Hafiz ba khwod na posheed en khirqai mai alood
Aye Shaykh-e-pakdaman mazoor dar mara!
Hafiz did not
Of his choice wear
This wine-soaked cloak;
O puritan Sheikh, beware!
He is helpless;
It was thus ordained!
Thus reverberate the words of the great Persian poet Hafiz Shirazi (c. 1320–89) in the lyrics of Murli, one of the greatest qawwals or Sufi singers of India.
My first introduction to Sufi poetry or Islamic mystical poetry was not through books but through the medium of qawwali, a kind of musical composition in which the verses, not the music, are paramount. At qawwali performances (or Mehfil-e-Sama), which regularly occur at both private homes and at the shrines of famous saints in South Asia, one can hear to this day the words of Hafiz and Sa’di Shirazi (1184–1291), Jalaluddin Rumi (1207–73) and Amir Khusrow Dehlavi (1253–1325), as well as the vernacular of Kabir (1398–1447), Sultan Bahu (c. 1628–91) and Baba Bulleh Shah (1680–1757), some of the most popular and revered Sufi poets of Islam. For it is in the poetry of the Muslim world that the soul and heart of Islamic civilization lie. While this is a book of Islamic mystical or Sufi poetry, and not about Islamic mysticism or Sufism (I will use these terms interchangeably), a better appreciation of the verses requires some understanding of Sufi ideas.
Sufism has its origin in the early days of Islam, most notably the second century ah (eighth century ad), its centre located in Baghdad and Basra, which were then under the rule of the Abbasid Caliphate. What defined the early Sufis was their absorption with God, other-worldliness and a life removed, and these concerns were reflected in their sayings and poetic output. These early Sufis were mystics and philosophers first and poets second. Their greatness, in other words, lies not in their poetry but in their lives and their utterances. Among the early mystics were Rabia Basri (d. 801), Junaid Baghdadi (830– 910), Hasan Basri (642–728/737) and Shibli Baghdadi (d. 946), to name but a few, but the foremost among them was Mansur Hallaj (d. 922). He is considered the earliest martyr of Islam, executed for his famous utterance ‘An al Haq’ (‘I am the Truth’). Although preceded by Rabia Basri, Mansur Hallaj is perhaps the first major Sufi whose poetry is highly sophisticated and developed.
Many early Sufis spent their time seeking meanings and authorization in the Qur’an and the Hadiths to counter accusations of unbelief and deviation levelled against them by orthodox Muslims. Hence a substantial portion of early Sufi writing offers responses to unjustified criticism prompted by the utterances of the more passionate and fearless advocates of the path of divine love, where God and man merge into dangerous (i.e. unorthodox) Shirk (‘associating other beings with God’). It is through these writings that we get a fairly well-developed argument or justification for the Sufi Path, as the early Sufis develop the Sufi doctrine and explain its philosophy and manners. The further development of Sufi ideas through great masters like Abul Qasim Al-Qushayri (d. 1072) and Abu Hamid Al Ghazali (1058–1111) led to the infusion of Islamic culture with the mystical ideas of the Sufis, which permeated both philosophical and religious discourse. The impact of such ideas was profound on poetry, as it was the main artistic vehicle of Islamic civilization.
So what is this Sufi Path? We can describe it as the Path of Love where the human soul searches out God, and if the grace of God falls upon the searcher, then he or she finds fana (annihilation) in God and, ultimately, baqa or eternal existence in the consciousness of God. But these states are granted only to the saintly and God-graced few. For most, the Path is a path of loving God through His manifestations. This is the message that Sufism conveys to the common believer: love God, love God’s creation and praise Him and remember Him all the time. To put it simply, Sufism in its human essence replaces a fearsome and unforgiving God with a loving, loveable and merciful one.
Since God is unseen and formless, most humans need to find him through his creation and through human love. In loving another human being one discovers the all-consuming power of love, while the astonishing beauty of the Beloved reduces the lover to a state of helpless abandon. At this point he or she becomes a slave willing to be sacrificed. But this love of the human is merely Ishq-e-Majazi (illusory love), and if the lover is pure of heart it should act as a bridge to Ishq-e-Haqiqi (true love), which is the love of God.
