Stain Your Prayer Rug with Wine 213I am He whom I love, and He whom I love is I.
We are two spirits dwelling in one body,
If thou seest me, thou seest Him;
And if thou seest Him, thou seest us both.If, then, the perfect love is unrequited love—the kind of love that
expects nothing in return—then the perfect lover and the paradigm of
love for Sufis is Iblis, or Satan, who began his existence as an angel in
“the Way of devotion to the service of God,” but who was cast out of
God’s presence for refusing to bow before Adam. Rumi illustrates in
his “Apology of Iblis” that this refusal to obey God “arose from love of
God, not from disobedience.” After all, “all envy arises from love, for
fear lest another become the companion of the Beloved.”
Though cast into hell, never to see the face of God again, Iblis
continues to yearn for his Beloved, who “rocked my cradle” and
“found milk for me in my infancy.” He will pine for God forever, cry-
ing out from the depths of hell, “I am mated by Him, mated by Him,
mated by Him!”
If this somewhat flattering impression of Iblis is shocking to most
Muslims, it is important to remember that that is precisely the point.
As Attar claimed, “Love knows of neither faith nor blasphemy.” Only
by breaking through the veil of traditional dualities, which human
beings have constructed in order to categorize proper moral and reli-
gious behavior, can one achieve fana. The Sufi knows no dualities,
only unity. There is no good and evil, no light and dark; there is only
God. This notion should not be confused with the Hindu principle of
maya (the illusion of reality), or the Buddhist doctrine of sunyata (the
emptiness of all things). For the Sufi, reality is neither emptiness nor
illusion; reality is God. “Whichever way one turns, there is God,” the
Quran says; “God is all-pervading and all-knowing” (2:115). And
because tawhid insists God is one, the Sufis argue, reality must also
be one.
The atom, the sun, the galaxies, and the universe,
Are surely but names, images, and forms.
One they are in reality, and only one.