
because he is saying, 'Our Deen is war and terror.' In other words, we
are the people who can fulfil this Deen, because of this gnostic divine
knowledge we get through the process which he is proposing to his
followers.
Maulana comments on the Qur'anic command, 'Spend in the
way of Allah' and links it to the Messenger's rejection of monasticism
in Islam. Maulana Rumi makes an important comment on the hadith
of Rasul, salallahu alayhi wa salem, 'There is no monasticism in Islam.'
Now we all know that is a hadith of fiqh, and it defines that you can-
not have celibacy and men shutting themselves away, that the process
of life is family life. He then explains the meaning of it, he does not
deny it, it is not a batini interpretation, he does not deny this is the
fundamental principle of the muslim community, but he explains. He
says, 'When there is no enemy, jihad is inconceivable. If you do not
have desire you cannot have obedience. You cannot have abstinence
 when you do not have desire. When there is no adversary what is the
use of your force?' He says, "Allah said, 'Spend', - 'fisabil-illah' - which
implies 'therefore gain something.' You cannot spend until you have
gained something. You cannot spend without a previous revenue,
although He has used spend in the absolute, it is the verbal command,
'Spend!' Nevertheless read it as meaning 'Gain and then spend."'
So what he is doing is thrusting the murid into the world, into
action, into the transaction. He is not withdrawing. The people of
Mevlevi were not withdrawn, they were not as they were slanderously
presented to Europe by the kafir dictator. On the contrary, this was the
army of Allah. Maulana says, "When there is no predicate in someone
the existence of subject is impossible." In grammar there is the subject
and predicate, the subject is the noun and the predicate is what you
predicate of the action. When there is no predicate L.'l someone the
existence of the subject is impossible. You do not have any reality until
you move into the action. You do not exist. This is his teaching, he is
not proposing some withdrawal from the world. He is not proposing
to hide away. He is putting man in action but in a way by which he
understands what happens when he moves. And then he says some-
thing which sounds exactly like that of which they accuse him.
He says in the Diwan of Shamsi-Tabriz, which remember, is a
separate thing. It is the book for the 'arifeen, for the gnostics. It is
about the relation between the Shaykh and the murid. It is between
Rumi as murid and Shams as his master. It is about what happened
when this wild apparently crazy Qalandari darwish came into Konya.
Remember Konya was civilised. Konya was cultured. Konya had a
court. Konya had poetry, had music. It had everything, it was beautiful,
it was outside the storm, and in came this darwish from the Qalandari
in his thick felt -muraq' a. If he took it off it could stand up like a tent.
Stinking, smelly felt that was heavy. In he came and turned this man
upside down. This is from the Diwan, he says, "Be dru.Ilken in love for
love is all that exists! Without the dealings of love there is no entrance
to the Beloved. They say, 'What is love?' Say, 'Renunciation of will."'
This is the sufic answer. What is love? And he says tell them it is renun-
ciation of the will. What does that mean? This is already extraordinary
because it does not sound like what we think of, when we think of
romantic love. He says, "Love is the renunciation of the will." In other
8 9
words, you do not want anything, you want what the Beloved wants.
Of course all the stories of Layla and Majnun which are in the
Mathnawi, are about love.
And Maulana says, "The one who has not escaped from will.
No will has he." It sounds like a contradiction To say that the one who
has not escaped from the will, who has not got away from his will,
does not have a will. In other words, what he is saying is that if you
have a will you are under the wisdom of Rasul, salallahu alayhi wa
salem, who said, "You want something and Allah wants something.
What you want is not what Allah wants. But you must know that what
Allah wants is certainly going to happen." The one who has not
escaped from will, no will has he. The one who has escaped from will
has a will. His will is what the Beloved wants. He has got the ibada of
Allah. I do not want anyt.li..ing, I want what He wants, at that point he
has will because He is the one who wills when he belongs to Allah. So
he has abandoned this attribute. What he is doing is, he is turning the
world absolutely upside down. This is the extreme of what I have been
saying earlier. This is an exact opposite apparently and we have to join
these two together to find out how this process takes place.
Now we look at some aspects of the way of the tariqa of
Mevlevi. With the tariqa of Mevlevi you have to go back before the
persecutions. It is underground at the moment, it is hidden, it is
smothered, but it is not finished, because it is all there to be perceived
and the same teaching that is here is the same teaching among all the
sufis. This is probably the most orthodox, the most correct and the
most pure of all the versions of tasawwuf in existence. He says, "If
anyone risks the way" the tariqa, "without a guide, a voyage of two
days lasts a hundred years."
He tells the story of a boatman who was an ignorant peasant,
taking a scholar across a lake, and he said to the man in the boat,
"What do you do?" He said, "I am a grammarian." The boatman said,
"Oh I do not know anything about that. I do not need to know all that."