The mystical ideas that underpin Sufi poetry can be summarized as follows: God is Absolute Beauty and Absolute Good, and He precedes all creation and He existed alone. As it is in the nature of beauty to be admired, worshipped and revealed, so He created the phenomenal world so that His beauty could be revealed. It was born as a result of God’s desire for the hidden to be known. But this world is not absolute as is God, and is only a reflection of Truth rather than Truth itself. It is, therefore, transitory. Moreover, as God is Absolute Beauty and Absolute Good, so this creation, however beautiful, is imperfect and represents what is Not-Good, as it is merely a reflection of the Good and not the Good itself.
In A History of Ottoman Poetry, E. J. W. Gibb (1857–1901) describes the double nature of the human Self that demands both transcendence and immanence from the seeker of divine love:
Man, like the phenomenal universe in which he finds himself, and of which he presents an epitome, is double-natured, partaking at once of Being and Not-being, of Good and Evil, of Reality and Unreality. But as that side of him which derives from Being, and which therefore alone has a real and eternal existence, is necessarily an emanation of Divinity, he is, so far, ultimately and essentially one with God. This Divine particle in man, this spark of Pure Being, is ever seeking, consciously or unconsciously, to be reunited to its source; but so long as the phenomenal state lasts, the presence of the element of Not-being holds it back.1
The purpose of human life is therefore to eliminate as much as possible this state of not-being so that one may attain union with God and become absorbed into the Divine. While total annihilation of the not-being and complete union with God are to be realized only after death, a measure of this experience is possible even in this earthly existence. But how is one to transcend the element of not-being? The Sufis propose that it is to be achieved only by conquering Self, for although the Self appears real to us it is in fact an illusion that is the cause of our main sorrow, that is, our separation from the Divine. Gibb continues:
And how is Self to be conquered? By Love. By Love, and by Love alone, can the dark shadow of Not-being be done away; by Love, and by Love alone, can the soul of man win back to its Divine source and find its ultimate goal in reunion with the Truth. And the first lessons of this Love, which is the keynote of Sufism and of all the literature it has inspired, may be, nay, must be learned through a merely human passion. Than true love ‘there is no subtler master under heaven’.2
But human love, which is the first stage of love, no matter how good and valuable, is not the end of the journey. The true pilgrim of love must recognize it as simply the bridge that he must walk across towards a higher goal. The nature of ‘Typal’ love offers some insight into the experience of this journey of love, which involves the complex states of being and not-being. Sufis distinguish ‘Typal’ love from divine love, describing it as a bridge to the real in which the pilgrim must beware of lingering too long, or else he may fail to reach the journey’s end.
In the end, the true lover must cross this bridge of earthly love, leaving it behind. For the true lover relinquishing this love is not a loss, since what awaits him or her is far more beautiful and joyous. Once the journey ends
his eyes are opened, his heart is made clairvoyant through Divine Love; wherever he turn his gaze he sees the Face of God; God shines down on him from every star in the sky, God looks up at him from every flower in the field, God smiles on him in every fair face, God speaks to him in every sweet sound; all around him there is God, nothing but God. If he turn his eyes inward and look into his own heart, there he can read letter by letter the very heart of God. For he has now become one with God, knowing and feeling that there is naught beside God; and he can cry out with Mansur ‘I am the Truth!’ and exclaim with Bayezid of Bistam ‘There is none other than God within my cloak!’3
This point is brilliantly illustrated in the excerpt from Yusuf and Zulaikha by Abdur-Rahman Jami (1414–92), which appears in this volume (p. 279).
Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (1888–1958), the renowned nationalist and scholar of Islam in South Asia, writing on the seventeenth-century mystic and poet Sarmad (d. 1661), has developed further the experience of this passage from worldly to divine love. For Azad, the lover must willingly seek the ‘telling blow’ of love, without which it is impossible to sever the chains that bind us to this worldly life. In the following passage he eloquently describes the suffering that the lover must savour, since it eventually leads to self-reflection and eternal beauty.
The first condition of loving the Divine is to turn away from worldly concerns, but man is so chained and attached to earthly things that unless he receives a telling blow to the heart he cannot break this link. When a bee alights on honey, it will only depart if it is shooed away. The human heart does not turn away from the pleasures of the world unless it is hurt. Only Love can deliver this incisive blow.
