William C. Chittick, Ph.D.2013-05-21T06:20:31-04:00William C. Chittick, Ph.D.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=william-c-chittick-phdCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for William C. Chittick, Ph.D.Good old fashioned elbow grease.Sufism and the Path of Lovetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8469312011-04-13T19:00:53-04:002012-05-21T13:42:17-04:00William C. Chittick, Ph.D.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-c-chittick-phd/
Those who asked questions about the meaning of life or felt the call of love for God did not seek guidance from jurists or theologians. Instead, they turned to teachers experienced in matters of the spirit. These teachers were called by a variety of names, "Sufi" being one of many. They were usually deeply learned in both jurisprudence and theology, but they considered these the groundwork for the real task of becoming fully human. From around the 11th century, many of these teachers reached out to vast audiences through poetry. The best known examples remain Ibn al-Farid in Arabic, Rumi and Attar in Persian and Yunus Emre in Turkish.
During the same period there was a flowering of prose works on love. One of the most influential authors in the Persianate lands was a man by the name of Ahmad Sam'ani, who died in 1140, 65 years before the birth of Rumi. He was a member of an eminent family of scholars from Merv, a great cosmopolitan city in Central Asia. Unlike some of his more famous relatives, he wrote only one book, a 600-page discourse on the 99 most beautiful names of God. During his own lifetime he was known as an eloquent preacher.
Sam'ani explains that God is motivated by love and compassion in everything he does. No matter which of the divine names we take as a starting point for meditation, we will find that it serves the purposes of love. This includes not only gentle names like merciful and forgiving, but also awe-inspiring names like severe and avenger.
Along with others who wrote on the same topic, Sam'ani understood love as an immediate corollary of tawhīd. God, in his absolute unity, embraces an infinity of possibilities. He desired to make these manifest: "I loved to be recognized," as the famous saying puts it, "so I created the creatures that they might recognize Me." Otherwise, why bother with creation?
On the human side, recognizing God's merciful self-manifestation stirs up love for him. Since he alone is real, love for anything else is ephemeral and unreal. In any case, people cannot avoid love. They are full of desires, wants, wishes, loves, passions, cravings (as the consumer society knows so well). Created in the image of a loving God, they cannot not love. Their problem is that they cannot see beyond their noses.
Settling down in love depends upon achieving recognition of the One, because nothing can satisfy unlimited craving but the Infinite. Self-centeredness, however, makes love for fellow humans impossible, much less love for God. As Rumi said, the ego is "the mother of all idols," the greatest obstacle to love.
Sam'ani's book aimed at awakening people to beauty and alerting them to their innate love for God. Theologians could offer creeds, jurists could tell people what to do and what not to do, but all this was dry and stultifying if not leavened by love. In contrast, Sam'ani offered delicious prose mixed with occasional poetry, a fine sense of humor and wonderful anecdotes, in many ways prefiguring Rumi. Here is a typical passage from his book, urging readers to see through their own illusions and to engage in the really difficult task of overcoming the self:
Ash'ath the Covetous was passing by a tray-maker's shop. He said, "Make these trays you're making bigger. Maybe someone will give me something on one of them."
Here you have your own breast full of wishes, your own worthless heart!
It is said that there were 360 idols placed in the Kaabah. If all the accountants in the world came to record the number of idols in your breast, they would be not be able to do so.
In our times it is not necessary for Azar to carve idols, for everywhere in the world there's someone with unwashed face, an Azari idol in his breast. "The ego is the greatest idol."
In the city a Zoroastrian is walking and wearing his cap, and you are walking with the turban of tawhīd on top of your head and a fanciful notion of tawhīd inside it. If turban and robe make someone a Muslim, then bravo, O leader of the sincerely truthful! And if "Zoroastrianism" means to attach your heart to two, well, you know what needs to be done.
In short, know that nothing is given out on the basis of talk!
Abu'l-Qasim Mudhakkir lived in Naishapur, though he was originally from Merv. He was a sweet-tongued preacher. Once he was holding a session and saying fine words. A man stood up and said, "If the work is done with talk, you have gone to the place of honor. But if this pot needs some seasoning, then you can't settle down on the basis of words."
There was a singer who used to go to the home of a nobleman. Whenever he sang a song, the nobleman would say, "Bravo!" He would sing another song and again he would say, "Bravo!" The singer was also a poet. One day he said,
Every time I sing, you say, "Bravo, sing another!"
But bravo doesn't buy me any flour.
In the bazaar, you can't buy anything with "Well done!" They want pure gold and unalloyed silver.
O respected man! In this road they want a burnt liver, they want a heart full of pain, they want footsteps with truthfulness, they want a spirit with love, they want togetherness without dispersion. If you have the hard cash, then the work is yours.
Indeed, the first trial you face is the trial of your own being. Gather this being and hand it back to the Sultan of tawhīd so that he may destroy it, for nothing can bring together a dispersed man except tawhīd. Tawhīd is assaying: discarding the specious temporal and selecting the authentically eternal.
Everyone in the world is attached to giving one and taking two. Those who follow this path are attached to giving all and taking one.
For more of Sam'ani, see Chapter 9 of my 'Sufism: A Beginner's Guide']]>The Beauty of Following the Guidance of Godtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8323742011-03-12T18:07:30-05:002011-05-25T18:35:25-04:00William C. Chittick, Ph.D.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-c-chittick-phd/
Innate beauty is the harmonious balance of the entire range of divine attributes present in the human substance, such as life, consciousness, desire, power, speech, compassion, justice and kindness. Acquired beauty can also be called "recovered beauty" because it is not a new beauty, simply the innate beauty brought into the open. Although we are innately beautiful, we have lost touch with ourselves.
This is an ancient story, constantly retold in everyday life. Everyone knows that we have lost our beauty. It is so obvious that many people refuse to consider the idea that there is any such thing. No, they respond, human beings are rotten to the core, heartless and soulless, besotted with egotistic illusions, indifferent to the suffering of others. Those who sympathize with this response should wonder why, if we are so bad, we feel bad about being bad.
The Quran explains in many ways that people do not live up to their beauty. As in Genesis, the story begins with Adam, but there are important twists in the Quranic version. God told Adam and Eve not to approach the tree, but they did. They ate the fruit not because their wills became corrupted, as Christian theologians like to say, but simply because "Adam forgot" (Quran 20:115). Why did he forget? "Human beings were created weak" (4:28). How can someone who is weak carry the burden of the divine attributes? No one is strong but God.