And the grammarian said, "If you do not know grammar you have wast-
ed half your life." Then they looked up at the sky, and a storm came. This
terrific storm blew and the boat began to fill with water and the boat-
man said, "Do you know how to swim?" and the grammarian replied,
"No." Then the boatman said, "Well, you have wasted all your life!" and
 he jumped into the water.
Rumi says this is the metaphor of the two possible approaches
to existence. If you take this one you may get half way across the lake
but you will not reach the other side. You will not arrive, you are fin-
ished, it is not a basis on which you can live. So he comments on this
story and he says, "If you are the most erudite scholar of your time in
the world beware of the passing of this world and of time. We have
told the story of the grammarian in order to teach you 'nahw' and
'mahw', to teach you grammar and detachment. In the loss of your
self oh honoured friend," in the loss of your self, in the loss of your
consciousness of your existence which is the heart of all sufic practice,
in the loss of your self, of self awareness in the acts of khalwa, "you
will find the fiqh of the fiqh", you will find the legality of the legal,
"you will find the grammar of grammar and the essence of the sci-
ences." And then he goes on to explain, "This is why in appearance
you are the microcosm because in reality you are the macrocosm.
From the point of view of appearance the branch is the origin of the
fruit but in reality the branch came into existence because of the fruit.
If he had not had a desire, and a desire and a hope for the fruit why
would the gardener have planted the root of the tree?" If he had not
desired and hoped for fruit why would the gardener stick the root in
the earth? Now what he is doing is turning all understanding of exis-
tence upside down. What he is saying is a tremendous thing, he is say-
ing that everything exists for the highest phenomenon. All of the law
of phenomena are in order that the highest phenomenon should take
place. He said, "That is why in reality the tree is born of the fruit even
if in appearance the fruit has been engendered by the tree." He says
everyone is understanding all of existence in the wrong way and he
explains that, "This is the reason why Sayyedina Muhammad, salal-
lahu alayhi wa salem, said, 'Adam and the other Prophets follow me
behind my banner."' In other words they were branch and he was the
fruit so the completion of the thing is in the man of absolute knowl-
edge, is in the one who comes with the Message from Allah. It is all in
order that he should come.
What Maulana is saying is that all lived existence is built
around the process of understanding how existence works, which can
only be understood in obedience to Rasul, salallahu alayhi wa salem,
10
from following the Deen of Islam, in absolute obedience to Islam. In
recognising the Message of la ilaha ilallah, in recognising the message
of Muhammad Rasulullah and within that, finding the teacher, finding
the one who can show you your own secret, who can open you to
your own situation. Thus the purpose of existence is to have people of
knowledge. It is for you, once you become one of the people of gno-
sis. It is all for you, everything is for you, once you realise this treasure
then everything has changed, all of the rules have changed. And so
Rumi foretells the disaster of the secular state, he says, "You deny the
Divine. You deny the way of Rasul, salallahu alayhi wa salem. We bow
down before the Everlasting. We bow down before Allah, subhanahu
wa ta' ala, and because you have denied yourself this, you end up bow-
ing down before the ruler. You bow your kriee aiid kiss the feet of the
ruler. He is just some flesh and bones that will become like excre-
ment." It is just a bit of stuff and you are all .grovelhng about before a
mortal ruler so you have made a religion on a ruin. He said that we
bow down before Allah, subhanahu wa ta' ala. These two things are not
compatible, they are not compatible.
A sufi said to me in Tafilalet, "The reason we kiss the hand of the
Shaykh is because we do not kiss the hand of the king." We kiss the hand
of the Shaykh because we kiss the hand that takes us to knowledge. We do
not kiss the hand of the one who comes to put us down but the one who
comes to raise us up. It is the opposite, and this is why it had to be
destroyed.
In another place he said about the Way, "On this subject the
Prophet, salallahu alayhi wa salem, said, 'I am like the ark in the rivers
of time. I and my companions are like the ark of Nuh, whoever is con-
nected to us gains benefit."' Then he comments, "When you find
yourself with the Shaykh you are distanced from evil. Day and night
you are a traveller on a boat, you are under the protection of a spirit
who confers life. You are sleeping in the boat but you continue on
your way. Even if you are a lion, you are vain and in error when you
take the path without a guide."