Only the angel of Love it is who hides in his wings that powerful sword which can sever the ties that bind us to earthly pleasures and break the bonds of blood that restrict us. And when the heart is free of all restrictions and reflects upon itself, it finds no chains save the link of eternity that circles its feet. For this Love, wise Attar restlessly laments:
For the unbeliever Unbelief, for the believer Belief,
For Attar a particle of pain is enough.4
Those who have not experienced the peace-destroying blow of earthly love are the most unfortunate, since their hearts remain numb and impervious to the presence of Divine Beauty. If one has not yearned for an earthly Beloved, one’s senses will not be honed sufficiently to be able to yearn for the Divine Beloved. Or as Azad observes:
Anyone who is so dead of heart who has never had the good fortune of destroying his peace and sanity in anticipation of the unveiling of earthly beauty is hardly likely to experience the presence of Divine Beauty through his earthly senses.5
Yearning and longing for the love of the Divine is seen as a gift that comes to the few who are fortunate enough to undergo the anguish and pain of longing for a heartless and indifferent Beloved. It is only then that the lover is capable of smashing free of the Self and becoming alive to the melody of creation:
That heartless one who has been unable to shower an indifferent and vain Beloved with all his stability, pride and joy, heart and mind. Such a man is not likely to break the idol of self-worship and self-adoration that resides within him. One who has not been driven crazy by the song of a beautiful creature is unlikely to be ecstatic when he hears the music of creation. […] Suffice it so say that he who is unfortunate enough never to lose his head and senses over a beauty’s stark and unexpected gaze, will not be dizzy at the sight of the Divine.6
The ache of earthly love prepares the lover for the Divine, so that ‘like the lamp which has already been lit’ he or she is ready to burn instantly with the touch of a spark, unlike the un seasoned one that takes longer to light. This being the case, why should the seeker of the Real Beauty wait when it is possible to sample a foretaste of it in this world? Azad goes on to say:
If the seekers are searching for beauty, then why wait for the hidden to be revealed? They should be startled and dazed by the light emanating from the veil.7
We may read in the above words the underlying idea of Elast, a primordial covenant with the Divine to which the Qur’an refers, and which underpins all aspects of Sufism and the mys tical approach to Islam, including Sufi poetry. According to this covenant, in pre-eternity before the world was created God assembled all the souls of humanity and asked, ‘Elastu Bi Rabbikum?’ (‘Do you not recognize your Lord?’), and the souls answered, ‘Yes.’ The mystics invoke this covenant to advance the idea that the soul is constantly yearning to be united with God. It is this wine, the wine of Elast, that Sufi poets allude to as the wine with which humankind is forever drunk. Those who gather in the Tavern of Truth, Maulana Azad goes on to say, are initially offered only a sip, but, once they are able to tolerate the bitterness of the wine, the Saqi (or Wine-giver) unveils himself. After that, there is no longer any need for goblet or wine: ‘The glance of the wine-giver itself is intoxicating enough for the drinker to lose himself in.’ We may also trace here another very important idea for the Sufi tradition of God as our friend. This idea, too, derives from the Qur’an (50:16), where it is said of the relationship between God and man: Wa Nahno Aqrabo Elayhay min Hablil Wareed (‘But We are nearer to him than his jugular vein’).8
Then there is the prophetic tradition I have already mentioned, which provides a philosophical argument for the creation of mankind and the need for mankind to love and worship God and His eternal beauty. According to one sacred Hadith, David is said to have asked God why He created man. God replied, ‘I was a Hidden Treasure, therefore was I fain to be known, and so I created creation in order that I should be known.’9 The Sufi quest for Divine Beauty emanates from this tradition and reflects a striving to accomplish this mission.
Sufi poetry explores the ideas outlined above; in particular it celebrates human love as a bridge to a celebration of the Divine. Similarly, when a Sufi poem praises wine it is also praising the wine of Ma’rifat (gnostic knowledge). So, in this way, the apparently mundane and secular is, in fact, imbued with a spiritual interpretation – regardless of the poets’ intentions! It may be argued that many poems not written by Sufi poets also are imbued with the message of Sufism, consciously or unconsciously. Indeed, R. A. Nicholson (1868–1945), the eminent scholar of Islamic culture and civilization, has observed that almost all of the great poets of Persia have borrowed the ideas of Sufism and speak its language in their own way. Thus Hafiz Shirazi, writing in the fourteenth century, made the mystical terminology serve the function of a mask or a lady’s fan.
