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Perhaps the most distinguishing feature of Sufism, the feature that differentiates it from other spiritual disciplines, is its central theme of direct love of God. God is not an abstract entity with whom it is impossible to have a personal relationship in Sufism. On the contrary, God permeates this world and is manifested everywhere and in everything.
This earthly presence of God has made it possible for human beings to have an unmediated experience of God. The onus is on the spiritual traveller or the seeker of truth to cleanse his/her heart in order to experience God in the world. This attitude is the opposite of the strict theological view that makes God otherworldly, unattainable, and beyond one’s experience or even imagination.
One of the interesting consequences of bringing God down to the earth and present in the world, is that we can then apply our understanding and experience of worldly love to our experience of divine love.
In Sufism, the intricate relationship between lover and beloved in worldly love can be a blueprint for how to approach a relationship with God. Sufi literature is full of stories about romantic love between humans being used as a guide to engage in divine love. A recurring theme in these stories is that of intimacy with the beloved.
‘Attar in the Elahi-nameh tells a story about intimacy between Mahmoud and Ayaz and then applies this to the divine domain.
The tale is told in the context of the famous love story between the Persian king Sultan Mahmoud and his slave Ayaz. Once when Ayaz was massaging the king’s feet he began to kiss them also. After a while, the Sultan turned to Ayaz and asked, “What is the purpose of your kissing my feet, since you could kiss my face? Why choose the humble feet?” Ayaz replied, “All mankind has a share of your face for they can plainly see your moon-like countenance, but no one has access to your feet except me and that makes our intimacy greater.”
‘Attar then applies this story to the divine domain in the context of the relationship between God and Satan. Satan saw that the other angels experienced God through His kindness. He wanted to be more intimate with God and sought something that no other angel was seeking: God’s wrath. The curse from God was to Satan a source of sustenance and intimacy while to others it was death itself. ‘Attar’s point is that if you want to have intimacy with your beloved, seek a path which is less travelled by others. These are usually the paths that are more difficult and require hardship, and that may seem to others to be a bad deal.
To be intimate with one’s beloved means to share certain things with him/her that no one else can be privy to. There are secrets between the lover and the beloved that no one else knows. But why is it important to be intimate with one’s beloved? In any love relationship it is important to feel that one is special in the eyes of one’s beloved, and to feel one is loved in return. This is a distinctive feature of human intimacy as we want our beloved to care for us in a unique way that it is different from the way he/she treats others. This is also reflected in our love for God. We want such a relation to be special in a sense of having attention from God and access to certain aspects of the divine to which no one else has access. But the leap from human love and intimacy to divine love is a deeply personal and experiential journey, which—as Sufis have repeatedly pointed out—transcends human discourse and for which there is no recipe that guarantees one will reach one’s destination.
However, just as Satan had to pay the price of God’s wrath for his intimacy with God, we human beings have to pay a price too. The more intimate we are with our beloved, the harder it is to be separated. In our intimacy with God we feel the pain of separation when we are too preoccupied with the affairs of the world. However, and perhaps more importantly, our intimacy with God makes it possible for us to accept the world as it is with all its sufferings, shortcomings and beauty. The price of accepting the faults of the world is to appear strange in the eyes of others. As Rumi says:
I am in love with God’s grace as much as his wrath, It is so strange that I am in love with two opposite qualities.