In this version of the tale, God in motherly concern for human weakness sent prophets, one after another. With numbers like the traditional "124,000," the notion is plainly that forgetfulness is endemic to the human race -- though we don't need the numbers to figure that out. The mission of the prophets is to help people recover their innate beauty.
Everyone knows we've lost it, but people don't agree on what "it" is. Descriptions of human ills and recipes for their cure fill the writings of historians, philosophers and social critics. They provide raw material for the daily news and punditry, and they drive political and social movements. If human beings are fine, why all the fuss? "If it ain't broke..."
But it is.
People offer cures for the disease on the basis of their own diagnoses. In the Islamic context, there are two basic approaches, one focusing on the social context, the other on human nature. The first can be called "legal-mindedness," the second "spirituality."
The legal-minded approach is that of the Muslim jurists and their theological allies. They think the disease is human disobedience and claim that we Adamites can straighten things out by obeying the law, by which they mean the instructions of the Quran and the Prophet concerning right activity, as interpreted by themselves. In modern times, this approach has joined up with various ideologies spawned by the Enlightenment, all of which aim to establish paradise on earth. This approach is virtually identical with that of governments and law-makers everywhere; the difference lies in the source of the laws.
The spiritual approach acknowledges the necessity of law but rejects the idea that it can cure the problem. The underlying perspective has parallels in most religions. It first sank into me when I came across it many years ago in my favorite comic strip, Pogo: "We have met the enemy, and he is us." The problem lies in my own self, and the solution is to fix myself. In the ideological approach that has been adopted by the legal-minded, the problem lies with the other guy. "We have met the enemy, and he is them."
If the disease is forgetfulness, what exactly did Adam forget? He forgot who he was, and then he tried to fix it.
It is fairly clear that law cannot solve the problem, though it keeps lawyers and bureaucrats happy. We would probably get along better if everyone did obey the rules, but the disease would pop up elsewhere. The cure lies in remembering, not in treating the symptoms.
Notice that the notion of forgetfulness points to something we already know, something that has slipped our minds. In one word, Adam forgot "God." More specifically, he forgot the fact that there is no god but God. Having forgotten, he followed a false god, an idol, whether Satan, or his own desires, or his own ego. All these boil down to the last, because it is we who make the choices. They can't make us choose what we choose to choose.
Rumi, one of the greatest teachers of the spiritual tradition, tells us that the ego is "the mother of all idols." He is echoing the Quran's discussion of what it calls "caprice," as in the verse, "Who is more misguided than he who follows his own caprice without guidance from God?" (28:50). Muhammad put it this way: "Your worst enemy is your own self."
In the Quran's version of this ancient story, Adam and Eve asked forgiveness for eating the forbidden fruit. God immediately forgave them and then sent them into the earth, appointing Adam to be a prophet, that is, a guide for his children. All prophets, the Quran tells us, brought "reminders" (dhikr) to their people. The proper response to a reminder is "remembrance" (dhikr).
In the Quranic viewpoint, all religions established by God acknowledge tawhīd, the fact that there is no god but God. As the Book puts it, "We never sent a messenger before you save that We revealed to him, 'There is no god but I, so serve Me'" (21:25). "Service" is then appropriate activity in conformity with tawhīd.
Unlike tawhīd, appropriate activity depends to a large degree on historical context. God sends prophets only "in the language of their people" (14:4). This is the Quran's rationale for the extraordinary diversity of religious teachings and practices.
In short, the Islamic tradition holds that human beings are innately beautiful because of the latent divine image, but they have forgotten God and lost touch with themselves. The goal of life is then to recover the human birthright, and the way to do so is to follow revealed guidance.
(Among the good books that address the excesses of legal-mindedness, one can mention the writings of the Muslim jurist Khaled Abou El-Fazl, especially his Search for Beauty in Islam.)
]]>Islam and the Innate Beauty of Human Naturetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8145762011-02-02T22:37:53-05:002011-05-25T18:30:24-04:00William C. Chittick, Ph.D.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-c-chittick-phd/
The quickest way to get at the notion of innate human beauty -- as contrasted, for example, with the innate beauty of the natural world -- is to reflect on the Judeo-Christian principle of the divine image, reaffirmed in the Prophet's saying, "God created Adam in His form."
It is true that many jurists and some theologians have read the pronoun in this saying as referring to Adam rather than God. They understand it to mean that God created Adam not in stages, but all at once, in the perfection of his adult form. Nonetheless, a great body of Islamic literature, without rejecting this interpretation, has read the saying in light of the overall Quranic anthropology, which leaves no doubt that the pronoun can also refer to God.
One of God's most beautiful names is "form-giver" (musawwir). The name means that all shapes, forms, images, ideas, figures, representations, paintings and sculptures are created by God, directly or indirectly.
This, by the way, is a typical Quranic "name" of God. Notice that these are not proper names--unlike "Frank" or "Jane." Proper names tell us practically nothing about their objects. In contrast, the most beautiful divine names designate positive qualities that appear in creation. Typically numbered at ninety-nine, they include alive, knowing, desiring, powerful, speaking, generous, just, forgiving, compassionate.
In each case the divine name means that God alone is truly designated by the named quality. Created things receive no more than dribs and drabs of it. As for the name "Allah," it is simply the Arabic word for God, used by Christians as well as Muslims. It is not a proper name, because its meaning -- in contrast to the meaning of "Frank" -- can be understood from its etymology. To say that "Muslims worship Allah" is like saying "Frenchmen worship Dieu."
In speaking of the activity of God as form-giver, the Quran addresses human beings with the verse, "He formed you and made your forms beautiful" (40:64). All created beauty can be nothing but the signs, forms, shapes, and images bestowed by the Form-Giver. In the human case, God formed people "in the most beautiful stature" (95:4). All creatures were given beauty, but only human beings were given the superlative form of beauty. In other words, they alone were created in the form of God himself, who alone is rightly designated by the most beautiful names.
The Quran says that God created Adam as his "vicegerent" (2:30), his representative on earth. In clarifying what this implies, it says, "He taught Adam the names, all of them" (2:31). The stress here -- "all of them" -- indicates that the issue is not simply the names of the natural realm, over which Adam was appointed vicegerent, but also the names of the Creator. Without knowing both sides, Adam could not act as God's intermediary.
Adam was given knowledge and recognition of all that exists as his own actuality. As some of the Quran commentators say, he knew the names of all things in all the languages of all of his descendants. In contrast, his descendants possess comprehensive knowledge only as a potential. It is up to them to bring this knowledge into actuality. The quest to know is an inherent human attribute, and people undertake this quest precisely because of love and desire. They want to know.