Apart from the recurring themes mentioned above, Sufi or Islamic mystical poetry is imbued with symbols and metaphors that derive from and develop many of the philosophical ideas of the early Sufis. These repeated images are the Lover, exemplified by Majnun or ‘the one possessed’; the Beloved, which ultimately refers to God, but could also be the earthly Beloved as a reflection of God’s beauty; the wine, which is the knowledge that is gained not by reason but by the heart or Ma’rifat; the Saqi or ‘wine-giver’, who brings this gnostic knowledge; the Maikada or ‘tavern’ where this wine is served, as opposed to the Dair or Haram (places of worship) where the Zuhhad (puritans or orthodox legalists) congregate. This magnificent poetry is also rich in simile and metaphor: the eyebrows of the Beloved are compared to the arches of a mosque, the hair of the Beloved to a snare for the lover, and so on. The idea is to celebrate love, which breaks the chains of earthly existence and disconnects us from worldly gain or loss; the lover is lost in this world and discovers his true essence through the ‘madness’ of love.
In his introduction to a collection of ghazals or love lyrics by Rumi entitled the Divan-e-Shams-e Tabrizi, Nicholson divides the early Persian poets into those who are Sufis by pro fession or conviction and those who are not. Many early mystics like Rabia Basri and Mansur Hallaj were Sufis or mystics first and poets second. For them poetry was more about a distilled form of expression of their devotion to God and their philosophical or religious concerns, and indeed their reputation as mystics far outstrips their accomplishments as poets, which is as they would have wanted it. Rabia’s verses, for instance, are more like devotional utterances than poems, although Mansur Hallaj was an inspired poet as well, as is obvious from his Divan.
Foremost among the great Sufis who were also great poets are Sanai Ghaznavi (d. 1131), Fariduddin Attar (1145–1221), Umar Ibn al-Farid (1181–1235), Mohyuddin Ibn ‘Arabi (1165– 1240), Jalaluddin Rumi and Mahmud Shabistari (d. 1320). They were also Sufi thinkers first and poets second, yet their continuing fame owes much to the beauty of their poetry. Even those poets who may not be classified as Sufis seek similarly to tantalize us and heighten our pleasure by the play of their wit, by suspending us between matter and spirit, and by alluding to love, wine and beauty in the warmest and most alluring colours. They do it with such subtlety of language, observes Nicholson, that ‘often the same ode will entrance the sinner and evoke sublime raptures in the saint’. He goes on to say that ‘The real basis of their poetry is a loftily inculcated ethical system, which recog nizes in purity of heart, charity, self-renunciation, and bridling of the passions, the necessary conditions of eternal happiness.’10
Nicholson also draws our attention to another pervasive theme in Sufi (or Sufi-inspired) poetry: an incessant questioning of parochial and dogmatic interpretations of the Qur’an and of the Hadiths by the institutionalized authorities of Islam. While never assailing Islam itself, they persistently launch indirect attacks and
frequently the thought flashes out that all religions and revelations are only the rays of a single eternal Sun; that all Prophets have only delivered and proclaimed in different tongues the same principles of eternal goodness and eternal truth which flow from the divine Soul of the World. Among these, the genuine Sufi poets, Jalaluddin Rumi is without rival.11
While talking of Persian Sufi poets one must not forget the revered Sufi poets of the Arabic language, foremost among them the saintly Umar Ibn al-Farid, whose Qasida al-Khamriyya (The Wine Ode) and Nazm al-Suluk (Poem of the Sufi Way) rank as the highest and most eloquent examples of mystical poetry; and, of course, the great Mohyuddin Ibn ‘Arabi, whose influence went beyond the Arabic language to pervade and permeate all subsequent Sufi poetry in most Islamic languages, including Persian.
What Nicholson says about the Persian poets and Rumi is equally applicable to the great poets of the Muslim world, be they Arabic, Turkish or South Asian. Their best works are informed by the basic ideas of Sufism and mysticism. Even modern secular poets are sometimes open to such an interpretation, because of the abiding essence of the ghazal. Since creativity and poetry have always been a part of Islamic tradition (and often at odds with religious orthodoxy), Muslim poets have often used the imagery of love and the questioning eye of the Sufis to express their profoundest ideas.
These mystical ideas first emerged in Arabic poetry, where the early poets skilfully adapted the existing metaphors of wine, love and beauty and infused them with mystical and Sufi meanings. From Arab poetry this influence spread to Persian and Turkish poetry, then to the South Asian subcontinent. Indeed, poets like Rumi and Baba Bulleh Shah, although they lived several centuries apart, share the same mystical preoccupations and use the same metaphors to express their ideas and emotions. Here are two examples:
What can I do my friends, if I do not know?
