An Introduction Who was Rumi? Sufism and Islam God and the World Universal Man The Fall The Trust Union with God The Nafs Knowledge and Method The Limitations of Rational Knowledge

slide 8 of 11 “Love came, and went again, Like blood within my flesh and vein; From self Love set me free And with the Friend completed me. Only remains my name; My being’s every particle The Friend took for His claim, And so the Friend became my whole.” —Rumi “The path leading to union is long and difficult and has been described in a variety of ways by different Sufis. For our purposes here it is sufficient to limit ourselves to a consideration of two main steps on the Path; steps which are an application of the Shahadah to the spiritual travail. The first of these is fana’, ‘annihilation of self,’ which derives from the ‘no’ of the Shahadah: ‘There is no god but God,’ there is no reality but the Reality. Man’s self-existence is not real, since he is not God; therefore the illusion that it is real must be annihilated. The second is baqa’, ‘subsistence in God,’ which springs from the ‘but’: There is no reality but the Reality. Since God alone is real, man’s real Self is God. Man attains to Reality only by passing away from his illusory self and subsiding in his real Self.”