Winds of Change.NET: Sufi Wisdom: From Sleep to Love

February 15, 2003

Sufi Wisdom: From Sleep to Love

by Joe Katzman at February 15, 2003 11:52 PM

As militant Islam does its level best to discredit the religion, it's important to remember that there are other voices within the faith. One such is the Sufis, the Islamic mystics who live islam (submission), iman (faith) and ishan (awareness of G-d, "to act beautifully").

The Wahhabi hate them, of course, which constitutes an endorsement in my books. The great poet Rumi was a Sufi, and once again we turn to him for this week's meditation on love as the Sufis see it. I can understand this mindset intellectually as the fulfilment of their path, but viscerally - no I'm not in this category or even close to it.

"Those who don't feel this Love
pulling them like a river,
those who don't drink dawn
like a cup of spring water
or take in sunset like supper,
those who don't want to change,

let them sleep.

This Love is beyond the study of theology,
that old trickery and hypocrisy.
If you want to improve your mind that way,

sleep on.

I've given up on my brain,
I've torn the cloth to shreds
and thrown it away.

If you're not completely naked,
wrap your beautiful words
around you,

and sleep."

And their object of Love is...? You tell me.

Printer-friendly Version

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.windsofchange.net/windsopcentre-cms/trackback.cgi/819

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference
"Sufi Wisdom: From Sleep to Love"

Comments

#1 from Richard R. Fernandez at 12:17 pm on Feb 15, 2003

It's sad commentary on the state of the world that the Sufis must inhabit the shadows while the Wahabists stalk out in the light of day. It's also a warning that our own innocence will not save us on this, our bloodstained planet.

#2 from Tom Roberts at 3:40 pm on Feb 15, 2003

a biased answer-
Hebrews 11

1 Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
2 For by it the men of old received divine approval.
3 By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear.

Those things "seen" are what we perceive in our waking hours. What is "not seen" is the subject of extra rational, "sleeping", perceptions. Your "Love" is the source of "things hoped for".

Paul didn't address such complex thoughts to the Hebrews as he would to a random audience.

Post a comment

Here are some quick tips for adding simple Textile formatting to your comments, though you can also use proper HTML tags:

*This* puts text in bold.

_This_ puts text in italics.

bq. This "bq." at the beginning of a paragraph, flush with the left hand side and with a space after it, is the code to indent one paragraph of text as a block quote.

To add a live URL, "Text to display":http://windsofchange.net/ (no spaces between) will show up as Text to display. Always use this for links - otherwise you will screw up the columns on our main blog page.

Finally, note that a constant onslaught of Trackback spams from auto-generated blogspot blogs has forced Winds to ban the blogspot.com domain from use in comments or trackbacks. If you host on blogspot, consider moving; otherwise, the complaints need to be directed at Google not us.