I am neither Christian nor Jew, nor Muslim nor Hindu.
What can I do? What can I do?
Not of the East, nor of the West,
Not of the land, nor of the sea,
Not of nature’s essence, nor of circling heavens.
What could I be?
—– Jalaluddin Rumi
Not a believer in the mosque am I,
Nor a disbeliever with his rites am I.
I am not the pure amongst the impure,
Neither Moses nor Pharaoh am I.
Bulleh, who knows who I am?
—– Baba Bulleh Shah
Though the two main Islamic languages of Arabic and Persian provide us with the most accomplished exponents of Islamic mystical poetry, Sufi poetry in the South Asian languages of Punjabi, Sindhi and Urdu has come to the fore over the last few centuries. The coming of Islam to India in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries brought an influx of Muslim scholars and mystics in its wake. India was already a fertile ground for a kind of devotional poetry, while the Sufis found an attractive parallel of divine love in the Hindu idea of bhakti.
It would be true to say that many great Sufis were also poets and many great poets were also Sufis, in orientation if not in practice. Almost all of the poets of the Islamic world, whatever language they expressed themselves in, have been in one way or another influenced by Sufism and have written verses imbued with Sufi ideas.
To summarize, Islamic mystical or Sufi poetry begins with the likes of Rabia Basri and Shibli Baghdadi, with the desire for piety and absorption in God reaching its culmination in the poems of Mansur Hallaj, the hero and martyr of Sufi poetry, whose introspection and absorption in God led him to the ultimate test of the gallows. We then enter the poetry of love for the Divine, and through this love the total bewilderment with the beauty and annihilation of the Self in love, reaching its peak in Fariduddin Attar, Jalaluddin Rumi, Ibn ‘Arabi and Umar Ibn al-Farid.
The river of this love flows and the poets get bolder in celebrating the inebriation and ecstasy of this love, as well as the wine that brings these forth and is symbolic of the way of the heart, and knowledge gained through insights provided by an all-pervasive love. This drunkenness in love and this heady wine then reaches its heights through the playful questioning of the very nature of existence, and the relationship of man and God becomes one of lover and Beloved – where the lover gets ever bolder in testing the affection and loyalty of the Beloved, and sometimes appears to transgress even the boundaries set by tradition and law. This, then, is the highest level of Sufi poetry, celebrating drunkenness in love, questioning, sceptical, but never letting go of the certainty of God’s mercy, His beauty, His blessing and loving kindness for His human devotees. As Hafiz puts it in ‘A Corner of the Tavern’:
The mosque or tavern,
wherever I went,
It’s you I sought.
No other thought
was my intent.
In the main, the poetical forms represented in this anthology are also the most popular: the ghazal or love lyric, the masnavi or narrative poem, and the rubai or quatrain.
The ghazal has a strict metrical form and rhyme scheme, which can sometimes be a constraint. But the peculiarity for Western readers lies in the fact that each couplet can have its own individual and unique meaning and is not necessarily related to the previous or following couplet. In other words, there is no necessary continuity of events or ideas in the ghazal, although one can sense a continuity of mood or emotion. This peculiarity sometimes hinders the continuity of an idea, but it has a huge advantage in that, while discussing love (which all true poetry is surely about), the ghazal can also explore philosophical, social, religious and political ideas. This advantage has been exploited to maximum effect by both Sufi poets and modern poets of this genre.
Two other aspects must be noted for Western readers: the ghazal has no title (the titles in this anthology have been introduced for convenience) and usually the last verse includes the poet’s name or nom de plume. In the following translations I have tried to retain the couplet form of the ghazal and the rhyme scheme, when I felt it was not forced, but in some cases I have abandoned both.
The masnavi is also written in rhyming couplets, but has a narrative structure and a continuity of meaning from one couplet to the next. It was used for storytelling and for larger philosophical speculation in verse. Here, it is exemplified by excerpts from Jalaluddin Rumi’s Masnavi and Mahmud Shabistari’s Gulshan-e-Raz. In fact, all the major Sufi poets – Sanai Ghaznavi, Fariduddin Attar, Abdur-Rahman Jami – expressed their ideas in the masnavi. However, it was mainly a Persian form. Arab poets like Ibn al-Farid wrote in a different style and form derived from Arabic prosody.