God, in his love to be known and recognized, created and continues to create the universe. Human beings, in their love to know, attempt to grasp the reality behind the appearances. In the last analysis, there is nothing truly real but the True Reality. Tawhīd, the assertion of divine unity, provides love with its ultimate focus. Love is then the quest to overcome separation between the knower of the names (us) and the named reality (the One God).
I have just summarized countless volumes on theology, philosophy, and spiritual psychology. These books -- few of which have been translated into European languages -- provide an extensive library investigating the human phenomenon. Clearly, the approach does not coincide with that of anthropology, archaeology, biology, psychology, or any other modern science, each of which isolates a certain aspect of human nature and dissects it without end.
The Islamic approach (not unlike the Christian and Hindu, among others) addresses human nature as a global totality made in the image of the Ultimate Reality. It builds on the primal unity of all things and observes unity's endless reverberations as it emerges from indistinction. Every attempt to determine a thing's coordinates within the infinite sphere of reality must then take into account the center point of the sphere. If that is ignored, people will be talking about some things in relation to other things -- useful, practical, and fascinating, no doubt, but short-sighted.
In this way of looking at things, the One Reality -- the Good, the True, and the Beautiful -- is the source of a good, true, and beautiful universe, which has appeared and continues to appear because of God's love to be known. The quality that separates human beings from everything else is the innate quest to know the Center and rejoin it. This quest appears in the indefinite diversity of human wants and desires, which may or may not be correctly oriented. "Love" is then an appropriate name for the creative force that drives both the originating movement and the quest to return to the Beautiful.
]]>The Islamic Notion of Beautytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.8025032011-01-01T18:54:13-05:002011-05-25T18:20:30-04:00William C. Chittick, Ph.D.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-c-chittick-phd/
The link between love and beauty is clear. We love what we find beautiful. Beauty attracts, ugliness repels. Nor are beauty and ugliness simply physical characteristics. We all know people who are outwardly attractive but personally repellent, and vice versa.
Beauty makes a massive appearance in love poetry like that of Ibn al-Farid, Rumi, Yunus Emre, and countless others. Their verses stir up wonder and delight by evoking the beautiful characteristics of the beloved.
In explaining the relationship between love and its object, philosophers like Avicenna analyzed the universe in terms of a Necessary Being that combined the attributes of Plato's Good with those of Aristotle's Unmoved Mover. All contingent things, animate or inanimate, are in love with the absolute beauty of the Good and strive to reach it, hence the ceaseless activity that fills the universe.
Those with a more theological bent preferred to cite the saying of the Prophet, "God is beautiful, and He loves beauty." They understood both beauty and love in terms of the axiom of tawhid, "There is no god but God." If God is beautiful, then there is nothing truly beautiful but God. And if God is loving, then no one truly loves but he.
A bit of reflection on God's love for beauty leads to the conclusion that he loves himself before all else. God as the one true lover perceives his own true beauty and loves it eternally. As for the universe, God loves it because, by loving himself, he loves everything demanded by his beauty and mercy, and that includes an infinity of creaturely possibilities. This view was encapsulated in the oft-quoted divine saying, "I was a Hidden Treasure, and I loved to be recognized, so I created the creatures to recognize Me."
In discussions of God's love for the universe, theologians and scholars agreed that God loves both the way things are and the way things ought to be. The discrepancy between these two loves has given rise to the never-ending debate over determinism and free will, nature and nurture, science and values.
God loves the way things are because "He made beautiful everything He created" (Quran 32:7). All things are lovable because they make his beauty manifest. Each thing plays its own harmonious role in the infinite web of relationships that the Quran calls God's "signs." The signs in turn display the characteristics of what it calls God's "most beautiful names."
God loves the way things ought to be because he created human beings with freedom to change themselves. Unique among all things in the universe -- so far as we know -- human beings have the capacity to recognize themselves as works in progress and to intervene in the manner in which they develop. Ghazali and other theologians pointed out that people are "compelled to be free." The expression points precisely to the creative tension between what is and what ought to be.
God's love for all things is often discussed in terms of the universal, all-encompassing mercy designated by the name "All-merciful." His love for the way people ought to be is then tightly bound up with the particular, responsive mercy designated by the name "Ever-merciful." The formula of consecration -- "In the name of God, the All-merciful, the Ever-merciful" -- acknowledges both sorts of love.
To say that God loves all things reiterates the principle of with-ness voiced in the verse, "He is with you wherever you are" (57:4). By means of his all-embracing love and mercy, God tends to the welfare of the universe, including the posthumous realms.
To say that God loves things as they ought to be points to the human capacity to recognize God's with-ness. In order to live their lives in a manner appropriate to the divine presence within themselves, people must be merciful and compassionate. The fact that God is with them does not mean that they are also with him -- that is precisely what needs to be achieved, what "ought to be."
Not being with God opens the door to the ugliness and evil that are apparent to everyone. To ask then how a beautiful God could create a world full of ugliness is to ask why each thing and each person is uniquely itself. From the standpoint of the role that beings and things play in the cosmic harmony, all are beautiful, but some are more beautiful than others, and the scale of beauty stretches not from "one to 10" but from one to infinity.
Whatever the scale we use to judge the discrepancies among things and people, no two fit exactly into the same niche. There is gradation without limit in categories without limit. The lower a thing may be on the scale of beauty, the more it is apt to appear as ugly.
More simply, the world is ugly inasmuch as we perceive it empty of God, the absolute good. It is beautiful inasmuch as we recognize the divine with-ness, the signs of the most beautiful names that fill the universe. Failure to recognize the signs goes back to ignorance -- the "root poison," as Buddhists call it.
Islam has no notion of original sin, but the Quran does say that Adam "forgot" (20:115). Our inherited forgetfulness provides all we need to bungle the job of being what we ought to be.]]>The Islamic Notion of Mercytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7952752010-12-14T19:57:21-05:002011-05-25T18:20:30-04:00William C. Chittick, Ph.D.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-c-chittick-phd/A Common Word, report that one of the biggest misunderstandings shown by Christian theologians is the notion that Islam has little or nothing to say about love.
One of the several reasons for this mistaken view is that the early Orientalists -- those who first studied Islamic thought in the modern West -- imagined that a school of thought known as "Kalam" played the same role in Islam as "theology" does in Christianity. In fact, Kalam has been one of several approaches to knowledge of God, and certainly not the most influential.
