Ibn Ata'illah as-Sakandari RA

If you want the door of hope opened for you,

then consider what comes to you from Him;

but if you want the door of sadness opened for you,

then consider what goes to Him from you.

Nizami Ganjavi

The Contest Between Khosrau and Farhad

(excerpt from the poem Khosrau and Shirin)

Khosrau asked once: "Where do you come from, say?"

Farhad replied: "From regions far away."

Khosrau: "In what crafts does you land excel?"

Farhad: "We purchase grief and souls we sell."

Khosrau: "By selling soul what do you gain?"

Farhad: "Our bards this custom don't disdain."

Khosrau: "Your soul from love is well high fleeing?"

Farhad: "My soul? I love with all my being."

Khosrau: "Shirin's affection do you prize?"

Farhad: "O yes, I prove it with my sighs!"

Khosrau: "Is she the moon that shines at night?"

Farhad: "Though drowsy, still I see her light."

Khosrau: "When will your heart forget her glow?"

Farhad: "When I am buried, lying low."

Khosrau: "When she appears, you trembling, sigh?"

Farhad: "To please her in the dust I'd lie."

Khosrau: "But if she wounds you in the eye?"

Farhad: "I'll give both eyes without a cry!"

Khosrau: "If someone offers her his heart?"

Farhad: "My sword of steel will do its part!"

Khosrau: "She never will become your own!"

Farhad: "A glimpse of her is a joy enough alone!"

Khosrau: "If all your chattels she demands?"

Farhad: "I'll give her all, as she commands."

Khosrau: "But if she orders - go away!"

Farhad: "My head then at her feet I'll lay!"

Khosrau: "Forget this friendship, do you hear?"

Farhad: "Can friendship be destroyed by fear?"

Khosrau: "Be calm, it is a day-dream, see?"

Farhad: "Nay, calmness not made for me!"

Khosrau: "Give up your love, and bear your lot."

Farhad: "For me love without love is nought."

Khosrau: "With patience men condole for sure."

Farhad: "Some men endure, I don't endure."

Khosrau: "By what great sorrow are you torn?"

Farhad: "Our parting makes me weep and mourn."

Khosrau: "Would you desire to have a wife?"

Farhad: "Alone I can no more bear life."

Khosrau: "Give up Shirin, you must obey!"

Farhad: "Shirin is mine, that's my last say!"

Khosrau: "Her name to mention do not dare!"

Farhad: "You see and hear Farhad's despair!"

Khosrau: "And if I come to love Shirin?"

Farhad: "The world will burn to ashes clean!"

Allama Mohammad Iqbal

Your eyes are fixed on miracles that amaze,

But world of events strange attracts my gaze.

No doubt, the world of thought is strange and queer,

But world of Life and Death more odd appear.

A call to you is sent by World of Chance,

Perhaps you may transmute it with your glance.

Ahmad Shamlou

The Garden of Mirrors

A lantern in my hands
A lantern in front
I leave to combat
the monster of darkness.

Only now that all tired cradles have resigned
from their routine swinging
into a timeless stillness,
a sun from my depths
is throwing numerous luminous rays
on the ashes of the lifeless stars
of my nightly sky.

So I deem
it is the time to leave...

***

Within the wild cries of the lightening
As-if in plain conception of the rains
in the restless womb of the clouds,

Within the silent pain of the vines
when the embryo of grape growing on the end of their limbs,

Within all these pain and cries
My sob was just another word
for the common wish for relief:

In the most frightening nights of plight
I also hopelessly called the Sun
and the Sunrise.

***

You'd come from the land of hundred suns,
you'd be from the land of hundred dawns.

You'd be from the place of birth, mirror and silk.

***

In a void
with no sign of god and with no sign of fire
I helplessly implored your gaze
and your trust.

You'd be
a sever flow
Of light, of love and of life
in the empty room between two death.

And you'd be a bridge
over the tears of solitudes
the hits of lassitude.

At least.
that is how I feel the glow of your gaze and the warmth your trust

***

Your bliss
is merciless indeed,
Yet so gracious.

And your breath
Striking over the palm of my hands
a green song...

***

I stir!
Now I stir!
A lantern in my hands
A lantern in front,
I leave to polish the stains of my soul.

Then I'll put a mirror
in front of yours:

That is how I will make an eternity
from you and me.