The rubai or quatrain needs little introduction to anyone familiar with The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859), translated by Edward FitzGerald (1809–83). In this anthology the quatrains of Abu Said Ibn Abil-Khair (967–1049) and Sarmad are perfect examples of the form and follow a strict rhyme scheme of aaba.
Naturally, these highly stylized poetic forms pose considerable difficulties for the translator, even before one takes into account the many layers of meaning in the words themselves, which have been refined over several centuries. As much as possible I have tried to interpret these poems in a modern idiom, and to retain the mood and rhythm of the originals, so that the reader gets a sense of the music of the poetry.
In the translations that follow I have kept textual references to a minimum, so that the poems stand alone without being weighed down by copious notes. There is one exception: Mohyuddin Ibn ‘Arabi added a lengthy commentary to his own poems, which is worth reading for the insight it gives us into his extremely symbolic technique.
The poems in this collection are arranged chronologically to give a sense of the development of Sufi poetry, and indeed Islamic poetry in general. I have chosen poets considered to be the most representative of their kind, but unfortunately limitations of space mean that I have left out vast areas of the Islamic world – such as Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and many South Asian languages, especially Urdu, which has a rich treasure of Sufi poems – where I have no doubt local poets have imbibed the wine of Sufi ideas.
Because of their symbolic language, many of the poems included here may be read on both a secular and a mystical level, depending on the state of consciousness of the reader. In a sense, all Sufi poetry is really love poetry, be it a lyrical ghazal or an epic like Rumi’s Masnavi. Indeed, the reader might be forgiven for seeing only a celebration of physical beauty and carnal desire in some of these poems, because many of them represent love poetry at its very best. The Sufi poet feels justified in praising earthly beauty, because it reflects the Ultimate Beauty of the Creator. Certainly, it would be fair to say that the best poets use this ambiguity to enhance the charm of their verses and imbue them with a prismatic quality.
What the great Sufi philosopher Abu Hafs Suhrawardi (1145–1234) said of music might also be an apt way to think about poetry, especially Sufi poetry:
Music does not give rise, in the heart, to anything which is not already there: so he whose inner self is attached to anything else than God is stirred by music to sensual desire, but the one who is inwardly attached to the love of God is moved, by hearing music, to do His will. What is false is veiled by the veil of Self and what is true by the veil of the heart, and the veil of the Self is a dark earthly veil, and the veil of the heart is a radiant heavenly veil.
The common folk listen to music according to nature, and the novices listen with desire and awe, while the listening of the saints brings them a vision of the Divine gifts and graces, and these are the gnostics to whom listening means contemplation. But finally, there is the listening of the spiritually perfect to whom, through music, God reveals Himself unveiled.12
It is in the poetry of the Islamic world, rather than its monumental architecture, that one can find the heart and soul of the Muslims. Islamic mystical poetry may be thought of as a river in which one must drown before one can find one’s Self. This river springs from the early centuries of Islam in Basra and Baghdad, collecting water from many streams, reflecting manifold linguistic and regional currents and eventually emerging as the great channel that we find flowing today through all Muslim lands in one form or another.
If the great architecture of the Islamic world is the body of Islamic civilization, then the poetry of the Islamic world is its soul, and in reaching into the soul one finds the very depth of universal Being. The river of this poetic imagination has been blocked by artificial dams erected by puritan orthodoxy or it has been abandoned to stagnate by the modern world. It is time that these barriers to the spirit of a great civilization were removed and the river allowed to flow again and inundate our minds with beauty and love, and provide us with the spiritual resources to dwell in a troubled world.
| 1. | E. J. W. Gibb, A History of Ottoman Poetry, (London: Luzac & Co., 1900–1909) vol. i, pp. 16–20. |
| 2. | Ibid. |
| 3. | Ibid. Bayezid of Bistam (d. 874) was an early Sufi who declared that God was in him. |
| 4. | Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Sarmad the Martyr (1910), translated by Mahmood Jamal (www.ideaindia.com, 2006). |
| 5. | Ibid. |
| 6. | Ibid. |
| 7. | Ibid. |
| 8. | The Qur’an, translated by Tarif Khalidi (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 426. |
| 9. | Cited in E. J. W. Gibb, A History of Ottoman Poetry, vol. i, p. 17. |
| 10. | Selected Poems from the Dīvāni Shamsi Tabrīz, translated by R. A. Nicholson (Delhi: Kitab Bhavan, 2004), p. xxvi. |
| 11. | Ibid., pp. xxvi–xxvii. |
| 12. | Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), p. 182. |