Kalam was closely allied with Islamic jurisprudence and typically depicted God as the supreme law-giver. When it mentioned love, it claimed that God loves human beings by issuing commandments, and human beings love God by obeying him. Those who obey go to heaven, and those who disobey go to hell. God deals with human beings strictly in terms of carrots and sticks -- forget about love in any normal meaning of the word.
Despite the fact that more recent scholarship has done a much better job of describing the diverse theological approaches of Islamic thought, this has had relatively little effect on the prejudices that Christian theologians picked up years ago in seminary. Pope John Paul II, with all his remarkable accomplishments, provides a good example. In Crossing the Threshold of Hope, he wrote, "The God of the Koran ... is ultimately a God outside of the world, a God who is only Majesty, never Emmanuel, God-with-us." (his emphasis)
Even a cursory glance at the Quran should lead a reader to wonder why, if God is so majestic, does practically every chapter begin with the formula of consecration: "In the name of God, the All-merciful, the Ever-merciful." In the text itself, divine names and attributes associated with mercy and kindness are far more common than those associated with magnificence and majesty. Many verses say things like, "He is with you wherever you are" (57:4) -- whether before your creation, during your brief stay in this world, or after death. This divine "withness" is tightly bound up with the notion of love and mercy.
The formula of consecration contains the two names "All-merciful" (rahmān) and "Ever-merciful" (rahīm). Both are derived from the word rahma, which is variously translated as mercy, compassion, and benevolence. Rahma is an abstract noun derived from the concrete noun rahim, "womb." Mercy is the mother's attitude toward the fruit of her womb. When God says in the Quran, "My mercy embraces everything" (7:156), this means that God has mercy on the entire universe. Basing themselves on this sort of verse and on the very notion of mercy, some theologians referred to the realm of nature -- that is, the universe in its entirety -- as the divine womb.
The close connection between mercy and motherhood is obvious in many sayings of the Prophet. For example, he said that when God created mercy, he created it in one hundred parts. He kept ninety-nine parts with himself and sent one part into the world. Mothers are devoted to their children and wild animals nurture their young because of this one part. On the day of resurrection, the Prophet added, God will rejoin this one part with the ninety-nine parts -- all for the benefit of those who dwell in the posthumous realms, whether paradise or hell. Among the several points embedded in this saying is the typical stress on tawhīd, the assertion of the uniqueness of the divine reality that is the foundation of Islamic thought: What we experience as mercy, compassion, and love can only be a pale reflection of a tiny fraction of the real thing.
Another account tells us that the Prophet had stopped to rest at a bedouin camp, where a woman with an infant was baking bread over an open fire. The child slipped away and approached the fire, and the mother quickly pulled him back. She turned to the Prophet and said, "Do you not say that God is 'the most merciful of the merciful'?" He replied that he did. She said, "No mother would throw her child into the fire." For a moment the Prophet turned away and wept. Then he said that God puts into hellfire only those who refuse to go anywhere else.
As a divine attribute, mercy is not identical with love, because love demands mutuality: "He loves them, and they love Him" (5:54). In contrast, mercy is one-sided, which is to say that God has mercy on creation, but not the other way around. People must certainly try to be merciful and compassionate, but that means they must love their neighbors as themselves. Failure to do so is a sure recipe for bad karma. As the Quran says repeatedly about those who do not act appropriately, "They are wronging only themselves."
Classical theologians spent a good deal of time explaining the subtle differences between the meanings of "All-merciful" and "Ever-merciful." Commonly they said that the All-merciful mercy is universal and the Ever-merciful mercy is particular.
Universal mercy begins with the bestowal of existence. Nothing has a claim on its own being or its own positive qualities. All are the gifts from the Creator. Everything other than God derives its reality -- however insubstantial that may be -- from the only reality that truly is. Life and livelihood do not come to us by chance, but because of the activity of the All-merciful.
Particular mercy is responsive. Some good things come to us because we seek them out. If you want to become a football player or a physicist, the ambition itself is a gift, and any aptitude you may have is also a gift. But achieving the goal has something to do with your own effort. Every mother will tell you that. If you do not strive for the goal, most likely you will not reach it.
God's particular mercy is his response to human effort. He bestows it on the basis of your engagement, commitment and love. When the Quran says, "God is the friend of those who have faith" (2:257), this means that he has special mercy and love toward those who search him out. Universal mercy reaches people in any case, just as a mother will never stop loving her children. Particular mercy is not guaranteed, because children may refuse to take advantage of their human status.
The goal of love is to overcome separation, to escape from the darkness and pain that define our existential plight, and to enter into the light. Or, it is to take advantage of the universal mercy that embraces everything and to seek out the particular mercy, the path to which is set down in prophetic guidance.
(The best survey of Islamic notions of mercy and motherliness is provided by Sachiko Murata in The Tao of Islam: A Sourcebook on Gender Relationships in Islamic Thought).
]]>Islam, God and the Shining Light of Lovetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7861022010-11-22T13:59:52-05:002011-05-25T18:15:22-04:00William C. Chittick, Ph.D.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-c-chittick-phd/tawhid, the assertion of divine unity that is the foundation of Islamic thought.
Religious discussions of love sometimes address how it descends from its divine status and intermingles with human affairs. In any case, everyone recognizes its attractive power, even if they disagree as to what it is and where it comes from. Rumi mentions the two extremes of disagreement in the verse,
For the elect, love is a tremendous eternal light,
for the common people, love is form and appetite. (Divan 18197)
"The elect and the common people" is an expression used in all branches of Islamic learning to distinguish between the experts and the uninformed. For Rumi, the experts are the prophets and saints.
To think that love is "form and appetite" is to imagine that it derives from the realm of sense perception and biological processes. Rumi has nothing against form and appetite, but he sees the distinctiveness of human nature to lie in its openness to the tremendous eternal light.
"Eternal" (qadim) means unchanging. The word is contrasted with "newly arrived" (muhdath), which means dwelling under the sway of time and alteration. God is eternal, and everything other than God -- the universe and all it contains -- fades away. We change, the eternal light stays the same. We have the appearance of reality, but every appearance disappears.
The Quran says that God is "the light of the heavens and the earth" (24:35). The heavens are the high realms of spiritual beings (such as angels and souls), and the earth is the low realm of bodily things. Nothing appears without light. The more intense the light, however, the more difficult it is to see, which explains why the spiritual realm is invisible. No one can imagine the upper limit of physical light, much less that of nonphysical light, which is the consciousness that animates the heavens and the earth.
