On Love: In the Muslim Tradition

Male and Female

Male and Female It is possible to speak about love only through its effects or the traces that are accessible to remembrance and reason. The traces are simply the reflection of one in the other, while the essence eludes those traces that are revealed as incomprehension and madness. And the weighing up the speaker undertakes demands that those remains be differentiated and sifted: what is not madness is retained, while the rest is retracted and rejected. All discourse about love is simply the interpretation of its traces and their transference to the other side of the current of love, where it exists as on a distant periphery. Whatever can be said about love is not love itself. And that is the reason incomprehension and madness are its real traces in the definable world. Whoever loves has a beloved who is veiled. But the lover seeks full revelation and identification with the beloved. When the veil completely disappears, there is no longer any duality. It is said that when Samnûn the lover spoke of love, oil lamps began to come and go right and left.4 People said to him: ‘‘Say something about love.’’ He replied: ‘‘I know no one on the face of the earth to whom it is easy to speak of love,’’ whereupon a bird came and perched opposite him. He said: ‘‘If such exists, then that is he.’’ And he began to speak of love, and the bird beat the ground with its beak until it bled, and died.5 16 / On Love This discourse is pressed into an image whose essence eludes reason. It seems that to understand it requires knowledge that sees the borders and the changeableness of everything that is within them. It may be found in different approaches. That is why speaking about love is coherent both as witness of madness and as a harmonious endeavor to delineate the rhythm within the indefinable. Love reaches us as the reflection of speaking about mankind, the world, and God. When it is in that sequence, it is man’s love for them—mankind, the world, and God. But, in duality there are two directions—giving and taking. The totality of existence may be understood also as the presence of two elements—male and female. Those elements encompass one another in full harmony. Their unity produces or creates everything that exists. The relationship of those two elements is, from the perspective of oneness, constant change. Thus the totality of existence, of all worlds, changes at every moment, like a river. ‘‘Change’’ is the Flow through which the heavens and the earth, and everything in between them, are created again and again. Male and female are the initiators of that change and signs of all the movement in the world. That mutuality of oneness and the Flow of days is contained in the statement: Say: ‘‘God is One, the Eternal God.6 He begot none, nor was He begotten, None is equal to Him.’’7 All phenomena form part of the Flow. No single one of their ‘‘suspended ’’ states is not the Flow, but nor is anything outside it. The Flow is indefinable, but everything that is in it bears witness to it. Aspiration toward it means denying the seeming independence of its separate phenomena. In it and with it individuality outside it disappears: a bird alights on a branch, endeavors to pass through it and show its innerness in the Flow and with it. Its opposition to the branch through which it tries to pass, for the sake of the Flow in which everything exists, opens it whereupon it shows its innerness on the branch and its The Impossibility of Definition / 17 outerness ‘‘dies.’’ But, this is always a mutuality of action and passivity . Those two elements are present in the worlds as the totality of existence, but also in every detail within them. Through their presence they cause the transformation and alteration of everything at every moment. Everything is thus in duality, as He says in his Teaching: ‘‘And all things We have made in pairs’’;8 ‘‘God created the sexes, the male and the female.’’9 Every phenomenon in the world is paired with another. Some are the elements of creation: the pen and the tablet, the sky and the earth, the spirit and the body. Those dualities are the divergence of one and...