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On the stages of love, Fari'ud'din Attar, the 12th century Sufi mystic, wrote in the Conference of the Birds:
"O Cup-bearer! Fill my cup with the blood of my heart and if there be no more, give me the less. Love is a cruel pain that devours everything. Sometimes it tears the veil from the soul, sometimes it draws it together. An atom of love is preferable to all that exists between the horizons, an atom of its pain better than the happy love of all lovers. Love is the very marrow of beings; but there can be no real love without real suffering. Whoever is grounded firm in love renounces faith, religion, and unbelief. Love will open the door of spiritual poverty and poverty will show you the way of unbelief. When there remains neither unbelief nor religion, your body and your soul will disappear; you will then be worthy of the mysteries — if you would fathom them, this is the only way.
This then is the "ishq" of the ghazal. Though it can be compared to Platonism (the Symposium), or to Christian imagery, (Christ as the Bridegroom), or courtly love, it is all these things and more. It is "ishq," and in its comprehensiveness; it is unique in itself.
Why would the Sufis choose poetry to disseminate their lore? C. Rice cites several possible reasons: the security of concealment (through poetry and symbolic language) against persecution for heresy; the natural beauty of poetry as a vehicle of expressing the sentiments of love and beauty: "God is beautiful and cannot but love beauty," is an Arabic saying; and the temperament of the Persian people:
"(The Sufi) aimed at winning over, not only the learned, but the whole population, down to the least cultured among them. The results of this can be seen in the Persian people to this day. A certain mystical culture is common among them and all of them take a genuine pleasure in discussing such themes. The Westerner will often be astounded to find an illiterate peasant making an apt quotation from a mystical poem. Thus if the Sufi made such abundant use of poetry, it was because he knew how sensitive were the peoples of eastern Islamic countries to the influence of a poetical medium. To express a truth in a telling poetical phrase was more than half the battle." (The Persian Sufis)
The danger from orthodox religion was no less than the danger from established political power, and this contributed to the need for the Sufi to develop a symbolic or fanciful language, as this story of the mythical Mulla Nasruddin demonstrates:
"I shall have you hanged," said a cruel and ignorant king to Nasruddin, "if you do not prove that you have deep perceptions such as have been attributed to you." Nasruddin at once said that he could see a golden bird in the sky and demons within the earth. "But how can you do this?" the king asked. "Fear," said the Mulla," is all you need."
This story too has a double meaning, for Idries Shah, the Sufi writer, explains that "fear" is a technical term used by the Sufis for a particular state of consciousness. There is a whole list of these "states" and "stages" (ahwal and muqamat) in Sufism, each of which correspond to a particular period of development in the pupil. These go under names such as repentance (tauba), fear (wara), detachment (zuhd), trust in God (tawakkul), contentment (rida) for some of the "stages"; and concentration (muraqaba), nearness (qurb), love, fear, hope, yearning, certainty (yakin), for some of the "states". There are seven stages and ten
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