Spiritual traditions speak of ascending levels of nonphysical illumination, beginning with the obscure sparkles that typify everyday awareness and culminating in the infinite light of the eternal Self. In the Quran's retelling of the story of Moses and the Burning Bush, the light said, "I indeed am God; there is no god but I" (20:14): There is no god but God's very Self, the light of the heavens and the earth.
Rumi's verse, in short, refers to the axiom of tawhid, the fact that there is no true light but the divine light and no true love but the divine love. Everything in heaven and earth is the reverberation of the loving light. Each thing arrives newly and departs just as quickly. In relation to the universe, God is like the moon in relation to flowing water. As Rumi puts it,
The creatures are like water, limpid and pure,
shining therein the attributes of the majestic God...
Ages have passed, and this is a new age.
The moon is the same, but the water is not.
(Mathnawi 6: 3172, 3175)
Our scientific worldview is rooted in the measurable, but love and God are immeasurable. Scientific theories that speak of love naturally tend to agree with Rumi's common people: Love is form and appetite, feeling and emotion, impulses in the brain -- all these can be measured. The Quranic and Biblical worldviews see love as none other than the only reality that truly is. The word "reality," of course, fails to stir the heart, and "love" calls for commitment. Those who answer the call can transform themselves and the world.
Among the many mentions of love in the Quran, the favorite verse of love-theorists is this: "He loves them, and they love Him" (5:54). This verse puts the Islamic worldview in a nutshell: God brought the universe into existence because of his love for human beings. Human beings fulfill their calling by loving God.
The radiance of love's eternal light gives rise to the universe. The goal of love is to overcome separation, to bridge gaps, to bring the two lovers together as one. If love is to do its work, people must recognize the light and love it in return.
"He loves them" brought them into existence. Their recognition of the light feeds "They love Him." Once love intervenes, form and appetite lose their luster.
The final goal of lovers is to join the shining light at its source. The power that works this transformation is love. One of the many Quranic names of God is "friend" (wali), an Arabic word that combines the senses of "lover" and "helper." Both meanings can be seen in the verse, "God is the friend of those who have faith. He brings them out of the darkness into the light" (2:257).
]]>Islam and the Goal of Lovetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7761732010-11-06T20:20:57-04:002011-05-25T18:10:25-04:00William C. Chittick, Ph.D.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-c-chittick-phd/
The first axiom does not depend on the Quran. It needs to be accepted before there is any reason to consider Muhammad and the message. If God is not real, then God's "messages" will be even less real.
This first axiom states that there is only one true reality. Everything else -- the universe and all it contains -- derives from it. What we call "realities" are in fact non-realities dressed up in fancy clothes.
In the language of Islamic theology, this axiomatic notion is called tawhid (pronounced "toe-heed"), meaning "the assertion of unity," that is, the unity of the ultimate reality, which is commonly called "God." Any close reading of the Quran (and the works of practically any Muslim theologian, Sufi or philosopher) will show that tawhid is taken as self-evident to any healthy intelligence. If people miss it, the problem is "forgetfulness," the outstanding characteristic of the human race. According to the Quran, Adam did not "sin"; rather, "He forgot" (20:115).
The second axiom of the Islamic worldview is that Muhammad is God's messenger and the Quran God's message. No matter how important this axiom may appear, it hangs on the axiom of God's absolute unity.
Neither Muhammad nor the Quran is God. Both dwell in the realm of contingency and questions. Anyone who has delved into Islamic literature knows that every word of the Quran is open to interpretation. The very expressions used to designate the ultimate reality, God's "most beautiful names" -- such as Merciful, Knowing, Alive, Powerful, Forgiving, Majestic, Wise -- need to be explained. Explanation and understanding are human attributes, which is to say that they are riddled with forgetfulness.
Literally, the word tawhid means to say one, to make one, to assert one, to declare one. Theologically it means to declare that the ultimate reality, by whatever name it may be called, is one. In this bald form, the statement is unremarkable, not least because it is found in practically all religious traditions and most pre-modern philosophy.
The grammatical form of the word tawhid shows that it is an assertion on the part of an asserter. The asserter is not the reality whose unity is asserted. Tawhid involves two, and that is precisely the problem. On our side, we have a constantly changing self, immersed in forgetfulness and barely aware of what it is saying. On the other side, we have an absolute and infinite Reality, fully conscious of all that exists.
Tawhid is a human act. Its purpose is to provide an orientation for understanding ourselves and the universe. It points to the dimensionless center of the circle of existence, or to the infinite, all-encompassing sphere -- both symbolisms are commonly employed.
Once tawhid is accepted as the first axiom of thought, the goal of life becomes bridging the gap between the asserter and the asserted. In the language of Muslim piety, the goal is to achieve "nearness" (qurba) to God.
As created, contingent things, people dwell in dispersion, disarray, disharmony, dissonance and discord. Practically all human endeavor aims at escaping from these qualities. In the Quranic view, adequate paths of achieving integration, wholeness and unity have been provided by the prophets, beginning with the first, Adam. On the basis of divine instruction, they set down guidelines that can lead to conformity with the One Reality on the three levels of activity, thought and love.
As for love itself, as soon as Muslim scholars addressed its nature, they pointed out that it is essentially indefinable, as most everyone knows. Nonetheless, it has many symptoms and signs, the most basic of which is yearning for togetherness and desire for nearness. This is obvious in all its forms: romantic love, mother love, my love for my cats, your love for baseball, the soul's love for God.
Love, in short, aims at communion, union, unity. Tawhid is the assertion of oneness and unity, but it is only an assertion, not the reality. Love is the energy that drives the quest for integration. The assertion of unity and the transforming energy must work together to overcome disjunction and disarray, to achieve togetherness and harmony, to actualize oneness and union. Tawhid provides the orientation, love the force. Without tawhid, love is dispersed and scattered; without love, tawhid is empty talk.
That the word "love" expresses the goal of tawhid is a common theme in the literature. Many explain it in terms of "the sentence that expresses unity" (kalimat al-tawhid). That is, the four Arabic words "(There is) no god but God," the foundation of the Islamic creed.
Achieving the goal depends on overcoming the illusions set up by false realities, aberrant loves and misleading desires. In the language of Sufism, the false realities are called "others," meaning everything that distracts the heart from the Absolutely Real. Rumi explains that love actualizes tawhid in these terms:
Love is that flame which, when it blazes up,
burns away everything except the Everlasting Beloved.
It drives home the sword of "no god" in order to slay other than God.
