Part 1

Part 1

A person who has heard about love is like a moth that has heard about fire and enjoyed its light, but has never burned.

Once it burns in the fire, nothing of its body remains whole. It burns and is charred to a crisp.

One who has not been smitten with love does not know what it is.

To be smitten with love is humiliation and helplessness.

It is to lose one’s senses and to be disgraced.

Neither reason nor understanding remains unscathed before love!

When the intensity of love fades and the rule of reason returns, the lover is powerless to explain the things he did.

But before the torment of love, the pain brought by its separation and parting, and the reproaches born of his humiliation and disgrace, he is left holding his soul in his hands.

The heart that burns, crying, “Love again… What a calamity!” and the mind that flutters before love like a soul fleeing from death — they know of love’s ruin and its tyranny.

When a person who entered love at first out of fancy gets out of it safe and sound, he is terrified of meeting it again. He marvels, “How did I ever get out of love unharmed!” Looking at the burns that love has left, he trembles as though he had seen a nightmare.

There are a great many tales of love’s tyranny, but the strangest of them all is the unbelievable love of an aged saint for a Christian girl. Minds are still powerless to explain this love; wisdom is silent. But it is the truth that this shaykh, chained by love, lost his mind and his senses, his faith and his Islam.

The tale goes like this: a man named Shaykh San‘an had four hundred disciples. He himself lived in Mecca; each of his disciples had attained stations in sainthood, and every dream he saw came true. One day Shaykh San‘an saw himself in a dream in Rum, declaring his love to a Christian girl. This dream did not stop. He kept seeing it every day. In the end the shaykh was seized by a longing to know the wisdom of this dream, and he set off for Rum with his disciples. Constantinople, the capital of Rum, was in Christian hands. The shaykh entered Constantinople. And indeed, he happened to see an 18-year-old Christian girl on her way to church to worship, and he fell in love. There was no explanation for it. However much the shaykh tried to keep his love hidden, he was helpless, and love, burning him again and again, took his mind — or rather, love burned his mind first of all. The shaykh began to wander the streets of Constantinople like a madman. Little by little the disciples grew ashamed of him and began first to counsel him, then to reproach him. But the shaykh paid no heed to any word; rather, his love-madness went further and further beyond all bounds. The Christian children made a habit of stoning the old man who had lost his mind. The shaykh began to spend day and night in the street his beloved passed through. He cared about nothing else. The disciples wandered about helplessly and did not know where to hide themselves from the shame. At last the shaykh declared his love to the Christian girl. The girl laughed at him and left. Now the shaykh made the girl’s street his home and lay there declaring his love. Finally, after a long time, the girl deigned to speak to him: “So this is what Muslim shaykhs are like. Very well, if you want union with me, you will leave your religion, drink wine and burn the Quran; for three years you will herd swine by day, and by night you will light the fire in our church…” The shaykh accepted the conditions with joy; the disciples found no other way left to them, and, sighing and lamenting, turned their faces away from their pir and scattered in all four directions…

To be continued.