Sufism

67 entries

Teaching · Sufism○

The Qiyama at Alamut

A dramatic 1164 declaration by an Ismaili leader that the end of time had arrived and formal religious law was no longer binding.

What it isThis was not a vague prophecy but a specific enacted ceremony, formally proclaimed on a precise dated afternoon and then deliberately repeated at two further fortresses in different countries — a doctrine of the end of ordinary religious law, put into practice as a real historical event rather than remaining a purely theoretical teaching.

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Poem · Sufism · 1278

The Elephant in the Dark

A Candle Would Have Settled It

The elephant was in a dark house: some Hindús had brought it for exhibition.In order to see it, many people were going, every one, into that darkness.As seeing it with the eye was impossible, (each one) was feeling it in the dark with the palm of his hand.

— Masnavi III.1259–1268 · tr. R. A. Nicholson, 1930

Men feel an elephant in a dark house — Ghazālī read it as each man's partial truth; Rūmī blames the dark.

What it meansGhazālī used the story for the limits of perception: each man's report is partial and none is wrong. Rumi changes the blame. The hands were never the problem — the house was dark, and a candle would have ended the dispute. Partial knowledge is a condition to be lit, not respected.

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Poem · Sufism · 1278

Ayāz and His Sheepskin

What Ayāz Kept Locked Away

O Ayáz, what is this love of yours for your old shoes,Which resembles the love of a lover for his mistress?You have made these old shoes your object of devotion,Just as Majnun made an idol of his Laila!

— Masnavi V · tr. E. H. Whinfield, 1887

Sultan Maḥmūd asks his favourite why he visits a pair of old shoes the way a lover visits his beloved.

What it meansRūmī's heading sets the chamber under the Qurʾān's “Let man reflect out of what he was created”. Ayāz says that without the king's gift he is only those shoes and that jacket; Rūmī reads the shoes as the seed a man comes from, the jacket as his blood, and cites the saying that whoever knows himself knows God.

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