Look closely--after "no god" what remains?
There remains "but God," the rest has gone.
Bravo, O great, idol-burning love!
(Mathnawi, Book 5, verses 588-90)
]]>Islam: A Religion Of Lovetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7573522010-10-14T07:42:21-04:002011-05-25T18:00:30-04:00William C. Chittick, Ph.D.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-c-chittick-phd/
By studying the religions of others we can hope to gain a bit of distance from the unquestioned worldviews that underlie our own thinking. Such study is much like learning a new language -- we gradually come to see the strengths and weaknesses of our own way of talking and writing. So also each religion, including the atheistic versions, has its own genius and its own limitations.
It seems fairly clear that most thoughtful people nowadays think that we live in interesting times. Some look to other worldviews precisely to gain insight into their own lives. This is a major factor in the great popularity of religious studies in North American universities. The fact that Rumi has become a household name points in the same direction.
Part of Islam's intellectual heritage is a vast literature exploring and elucidating the nature of love, that most precious of human experiences. Now that I have been offered this forum and told to write about anything I feel like, well, I feel like talking about love. My two previous posts and the responses to them have highlighted the fact that most people have already made up their minds as to the nature of "true Islam." So let me turn to something that most people, Muslim or not, typically leave out of their understanding of Islam, not least because of their obsession with the world of politics and catastrophes.
Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya was a famous theologian from Baghdad who died in 1350. Part of his fame lies in the fact that he was the leading disciple of one of the most cantankerous theologians of Islamic history, Ibn Taymiyya, a favorite of Sunni ideologues. Surprisingly for those who think that people of this ilk were narrow-minded bigots, Ibn Qayyim dedicated a large part of his prolific output to love, compassion, forgiveness and other such mild-mannered themes.
In one of his many books, written late in life -- Ighathat al-lahfan, "Aid for the Sorrowful" -- Ibn Qayyim says that the root of Islam is "love for God, intimacy with Him, and yearning to encounter Him." He also says, "The revealed books of God, from the first to the last, revolve around the commandment to love."
Remember that Muslim scholars traditionally spoke of "124,000 prophets," beginning with Adam and ending with Muhammad. What Ibn Qayyim is trying to say is that every true religion -- that is, all the religions established by the 124,000 prophets -- are founded on love. It makes no difference who these prophets were or where they lived. When Muslims settled down in China, for example, they soon recognized that Confucius had been a prophet.
Claiming that "love" is the heart of Islam or of religion generally is not unusual in the Islamic context. Another example is provided by the major Sunni scholar Rashid al-Din Maybudi, who completed the longest pre-modern Persian commentary on the Quran in 1126. In explaining why the Quran calls itself "a book from God" (verse 2:89), he says that the book deserves to be titled "the eternal love" and that its content is "the story of love and lovers."
One hundred years after Maybudi and as many years before Ibn Qayyim, Rumi's famous teacher, Shams-i Tabrizi (who disappeared in the year 1247), said that the Quran is "a book of love," or "a love letter" from God. He explained that if lawyers, philosophers and theologians fail to see it this way, that is because they are too preoccupied with their own specialties. First, you need to love God rather than law or theology or philosophy (or politics). Then, you should read the book. It is worth noting here that Shams, despite his reputation as an unlearned rascal of spirituality, was a professional Quran-teacher.
No one is surprised to hear that Rumi saw the Quran as a book of love, but most seem to think that Rumi was out of kilter with the Islamic mainstream. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is no accident that his six-volume epic poem in celebration of love, the Mathnawi, has often been called "the Quran in the Persian language."
Shams al-Din Muhammad, the greatest and most beloved of Persian poets, provides another example. He is known by his chosen pen name, "Hafiz," a word that designates someone who has memorized the Quran. Anyone familiar with his poetry knows that it is permeated with love and beauty, so much so that native-speakers can become intoxicated simply by listening to it. Hafiz holds that all religion and indeed, all human striving, is rooted in love. One verse will have to suffice:
Everyone, sober or drunk, is seeking a beloved,
everywhere, mosque or synagogue, is the house of love.
Muslim scholars who talk about love as the heart of Islam and of religion generally take the position that God's love and compassion motivated him to create human beings so that they could love him in return. The goal of creation is to bring lovers into existence, and the goal of lovers -- that is, you, me and everyone else -- is to escape false loves and return to what we really love. This, for them, is the key message of the Quran, "the story of love and lovers."
]]>The Meaning of Islamtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7321042010-09-22T19:15:40-04:002011-05-25T17:45:25-04:00William C. Chittick, Ph.D.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-c-chittick-phd/why she should hate Islam. As a normal young American growing up on Long Island, she had no doubt that she should hate Islam, but she still wanted to know what was so bad about it.
There are many historical, political, and cultural reasons for the negative stereotypes of Islam that permeate American society. One of the more obvious is that people confuse religion and ideology.
Scholars often distinguish between "Islam," meaning the religion as taught and practiced over the centuries, and "Islamism," meaning the various ideologies that have appeared over the past century claiming to speak on its behalf. As one of these scholars put it, "An ideology is a clear blueprint that requires only mechanical implementation. ... It offers easy answers to the most difficult and fundamental questions. ... [It] renders redundant the human processes of constantly thinking, evaluating, facing hard choices, and balancing" (Farhang Rajaee, Islamism and Modernism, p. 4).
For those open to the idea that "Islamism" in no way represents the mainstream teachings and practices of the Islamic tradition, it is worth reviewing what the word islām, "submission" or "surrender," means in the Quran.
As noted in my previous post, one of the Quranic meanings of this word is the universal obedience of all things to the natural laws that govern the universe. These laws make free choice impossible. Everything fits into its own niche and does exactly what God wants it to do. All things are "submitted" by definition. Human beings, however, are also free by definition. In effect, part of their compulsory submission, their "predestination" if you prefer, is that they must face up to their own freedom.
The Quran and other scriptures assume that people are free enough to make a difference in their lives. In the Quranic view, God sent prophets to every people in order to tell them how to take advantage of their freedom so as to ensure a congenial posthumous becoming. This is the second Quranic meaning of islām: voluntary submission to God's guidance as given to the prophets (e.g., Abraham, Moses, Jesus). This, I would argue, is by far the most common meaning of the word in the Quran itself.
