ABSTRACT
In previous chapters on Rumi’s practical mysticism, the concept of love was addressed on various occasions. Here, in the final chapter of this part, this fundamental notion of his Sufism will be examined more closely, particularly with regard to its pivotal function in man’s mystical advancement, as an essential link between practices and stages. The subject of love and the terms referring to itmainly ‘ishq and maḥabba-are found most often in Rumi’s Dīvān, wherein his personal experience of love is expressed more clearly and directly.1 As the most central motif of his mysticism, it is the spirit and connecting force of the teachings of Rumi in their entirety throughout his works, especially those belonging to the period after the dawn of Shams al-Din Tabrizi in his life.2 Before Rumi, the concept of love was explained and elaborated not only by numerous Sufis3 but also by philosophers such as Avicenna, in his Risāla fī al-‘ishq (“Treatise on Love”),4 and the writers of Rasā’il Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’ (“Epistles of the Brethren of Purity”), particularly in the thirty-seventh epistle on the nature of love,5 in which one can see the influence of the Platonic doctrine of love. However, it is no easy task to identify other Sufis with such an intense personal experience of love as Rumi, in whose mysticism love penetrates so deeply in both its theoretical and practical aspects, and nor is it presented in such lofty poetry elsewhere.6 Although love plays a crucial role in both Rumi’s metaphysics of creation, which regards love as the motivating force in the creation of the whole universe,7 and in his practical way of return, in this section we concentrate more on the latter role, its function in traveling through various mystical stations.8 One significant feature of Rumi’s theory of love is its all-encompassing character, which comprehensively embraces every attraction present in the universe. According to him, the fundamental congeneity or “homogeneity” (Ar.: jinsiyya) between each and every “congener” (Ar.: jins) results in an attraction and an attractive force that draws them to each other, a force that is nothing other than love. He repeatedly employs the principle that “congener attracts congener” or “congener is in love with congener,”9 based on which earth, water, air, fire, and all particles in the universe attract, and are attracted by, their congeners.10 As the third book of the Mathnawī expresses, “[A]ll the particles of the world are paired as mates and are in love with their own mate,” desiring each other like amber and a blade of straw.11 Not only do the actual congeners attract each other but a
relation of love also exists between potential congeners, a point which Rumi calls the “capability of congeneity.” Water and bread, for instance, are not man’s congeners, but if eaten they increase man’s bulk and strength and they become homogeneous with man.12 Accordingly, Rumi depicts a universe wherein love dominates everywhere as the inherent quality of all things,13 and “in the eighteen thousand worlds, everything loves and is in love with something.”14 In the lively world portrayed by Rumi, love is the source of all movement and activity. As the Dīvān declares, “The creatures are set in motion by love,”15 and it is the waves of love that make the heavens turn and the sky spin around.16 Without its motivating force there would be no dynamism in the universe, and love is the principle of life without which the world would be frozen.17 Love is not only the origin of life and activity but it is also the principle of unity and unification, since two congeners attract each other in order to destroy their particular borders and become united. Love is the unitive force that “gave oneness to hundreds of thousands of motes,”18 and causes things to move from multiplicity to unity. One type of congeneity that Rumi highlights is that of particulars and universals, or a part and its whole, which results in attractive relation and love between them.19 Such love brings about their union in the form of the assimilation and absorption of the part into the whole, and since the latter is the origin of the former, Rumi regards this assimilation as the part’s movement back to its origin.20