Let us look at some of the things he then says about sense per-
ception. He makes a massive attack on thinking as a useful process. It
is very uncompromising. He is very influenced by Imam al-Ghazali. He
attacks the philosophers. There still is this tremendous debate which
11
 was the inevitable debate to take you out of Islam into kufr and also to
stop people going into Islam. They present you with two doctrines
intended to syphon you out of Islam. One is determinism, that you are
fated, that you are doomed, your destiny is that you can do nothing, it
is all written, and the other is that you have to use reason and intellect
and nothing matters, you just use intelligence and you get on, and
these are the two doors out of knowledge. He is very devastating in his
attack on the Mu'tazili view that you have to usereason because he
said that they are not actually using reason. He says that they are not
using reason at all they are using dialectics which he does not consider
to· be using reason. The German thinker, Gadamer, said, "Reason is part
of freedom." Rumi says of the determinist, the one who says every-
thing is determined and that you cannot escape the destiny, "Well if
everything is determined why are you arguing about it?" If you are
determined why are you making out a case for being determined
which implies some sort of freedom towards the subject of being
determined. If you were determined you would be completely stuck.
Rumi says, "The way of sensory perception is the way of don-
keys." I mean that is very uncompromising. It is the end of a university
education, basically. He says, "The way of sensory perception is the
way of donkeys, oh rider." He addresses his students as riders because
he wants them to distinguish themselves from the donkeys. He says,
"Shame on you. You who compete with donkeys." He said, "Beyond
these five physical senses exist five spiritual senses. They are like the
red gold, while the physical senses are like copper." In other words,
they seem to be something but they are not worth anything. He said,
"The muwahid as well as the mutashabi are dazzled by You, oh Allah."
The one who declares Allah is One and notill.J.1g is associated with
Him, the one who -does not connect to forms. "The muwahid as well
as the mutashabi" t..lie one who connects to forms "are dazzled by You.
Oh You who being without formal appearance appear un.der all the
forms, Allah, subhanahu wa ta' ala. The doctrine sustained by the eye of
the senses is Mu'tnili while the eye of reason is Sunni in the matter of
union with God." In other words, what he calls the eye ofreason is
really in a way a reference to the 'Ashari thinking that if you approach
Allah correctly then you do not get caught in this web and this trap
that ends up with scepticism, because scepticism is death. This is the
12
key to the matter: "That you call God without form or with forms is in
vain if you are not liberated from form." If you say God is without
form or with forms it is in vain if you are not liberated from form.
Unless you are liberated from form you cannot make a declaration of
tawhid because you are other-than-Allah, you are ma-siwa'llah.
Therefore your muwahid claim is invalid and to say that Allah is with
forms while you are a form is a shirk, because you are then §aying you
are a pantheist, you are saying you are part of the godhead. So he says,
"Neither of these positions has any validity unless you cease to exist."
So consciousness for a full spiritual education is that you should have
ceased, that is to say, to have 'experienced' your non-existence. Maulana
explains this: "The philosopher gives an explanation of a certain kind.
The theologian then rejects it. Another mocks both of them." So the
pbilosopher says one thing, the theologian says another and the third
one makes fun of both of them and the third one exhausts himself get-
ting it completely wrong. "Each gives his indications of the way, in
order that you believe he is from that village", in order that you think
he knows this matter. And he says, "No, this is the truth. None of these
people is right and yet the flock has not entirely gone astray. For noth-
ing false can be shown without the truth. The idiot buys false money
hoping it is gold. If there was not real money in circulation how would
it be possible to put out the false? If there was no truth, how could there
be error? This error receives its brilliance from the truth." The wrong
takes its brilliance from the truth. "So do not say that all is fantasy and
error. Without the truth there would be no imagining in the world. Truth
is the Night of Power."
Truth is Laylat al-Qadr, "hidden among the other nights in order
that the ruh can put each night to the test." In modem Islam, which is
dead, they say, "This is the Night of Power," as if it were fixed, yet Rasul,
salallahu alayhi wa salem, said, "I am not sure which night it is. It was
one of those uneven nights at the end of Ramadhan." The spirit is to say,
was it tonight? No it was not tonight. Was it this one?Yes, that was it.
You test the nights to find the one that is true, and he said that the truth
is like the Laylat al-Qadr, it is hidden among other nights in order that
the spirit can put each night to the test. So all the time in life you are
testing for the truth.
These are just some of the beginnings of the subject of
13
 Mathnawi. People say, "How did' the muslims at the time of Sahaba, at
the time of Sayyedina 'Umar, how did they get to the gates of Europe?
How did they rush across the world? How did they conquer to the
East?" It is because the people of those times knew these matters, they
lived with them, it was their coin. This was a common experience for
them. If you take all these tariqas, they trace all the way back to Rasul,
salallahu alayhi wa salem. Hasan al-Basri, raheem Allah, was alive at the
time of the grandsons of Rasul, salallahu alayhi wa salem. He was a
great sufi, and he was teaching in Basra on a certain day when a man
in his circle got up and walked out on the issue of using the intellect,
using reason and applying reason about life, that life could be under-
stood by ratiocination and analysis and dialectic. Hasan al-Basri said,
"You have separated from us. You have cut from us." You have become
Mu'tazili, you have cut off from this wisdom that is the absolute core
of the knowledge on which Islam is based, and the effect of that ques-
tioning is not to question the things of the physical world but first to
question the things of the Unseen world. To take the Iman out, to take
it away. To say you do not believe in angels. For example, it is obligato-
ry, you have to believe ill angels that is pan of Deen. You have to
believe in the reality of an unseen world around you, but of course,
the minute you are sceptical about the Unseen then you are sceptical
about your brother and you are sceptical about yourself because you
are an unseen reality. Your unseen dominates your seen. When the doc-
tor tends to a patient he gives him the medicine, he takes his tempera-
ture, he applies the cure; he cuts the flesh, he dresses the wound, he
puts him in the bed and the family come and they say, "How is he?"
