William C. Chittick explores “The Sufi Doctrine of Rumi”
In The Sufi Doctrine of Rumi: Illustrated Edition, William C. Chittick offers essential points of reference that serve as an accurate guidebook through the magical landscape of one of the greatest spiritual figures in the history of the world, Rumi.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, author of The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity and Rumi and the Sufi Tradition, writes in his foreword:
“This study of Dr. Chittick has the great merit… of approaching the subject [of Rumi’s metaphysical doctrines] from a strictly traditional point of view untainted by the modernistic fallacies which have colored most of the other studies devoted so far to this subject in Western languages …. [Rumi ] remains to this day a strong living influence in Persian and Turkish cultures and is now becoming a source of spiritual nourishment for seekers the world over.”
Rumi (commonly referred to as Mawlana, or ‘our Master’), was born on September 30, 1207, in Khurasan. He composed over 70,000 verses of poetry, including the Diwan-i Shams-i Tabriz, and the epic poem Mathnawi, which has had an immense influence on Islamic literature and thought. He died on December 16, 1273.
There has been unceasing praise for Rumi’s poetry ever since it was first set down in writing during his lifetime. Western orientalists have called Rumi “without doubt the most eminent Sufi poet whom Persia has produced,” “the greatest mystical poet of Islam,” and even “the greatest mystical poet of any age.”
“Love is that flame which, when it blazes up, consumes everything else but the Beloved.”
—Rumi
“Sufism is the most universal manifestation of the inner dimension of Islam; it is the way by which man transcends his own individual self and reaches God. It provides within the forms of the Islamic revelation the means for an intense spiritual life directed towards the transformation of man’s being and the attainment of the spiritual virtues; ultimately it leads to the vision of God. It is for this reason that many Sufis define Sufism by the saying of the Prophet of Islam concerning spiritual virtue (ihsan): ‘It is that thou shouldst worship God as if thou sawest Him, for if thou seest Him not, verily He seeth thee.’”
“(All) our movement (action) is really a continual profession of faith which bears witness to the Eternal Almighty One.”
—Rumi
“The Shahadah, which epitomizes Islamic doctrine and hence also the doctrine of Sufism, may be said to contain two complementary perspectives, that of transcendence or incomparability (tanzih) and that of immanence or resemblance (tashbih). The first, transcendence, indicates that God is distinct from all beings and that absolutely nothing can compare to Him; the second, immanence, indicates that all beings derive their total reality from God and that therefore in their essential nature they have no reality outside of His Reality.”
—Rumi
“Man is in appearance a derivative of this world, and intrinsically the origin of the world.”
—Rumi
“Although the universe is one when seen from the point of view of the Divine Essence, from the point of view of relativity there is a fundamental polarization into microcosm and macrocosm. The macrocosm is the universe in all its indefinite multiplicity, reflecting the Divine Names and Qualities as so many individual particularizations and determined modes. The microcosm is man, who reflects these same qualities but as a totality. The macrocosm and the microcosm are like two mirrors facing each other; each contains all of the other’s qualities, but the one in a more outward and objective manner and in detail (mufassal) and the other in a more inward and subjective manner and in summary form (mujmal). Thus man’s total knowledge of himself in principle includes the knowledge of the whole universe…The prototype of both the microcosm and the macrocosm is the Universal or Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil), who is the sum total of all levels of reality in a permanent synthesis.”
“The fleshly soul and the Devil both have (ever) been one person (essentially); (but) they have manifested themselves in two forms.…
You have such an enemy as this in your inward part: he is the preventer of the intellect, and the adversary of the spirit and of religion.”
—Rumi
“Man’s state on earth as an individual cut off from his spiritual prototype is due to the fall of Adam. The fall in turn is explained by Rumi as stemming from God’s casting Iblis (Satan) out of Heaven.”
“So man has come into this world for a particular task, and that is his purpose; if he does not perform it, then he will have done nothing.”
—Rumi
“Universal Man, as the principle of all manifestation, is the distributor of God’s bounty to the world. Thus the outward harmony of the universe depends on man’s collective actualization of the state of Universal Man. When a man realizes this original and primordial state, he becomes a ‘channel of grace’ for the world. But through the fall, the majority of men have forgotten their rightful function, and thus the world becomes ever more ‘separated’ from God and ever more chaotic. This original function of man to be the Universal Man and act as a channel of grace for the world is referred to by the Quran as the ‘trust’ (al-amanah) placed upon man’s shoulders at his creation.”
—William C. Chittick
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.”
—Rumi
“If ye pass beyond form, O friends, ‘tis Paradise and rose-gardens within rose-gardens.
When thou hast broken and destroyed thine own form, thou hast learned to break the form of everything.”
—Rumi
“A theme to which Rumi often returns is that the ego or carnal self (nafs) is a veil which prevents man from knowing his own true nature… The true ‘monotheist’ (muwahhid) sees with the vision of gnosis that all things depend absolutely upon God and derive their total reality from Him. The ‘associator’ or polytheist (mushrik), however, suffers from an optical illusion whose source is his attribution of reality to his own individual self. As long as he has not escaped from the limitations of his ego he cannot help but act as if phenomena were independent realities, detached from God.”
I said to my heart, ‘How is it
My heart, that in foolishness
You are barred from the service
Of Him whose name you bless?’
My heart replied, ‘You do wrong
To misread me in this way,
I am constant in His service,
You are the one astray.'
—Rumi
“To know the heart in its inmost essence is to know God, and to the degree that one truly knows God, one is not other than He, for a being defined by relativity cannot know the Absolute. To know God, one must ‘become’ God, by ceasing to exist in that mode of being which separates man from Him, or by no longer being defined by the limitations of that state.”
—William C. Chittick
“The great scholars of the age split hairs on all manner of sciences. They know perfectly and have a complete comprehension of those matters which do not concern them. But as for what is truly of moment and touches a man more closely than all else, namely his own self, this your great scholar does not know.”
—Rumi
“As we have seen, in Rumi’s view external knowledge, or knowledge in the usual sense of the term, is useful and justifiable only to the extent that it is symbolically effective. Man should never be satisfied to ‘know’ with the feeble powers of his reason. Rather he should enter the Path in order to be delivered from the limitations of reason and attain to gnosis.”