Elsa Kazi

Abu-Said Abil-Kheir

Beg for Love.

Consider this burning, and those who burn, as gifts from the Friend.

Nothing to learn.

Too much has already been said.

When you read a single page from the silent book of your heart,

you will laugh at all this chattering,

all this pretentious learning.

Nazeer Akbarabadi

Khuli jab ki chashm e dil e hazeen,to vo nam raha na teri rahi

Hui hairat aisi kuch aankh par ki asar ki be asari rahi

Pari goshe jaan mein ajab nida ki jigar na bejigari rahi

Khabare tahhayyur e ishq sun na junoon raha na pari rahi

Na to tu raha na to main raha jo rahi bekhabari rahi…

The eyes of an anguished heart open…No longer moist.. Bereft of tears

The perplexed vision Remained unmoved.. Devoid of response

The soul heard.. An unusual sound That took the pluck of life away

As wondrous love revealed itself The fairy vanished..The ecstasy lost

Nor you remained.. Nor I was found mere oblivion was all there was…

Khamsa by Nazeer Akbarabadi for Siraj Aurangabadi

Rumi

The outcome of my life is no more than these three lines:

I was a raw material;

I was cooked and became mature;

I was burned in love.

Sheikh Muslih-uddin Sa’di Shirazi

Do to me what is worthy of Thee,

And not what is worthy of me.

~ Gulistan

Fakhruddin Iraqi

The world but seems to be

yet is nothing more

than a line drawn between light and shadow.

Decipher the message of this dream-script

and learn to distinguish

time from Eternity.

Abu-Said Abil-Kheir

Life here is a gamble in which when you win, you lose!

Be content, that's how you beat the game here.

This world is like a pair of dice,

the only reason you pick them up

is to throw them down!

Abu Said Abil-Kheir

"Being a Sufi is to put away what is in your head

-imagined truth, preconceptions, conditioning

-and to face what may happen to you."

Hakim Sanai

Belief brings me close to You

but only to the door.

It is only by disappearing into Your mystery

that I will come in.

Rumi

O’ my Heart! Until, in this prison of deception
You see from difference between This and That.
For an instance, get detached from the well of tyranny.
And stand outside.

Rumi

Water says to the dirty,

"Come here."

The dirty one says,

"But I am so ashamed."

Water says,

"How will you be made clean without me."

Mathnawi II, 1366-7

Muhammad Asad-(Excerpt:The Road to Mecca )

One day -- it was in September 1926 -- Elsa and I found ourselves travelling in the Berlin subway. It was an upper class compartment. My eye fell casually on a well-dressed man opposite me, apparently a well-to-do businessman, with a beautiful briefcase on his knees and a large diamond ring on his hand. I thought idly how well the portly figure of this man fitted into the picture of prosperity which one encountered everywhere in Central Europe in those days: a prosperity the more prominent as it has come after years of inflation, when all economic life had been topsy-turvy and shabbiness of appearance the rule. Most of the people were now well dressed and well fed, and the man opposite me was therefore no exception. But when I looked at his face, I did not seem to be looking at a happy face. He appeared to be worried: and ;not merely worried but acutely unhappy, with eyes staring vacantly ahead and the corners of his mouth drawn in as if in pain -- but not in bodily pain. Not wanting to be rude, I turned my eyes away and saw next to him a lady of some elegance. She also had a strangely unhappy expression on her face, as if contemplating or experiencing something that caused her pain; nevertheless, her mouth was fixed in the stiff semblance of a smile which, I was certain, must have been habitual. And then I began to look around at all the other faces in the compartment -- faces belonging without exception to well-dressed, well-fed people; and in almost every one of them I could discern an expression of hidden suffering, so hidden that the owner of the face seemed to be quite unaware of it.This was indeed strange. I had never before seen so many unhappy faces around me; or was it perhaps that I had never before looked for what was now so loudly speaking in them? The impression was so strong that I mentioned it to Elsa; and she too began to look around her with the careful eyes of a painter accustomed to study human features. Then she turned to me, astonished, and said: "You are right. They all look as though they were suffering torments of hell... I wonder, do they know themselves what is going on in them?"I knew that they did not -- for otherwise they could not go on wasting their lives as they did, without any faith in binding truths, without any goal beyond the desire to raise their own "standard of living," without any hopes other than having more material amenities, more gadgets, and perhaps more power...When we returned home, I happened to glance at my desk on which lay open a copy of the Koran I had been reading earlier. Mechanically, I picked the book up to put it away, but just as I was about to close it, my eye fell on the open page before me, and I read:

You are obsessed by greed for more and more

Until you go down to your graves.