and the doctor says, "I have done everything I can. Now it is up to
him." In other words, something in him has to make this fight not to
die. This is his unseen reality. His unseen dominates all the wisdom
and the knowledge and the physical expertise of the doctor. So the
path of Mu'tazili, the path of doubting, the path of thinking every-
thing can be explained and examined and cut and dissected is a false
mastery by which we have not got this matter in our hands. We are
another sort of creature. We are dominated by our Unseen.
Rumi indicates something of the core of this unseen·-ness that
is the self and in fact the unseen-ness of the whole cosmos because he
has also said, "You are not the microcosm you are actually the
14
macrocosm, you are the whole thing." And he says that the very core of
the matter is love and that love is this pulse, is this movement, is this
dynamism that makes everything in the physical world move. It makes
the planets move, it makes the atom move, it makes the plant waken, it
makes everything in motion. And therefore it indicates the Essence. He
says, "By love bitter things become sweet. By love pieces of copper
become gold. By love, dregs become clear. By love, pain becomes heal-
ing. By love, the dead one is made alive. By love, the king becomes a
slave. This love moreover is the result of knowledge." He says, "What
fool has ever sat on the throne oflove? On what occasion did deficient
knowledge give birth to this love?" And then he makes several defini-
tions. What he does is he puts together the key term of tasawwuf,
which is the 'arif" He says, "Everything except love is devoured by
love. Love is not contained in the word or its hearing. Love is an ocean
whose depths are invisible"
Now I remember I was with my first Shaykh, ShaY:kh
Muhammad ibn al-Habib, in Algeria. We were sitting in a garden with
some of .his fuqara and there was a very great Sufi there called Si
Hamoud from Blida and they were in the company of very high Sufis.
Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Habib was over a hundred years old at this
time. He said, "Tell me something about the heart." And one said one
thing and he said, "Yes, yes." And another one, and he said, "Yes, yes"
and he said, "That is not what I want." And then to Si Hamoud he said,
"What do you say?" and Si Hamoud said, "The heart is an ocean." The
Shaykh replied, "That is it. That is it. The heart is an ocean." So you see
what he was indicating is that this knowledge that is love, its place is
in the heart. It is in the heart that this matter comes to life. Imam al-
Ghazali said, "Someone who has put one foot on the path is a star, and
someone who is advanced on the path is a moon. And someone who
has arrived is a sun. But the one who has not put .his foot on the path
is like a stone." And this is because his heart is dead. If the heart is
dead then nothing can be done. It is not possible. This was the terrible
challenge to Mustafa Kemal so that he had to destroy what he could
not have for himself
Rumi says, "Love is like a ship for the elect. Catastrophes are
rare. For the most part it is deliverance." He said, "Sell intelligence and
buy wonder, buy amazement." A tremendous devastating statement. He
15
says, "Intelligence is opinion", it is just yours not his, "while wonder
is the vision" by it you see. "If there had not been love how could
there have been existence?" The way he makes everything simple is
very significant. Once, a member of his family, al-Qunawi, the great
commentator of Muhiyyid-din ibn al-Arabi, was sitting with Rumi,
and he was the highest kind of intellectual sufi. He asked Maulana a
question and Maulana answered, and al-Qunawi said, "It is tremen-
dous how you can give such a simple answer to such a complicated
question." And Rumi smiled at him and said, "No it is extraordinary
that you could ask such a complicated question about such a simple
matter." Look how deeply he goes in this very simple metaphor. He
said, "If there had not been love how could there have been existence?
How could the bread have attached itself to you and become you?" He
said, "It became you by your love and your appetite. How else could
the bread have reached your ruh?" He takes the most physical process
of the transmutation of the proteins into your flesh and says how does
it attach to you? It comes by love. It comes by your desire. I want the
bread. I want to live, and it is your spirit, it reaches your spirit by this.
And then in a very beautiful line, he says, "The suffering of love is dif-
ferent from all sufferings." He gives his famous definition, "Love is the
astrolabe of the secrets of God." And he says, "The millat of 'ishq is
apart from all deens. For lovers the millat and the madhab is Allah."
Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi
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