D.H Lawrence's mysticism : a study of Lawrence's metaphysics in 'Women in Love' with reference to Mawalana Rumi and other Persian Sufi masters (original) (raw)
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Teosofi: Jurnal Tasawuf , 2022
It seems that the controversies over the nature of the beloved in classical Persian mystic poetry (also known as Sufi poetry) as an earthly or ethereal phenomenon would never end. Those in favor of the celestial reading of it consider their counterparts to be narrow-minded. The adherents of terrestrial love, though, see mystical readings dogmatic and outdated, prevailed by traditionalists. The topic gets even more complicated when one takes into account the attitudes in the medieval Muslim world toward pederasty, shāhid-bāzī, on the one hand, and the Divine Feminine /Masculine Beloved, on the other hand, and, thus, the gender of this beloved. The present article explores the beloved in Persian classical mystical poetry via five different but related approaches: historical, philosophical, translational and comparative, linguistic and poetic, and, ultimately, developmental. The study concludes that an essentialist reading of the beloved in Persian love mystic poetry would create numerous problems, and that the spirit of Persian classical poetry in this regard is the spirit of uncertainty with a certain purpose: it is the manifestation of the self-poet's agency, choosing one's object of desire without explicitly revealing it and, thus, living one's own life of choice without fearing the threads of religious fundamentalism.
Sufism in Writings: Mysticism and Spirituality in the Love Poems of Salleh Ben Joned
Salleh Ben Joned is seen as a notorious figure in the Malaysian literary scene as a result of his use of profanities and vulgarities, interlacing them into ideas or texts that are seen to be sacred by the society. He is most infamously known for his vivid descriptions of carnal images and sex and its vicissitudes in his poems, thus earning the accusations of being an apostate and his works to be blasphemous. This essay is an attempt at reappraising his love poetry, by explicating the poems using the doctrine of Sufism and its central theme of love and the Beloved/Divine. My view is that his poems are not just describing the 'profane' act of sexual copulation, but rather would be more apt in describing a devotee's spiritual journey towards finding his Beloved or the Divine.
2021
The present study aims at studying the sources and patterns of women images by Ḥijāzi poets in ghazal poetry, an important Arabic poetic genre that gained popularity and an outstanding stature in the Umayyad period. It also endeavours to show how poets depict images by the use of their five senses and examines what spiritual features of women these poets prefer. The method that I have used for this study is thematic analysis. The study examines the representation of the beloved women and certain motifs and the use of the five senses in the construction of themes. The findings of the study show that the images employed by Ḥijāzi poets are similar to those employed by poets in the pre-Islamic period. Ḥijāzi poets use sensual images more than spiritual ones because of the intensity of their emotional experiences, which have, in turn, enabled them to depict psychological sensual sufferings. Moreover, images in the Ḥijāzi poetry are representations of the poet's imagination; they do ...
In this article, we compare certain aspects of the love poetry of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (1207-1273), the most distinguished Sufi mystic and poet of the Persian language, and John Donne (1572-1631), the leading English poet of the Metaphysical school. Despite the cultural and age difference between the 13th century Persian Sufi and the English Christian poet of the Renaissance, there are striking similarities in their experience of love as revealed in their poetry. For both, love stands unique in the universe, creates a new status of self, engages lover and beloved in perfect union, obliterates temporality, integrates both body and soul and climbs to the heights of Divine jealousy. The two poets are worlds apart but the world of love to which they take their reader is essentially the same.
Transformation: An International Journal of Holistic Mission Studies, 2016
The longing for intimacy and closeness to God has perennially been one of mankind’s most pronounced characteristics. Those worshipers within the Islamic tradition that particularly focus on the interior aspects of the faith and endeavor to reach the transcendent, are commonly referred to as Sufis. Sufism, or Islamic mysticism, has devised copious theological materials and practical disciplines to attain its goal. It can be furthermore suggested that one of the ideas that appears to be most predominant in Sufi theology is characterized by the notion of love. This article examines how Sufism understands the concept of love, its close relationship to the attainment of knowledge and if it indeed succeeds in enabling humanity to achieve nearness with God.
The Transforming Power of Love in the Islamic Mystical Tradition
Temenos Review, 2024
This article discusses the important of love on the spirtual joIurney. It draws upon the work of three great mystical writers of the classical period of Islam: Farīd aldīn ʿAṭṭār (1145–1221); Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240) and Jalāl al-dīn Rūmī (1207–1273). It largely focussed on the Persian tradition and cites Ibn ‘Arabī only for metaphysical background. The discussion centres on case studies of two very famous incidents where love is described as dramatically taking over at a certain stage of the spiritual path from other forces as the prime mover. One of these is fictional—ʿAṭṭār’s story of Shaykh Sanʾān in his epic poem ‘The Conference of the Birds’—and one is from life—the description of Rūmī’s initiation into the path of love by the mysterious teacher Shams al-Tabrizī.
Culture and Religion, 2017
Based on the recent hagiography written by a devoted khalifa of a Naqshbandi Sufi saint, Zindapir, who died in 1999 in Ghamkol Sharif, not far from the city of Kohat in north-west Pakistan, the paper interrogates the meaning of ‘love’ as the essence of spirituality and ascent on the Sufi path. During his lifetime the author, like most of the saint’s disciples, expressed his love of the saint, and eulogised him poetically in qasidas often reminiscent of romantic Urdu poetry. After his death too, exceptionally among the disciples, he expressed his deep longing for the departed saint. Nonetheless in the hagiography love is most often used to describe a transcendent mystical spiritual connection – to the saint, the Prophet and God. Unlike a modernist trope focused on the individual search for personal experience of spirituality, here love is a mode of mystical knowing that disattends to individual feeling and experience. The paper will look at the different meanings of love as it is used in the hagiography by contrast to the meanings deployed during the saint’s life.
Overtones, 2023
This article explores the recurrence of Sufi themes in Elif Shafak's novel, The Forty Rules of Love and draws comparisons to similar selections from Jalaluddin Rumi's Mathnawi. This article examines the claims that Shafak employs concepts more connected to New Age Spirituality than Sufism in her novel and has oversimplified Islamic Sufi concepts to appeal to an international readership. Through the comparative study of Shafak's fictional narrative with Rumi's poetry, I examine whether or not Shafak's characters in The Forty Rules of Love undergo a spiritual journey, or are Sufi seekers towards the Ultimate Truth. By using the Mathnawi as a form of reference for the Sufi journey, I conduct a thematic comparative analysis of selected passages from the Mathnawi and Shafak's narrative to investigate the Sufi dimension of this book. Through comparing close readings of selections from the novel with the Mathnawi, Sufi themes such as that of restlessness, searching for enlightenment fanā' 1 , and the infinite power of Divine Love are presented. This article argues, through the thematic comparisons, that Sufi themes are predominant in the historical narrative of the novel, while the contemporary narrative lacks the Islamic basis of the Sufi path.