The third Quranic meaning of islām is the practices designated by the Quran as a means to follow prophetic guidance. This is islām in the narrowest sense of the term, generally defined as observance of God's commandments. These are summarized as "the Five Pillars": public acknowledgment of God's unity and Muhammad's prophecy, praying the daily prayers, fasting during the month of Ramadan, paying the alms tax, and making the pilgrimage to Mecca. Each pillar is a specific ritual act, similar to ritual acts found in other religions, but unique in detail.
None of these three meanings of the word islām corresponds to what the Quran sometimes calls "the religion," meaning the specific guidance provided by itself and Muhammad. One can argue that the Quran does not in fact use the word islām as the proper name of the religion, though this usage certainly became established over the centuries.
"The religion" as described by the Quran addresses three universal concerns: practice, understanding, and virtue. Or: doing the right thing, seeing things in perspective, and participating in God's beauty and goodness. Or: conforming to the Ultimate Reality in body, mind, and heart. Or: law, understanding, and love. Or: ritual, wisdom, and compassion.
Islamic texts typically list these three concerns in this order -- from the most external to the most internal -- because that is the way people develop. First the body appears, then awareness and understanding, and finally, God willing, human goodness.
A child can be taught what to do, but it takes a while before the child understands why it is the right thing to do. The stance of the parent -- "because I said so" -- may be enough to begin with, but part of growing up is to learn how to make your own choices. Both understanding and spiritual maturity are individual tasks. No one can understand for you, and no one can love for you.
Religion based on authority -- the pronouncements of parents, priests, rabbis, and mullas -- may seem to be the rule, but most people sense that it is not enough. Blind obedience is religion for Sunday school, not life.
As children develop, they learn that they are not the center of the universe. Education has always been as much about enculturation as anything else. There used to be a common notion that the ultimate aim of education is to help people achieve the status of a true human being. If you can act correctly and really understand the way things are, you may be able to develop love for God and sympathy and compassion for others.
These three dimensions of universal concern -- activity, understanding, and love -- are the topics of the Quran. It is true that Islam is commonly represented as a religion of law, but this is based on a superficial reading. Any broad historical perspective will show that law itself, the shariah, has always played a subsidiary role in the Muslim understanding of the text. The rules, after all, are kindergarten stuff. The general position has been that people should learn enough law to perform the rituals, but they should leave the details to the lawyers. Doing the right things is important, but it is far more important to grow up in mind and heart and to develop wisdom and compassion. "How easy to become a mulla," as the Persian proverb has it, "but how difficult to become human!"
During the first three centuries after Muhammad, the three dimensions of the religion coalesced into distinct fields of scholarly endeavor, one of which was law. Lawyers did come to play a prominent role in Muslim society, not least because any society is built on law, but lawyers had nothing to say about the wisdom and love that underlie both the worldview and the ethos of Islam. These were explained and elaborated upon by thinkers, sages, saints, and poets.
Islamic society generally recognized that lawyers tended to be a conniving bunch, always ready to compromise with the powers that be in order to enhance their prestige and influence. Criticism of their worldliness has been a common theme throughout Islamic history. When the religion of Islam in its full breadth and depth is reduced to law and put into the service of ideology, and when the law is then enforced by technological means undreamed of by the despots of old, the shariah becomes a powerful tool for social and political manipulation.
The current prominence of law and politics in public discussion of Islam should not blind us to the fact that the shariah remains the most external and rudimentary dimension of the religion. If it is employed as an ideological tool, "a clear blueprint that requires only mechanical implementation," it quickly turns into coercion. If it is combined with understanding, love, and compassion, it can and still does provide a stable ritual and social environment for spiritual growth.
For a description of the Islamic tradition in terms of its three dimensions, see Murata and Chittick,The Vision of Islam.]]>Which 'Islam'? Exploring the Word's Many Meaningstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.6759842010-08-14T07:07:12-04:002011-05-25T17:20:22-04:00William C. Chittick, Ph.D.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-c-chittick-phd/
It is fairly obvious that people think from within their own limitations. The more general a concept, the wider their diversity of understanding. Notions like "God" are notoriously up for grabs, as are words like "religion" or the names of the specific religions. There are as many "Christianities" as there are people who think and talk about it. So also is the case for "Islam." Both Muslims and non-Muslims constantly use the word with their own agendas in mind and with little or no reference to its meaning in the Quran, the founding scripture, or in the later tradition.
Most people have heard that "Islam" means literally to submit, surrender, turn oneself over. They might also have heard that it comes from the same root as salām, which means peace, lack of strife, absence of conflict. "The Peace" (al-salām) is one of God's Quranic names. By turning oneself over to the true peace that is God, one can escape the strife, conflict, war, and disharmony that are characteristic of everything other than God.
When we talk about peace in the world or in our lives, we mean achieving some sort of harmony among conflicting and contrasting forces. Such forces necessarily influence all that is specific and limited, not least the human self. God alone is free of outside influence, which is to say that he alone is true peace. Everything else is pushed and shoved from various directions, so, if we want to achieve peace, we need to make continual adjustments. This holds true whether we are talking about peace of mind, or peace in society, or peace among nations.
The Quran uses the word islām and derivatives like muslim (one who has the quality of islām) about 80 times. A small number of these instances can plausibly be interpreted as designations for the religion that the Quran and the Prophet were in the process of establishing. Historians have pointed out that the word came to be employed as a common designation for the religion only gradually, a process that has intensified enormously in modern times. Early on, for example, it was common to speak simply of al-dīn, "the religion."
Over the course of history, the historical phenomenon that we call Islam has produced many local forms. What ties them together is not any institutional setup or priestly class, but rather focus on the Quran and the Prophet as the sources for teachings and practices and the relative uniformity of ritual observances. Thus the daily prayers performed in Nigeria are practically the same as those performed in Beijing.
When we talk about the Quran, we should keep in mind that Muslims have always read the book as God's word, his self-expression, his own explanation of who he is and what he expects from people. We should also remember that it is characteristic of the Quran and of pre-modern Islamic thought generally to begin with God and to deal with the world only in terms of what is known about God.
The most basic thing that is known about God is that he is one, despite the multiplicity of his names, whether in the Quran or in other scriptures. When the Quran calls him by names like Alive, Aware, Desiring, Powerful, Speaking, Generous, Just, Merciful, Loving, Vengeful, or Forgiving, it is understood that the names differ in keeping with the manner in which the One God relates to the infinite diversity of created reality. What we call "reality" is in fact the sum total of phenomena that display God's names and attributes.