Nay, but you will come to know!

Nay, but you will come to know!

Nay, if you but knew it with the knowledge of certainty,

You would indeed see the hell you are in.

In time, indeed, you shall see it with the eye of certainty:

And on that day you will be asked what you have done with the boon of life.

For a moment I was speechless. I think the book shook in my hands. Then I handed it to Elsa. "Read this. Is it not an answer to what we say in the subway?"It was an answer: an answer so decisive that all doubt was suddenly at an end. I knew now, beyond any doubt, that it was a God-inspired book I was holding in my hand: for although it had been placed before man over thirteen centuries ago, it clearly anticipated something that could have become true only in this complicated, mechanized, phantom-ridden age of ours.At all times people had known greed: but at no time before this had greed outgrown a mere eagerness to acquire things and become an obsession that blurred the sight of everything else: an irresistible craving to get, to do, to contrive more and more -- more today than yesterday, and more tomorrow than today: a demon riding on the necks of men and whipping their hearts forward toward goals that tauntingly glitter in the distance but dissolve into contemptible nothingness as soon as they are reached, always holding out the promise of new goals ahead -- goals still more brilliant, more tempting as long as they lie on the horizon, and bound to wither into further nothingness as soon as they come within grasp: and that hunger, that insatiable hunger for ever new goals gnawing at man's soul: Nay, if you but knew it you would see the hell you are in...This, I saw, was not the mere human wisdom of a man of a distant past in distant Arabia. However wise he may have been, such a man could not by himself have foreseen the torment so peculiar to this twentieth century. Out of the Koran spoke a voice greater than the voice of Muhammad....*(PBUH)

Hafiz Of Shiraz

There are different wells within your heart.

Some fill with each good rain,

Others are far too deep for that.
In one well You have just a few precious cups of water,

That "love" is literally something of yourself,

It can grow as slow as a diamond

If it is lost.
Your love

Should never be offered to the mouth of a Stranger,

Only to someone

Who has the valor and daring

To cut pieces of their soul off with a knife

Then weave them into a blanket

To protect you.
There are different wells within us.

Some fill with each good rain,

Others are far, far too deep For that

Idries Shah

If you damage the jail you harm the captive. If you remove the prisoner, you bring the guard along too. If you touch the captor, you imperil the victim.Each human being lives in a jail. The prison is himself; and he is his own warder as well.While the warder is the prisoner and the jail, it is not surprising that there are so few escapes, and rescues are so rareAnd the process of interweaving captured and captivity, not to say dungeon, is so effective that this reflection must invariably sound like nonsense.But then everyone else’s sense is someone else’s nonsense.

Jorge Luis Borges

Borges and I
The other one, Borges, is the one to whom things happen.
I wander through Buenos Aires, and pause, perhaps
mechanically nowadays, to gaze at an entrance archway and its
metal gate; I hear about Borges via the mail, and read his name
on a list of professors or in some biographical dictionary. I
enjoy hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography,
etymology, the savour of coffee and Stevenson’s prose: the
other shares my preferences but in a vain way that transforms
them to an actor’s props. It would be an exaggeration to say that
our relationship is hostile; I live, I keep on living, so that
Borges can weave his literature, and that literature justifies me.
It’s no pain to confess that certain of his pages are valid, but
those pages can’t save me, perhaps because good writing
belongs to no one, not even the other, but only to language and
tradition. For the rest, I am destined to vanish, definitively, and
only some aspect of me can survive in the other. Little by little,
I will yield all to him, even though his perverse habit of
falsifying and exaggerating is clear to me. Spinoza understood
that all things want to go on being themselves; the stone
eternally wishes to be stone, and the tiger a tiger. I am forced to
survive as Borges, not myself (if I am a self), yet I recognise
myself less in his books than in many others, less too than in
the studious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free
myself from him, and passed from suburban mythologies to
games of time and infinity, but now those are Borges’ games
and I will have to think of something new. Thus my life is a
flight and I will lose all and all will belong to oblivion, or to
that other.
I do not know which of us is writing this page.