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The Sufis – Idries Shah

 The chief of this Persian community was named Mukinuddin. He had a beautiful daughter, Nizam, devout and well versed in the religious law. His spiritual experiences in Mecca, and his symbolical rendering of the path of the mystic, are expressed in love poems dedicated to her.

EI-Arabi realized that human beauty was connected with divine reality; and for this reason he was able to produce poems which both celebrated the perfection of the maiden and also, in correct perspective, stood for a deeper reality.

But the capacity to see the connection was denied to the formal religionists, who professed themselves scandalized. The poet's supporters have pointed out, often in vain, that real truth may be expressed in several ways simultaneously……

 Ibn El-Arabi’s Interpreter therefore reads, on the surface, as a collection of erotic poems

 But there is an inner reality which he refers to when he accepts all formalism, yet claims a truth behind and beyond it. Professor Nicholson has thus translated one of the poems which most shocked the devout, who believed that theirs was the road to human salvation:

My heart is capable of every form:
A cloister for the monk, a fane for idols,
A pasture for gazelles, the votary's Ka'ba [temple],
The tables of the Torah, the Quran.
Love is the creed I hold: wherever turn
His camels, Love is still my creed and faith.