Once we begin with this notion of God as the source of all other reality, it is easy to understand why the Quran sometimes uses the word islām to designate the compulsory, universal submission of everything in the universe: "Submitted to Him is everything in the heavens and the earth" (3:83). This submission has nothing to do with free will. It is rather a fact of existence that all of us face in our everyday lives.
Whatever "freedom" may be, it is enormously circumscribed by the actual reality of lived experience. Many scientists, including many social scientists, have gone so far as to say that freedom is an illusion -- in other words, there can be no such thing as "voluntary" submission. We submit to the way things are whether we want to or not. This is precisely what the word islām designates in its most basic Quranic meaning, with the proviso that hidden behind "the way things are" is the One, Merciful God.
If the word islām in the Quran designated only the compulsory submission of everything to its Creator, most of the book would be empty words, because its teachings presuppose human freedom. It addresses the instinctive human recognition that we need guidance, "education" if you prefer. We do not on our own have the resources to understand the way things are or to live in harmony with ourselves, others, and the world at large. Scripture generally and the Quran specifically address people as (relatively) free beings with the ability to make choices that have profound repercussions on their own lives, their societies, and their posthumous becoming.
In short, the second and most common Quranic meaning of the word islām is voluntary submission to the guidance of God. This guidance comes in the form of revelation to "prophets," who are defined as those whom God appoints to convey his instructions to human beings. Through them God tells people how to live up to their humanity and how to achieve ultimate fulfillment and happiness. If this guidance is to have any effect on people's lives, they must accept it freely. As the Quran puts it, "There is no coercion in the religion" (2:256).
The first prophet and the first voluntary muslim was Adam, the father of the human race -- this is an important point on which the Islamic understanding of human nature diverges from that of Christianity. The Quran speaks of Adam, Abraham, and other Biblical prophets, as well as the apostles of Jesus, as muslims, that is, people who voluntarily surrendered themselves to God's guidance and who happily followed his instructions. Notice, by the way, that they were muslims in two senses: They were compulsory muslims like everything else in the universe, and they were voluntary muslims inasmuch as they accepted their role as creatures of God placed in the world for specific reasons.
One way to understand these specific reasons is to recall Rumi's tale of the Ocean and the fish thrown up on dry land. All fish -- not to mention the dry land itself -- are compulsory muslims. Some fish are also voluntary muslims, because they have understood that they are fish and they have submitted to the guidance of the Ocean in order
to flip and flop their way home.
For more on the meanings of "islām/Islam," see Sachiko Murata and William C. Chittick,The Vision of Islam.
]]>Rumi and the Ocean of God's Lovetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.6514522010-07-19T13:50:49-04:002011-05-25T17:05:23-04:00William C. Chittick, Ph.D.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-c-chittick-phd/Mathnawi along with a complete English translation and two volumes of commentary (eight volumes in all). At that time Rumi was practically unknown outside the field of Middle East studies, so his popularity in the West is a recent phenomenon. In the Persianate world (which extends from the Balkans through Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent), he has been a cultural icon for centuries. Although he is now far better known in the West than he was 40 years ago, the understanding of what he is actually talking about seems to have decreased. It was not easy to plow through Nicholson, but one did learn a great deal about the religious and philosophical content of Rumi's teachings. Having breezed through one of the popular selections, one comes out feeling good.
Everyone recognizes that Rumi was a poet of love. This means that most people see him as an oddity in Islamic history. When we situate him in his own historical context, however, we see that he spoke for the mainstream. What made him stand out was that he got to the heart of the matter more quickly and much more enticingly than most authors. He makes his agenda explicit in the introduction to the Mathnawi: He is explaining "the roots of the roots of the roots of the religion," that is, the Islamic religion founded by the Koran and Muhammad.
Like any great scripture, the Koran presents its teachings in mythic and symbolic language susceptible to a great range of interpretation. Although the Koran does not mention love that often (about 100 times), it is easy to see that these few mentions provide the germs for an extensive literature on the intimate links between God and the human soul. In these discussions, authors sometimes cite what are said to be words of God addressed to David the Psalmist. In a typical snippet, God says, "O David, anyone who claims to love Me is a liar if night comes and he goes to sleep on Me. Does not every lover love to be secluded with his beloved?" One of these purported conversations eventually became prominent in Sufi teachings. David asked God why he created the universe. God replied, "I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be recognized, so I created the creatures that I might be recognized."
This saying puts centuries of reflection on love into a nutshell. It means that God in his absolute unity is infinitely rich, boundlessly overflowing, merciful, compassionate, loving. Moreover, "God is beautiful," as the Prophet said, "and he loves beauty." When he loves, it is always beauty that he loves. In his eternal selfhood, that beauty is precisely the Hidden Treasure, for there is no other beauty. His infinite love for beauty then gave rise to the universe, which is defined most briefly as "everything other than God." He filled that universe with beauty so that others might share in the joy of love.
But mountains and oceans, lions and eagles, no matter how beautiful they may be, have little or no capacity to recognize beauty in others. What is needed is a boundless receptivity to the infinite beauty of the Hidden Treasure, and that is what God gave to human beings when he created them "in His form," as Muhammad said, echoing Genesis. The Koran says, "He formed you, and He made your forms beautiful" (40:64). God loves human beings because of the fullness of the divine beauty that they display and their resultant ability to recognize God's beauty. God then asks, as any lover would, that they love him in return.
The human role in the universe is to recognize God, to love him as he should be loved, and to bring his love and beauty into the world. This anthropology underlies much of Islamic thought and is made explicit by Rumi's poetry. Its ongoing relevance becomes a little more obvious when we recall that in Islamic theology, God did not create the universe way back when, only to tinker with it once in a while (the notion of Deism). On the contrary, he is always creating the universe, which is nothing but the ongoing, ever-changing sparkle of the Hidden Treasure. God's love to be recognized is never absent from the world and our lives, and it constantly instills energy into all things.
Rumi gave a great variety of names to the human participation in God's love -- hunger, thirst, need, desire, craving, passion, fire, burning. Like many others, he identified love with the "poverty" mentioned in the Koranic verse, "O people, you are the poor toward God, and God is the rich, the praiseworthy" (35:15). Love is that empty spot in our hearts that we can never fill, because it craves the infinite riches of the Hidden Treasure.
Once upon a time, Rumi says, we were fish swimming in the ocean, unaware of the water and ourselves. The ocean wanted to be recognized, so it threw us up on dry land. We flip after this, we flop after that, pursuing an ever more elusive happiness. Is the ocean tormenting us? Well, yes. It put us here. But, the more we burn, the more intensely we will love the ocean's beauty when it calls us back.