Fakhruddin Iraqi Quotes

Each image painted on the canvas of existence is the form of the artist himself. Eternal Ocean spews forth new waves. „Waves“ we call them; but there is only the Sea. (p. 77)

To the eye of the true Witness, no more than One is to be seen – but since this One Face shows Itself in two mirrors, each mirror will display a different face. (p. 73)

Majnun may gaze at Layla‘s beauty, but this Layla is only a mirror […] God with Majnun‘s eye looks upon His own beauty in Layla, and through Majnun He loves Himself.

The Sufi tradition is like a vast garden in which are cultivated many flowers of different scents and colors, each sweet and beautiful, each reflecting one aspect of the garden of paradise.

If You are Everything then who are all these people? And if I am nothing what's all this noise about? You are Totality, everything is You. Agreed. Then that which is "other-than-You"- what is it? Oh, indeed I know: Nothing exists but You ...

Love the phoenix cannot be trapped nor in heaven or earth can it be named; no one has yet discovered its address: its desert holds not a single footprint. The world drains the last drops from its cup though itself it is not outside the glass; dawn and dusk I caress its face, its tresses, though where it is no day or night exists. Morning-breeze, if you pass its lane I have no message for it but this: My repose, who are my very life, without you I can take no single breath at ease.

I am Love: in heaven and earth I have no place; I am the Wondrous Phoenix whose spoor cannot be traced. (p. 72)

Love courses through all things. . . . No, It is all things. How deny It when nothing else exists? What has appeared – if not for Love – would not have been. All has appeared from Love, through Love, and Love courses through it. . . . No, all of it is Love. (p. 84)

I saw my Lord with the eye of the Lord. I asked 'Who art Thou?' and He answered 'Thou.

The more I gaze at Your face, the more my eyes incline toward Your vision like one who dies of thirst by the ocean shore, lips to the wave, thirstier and thirstier.

Iraqi became a work of art before producing works of art. If he sang the love of God in verses of great beauty, it is because his soul had itself become a song of God, a melody in harmony with, and a strain of, the music issuing from the abode of the Beloved. Iraqi was a gnostic who spoke in the language of love. For him, as for Sufism in general, love is not juxtaposed to knowledge. It is realized knowledge. The Truth, which is like a crystal or a shining star in the mind, becomes wine when it is lived and realized. It inundates the whole of man‘s being, plucking the roots of his profane consciousness from this world of impermanence and bringing about an inebriation that must of necessity result from the contact between the soul of man and the infinite world of the Spirit. But Iraqi was a Sufi gifted particularly in expressing the „mysteries of Union“ in the language of love. (p. xi)

When Ibn al-Arabi and his followers speak of „Being,“ they do not mean the Being of God as opposed to that of the creatures, or vice versa. They mean Being as such, in all the forms it may take, without exception. For them the „science of Being“ is the science of all sciences, since nothing but Being is. If someone can understand this science, he has understood the principle of everything. To grasp the nature of Being Itself is to grasp the nature of all that exists. „Love“ is one of the primary attributes of Being, which means that whatever exists must participate in it, just as it must participate in Being. To understand the nature of Love and its myriad self-manifestations is to grasp the nature of Being Itself, for the two are in fact one. (p. 27)

The Lama‘at of Iraqi belongs to a particular type of Sufi literature in which the purest doctrines of gnosis (al-ma‘rifah) were expressed in the language of love (al-mahabbah).

Only the One Being is.

The more I gaze at Your face, the more my eyes incline toward Your vision like one who dies of thirst by the ocean shore, lips to the wave, thfrstier and thirstier.

Fakhruddin ‘Iraqi produced one of the most exquisite commentaries on Ibn ‘Arabi’s doctrine of Love. This great poet-scholar had initially been associated with wondering qalandars, a group of outsiders who disregarded social norms and incurred the wrath of the orthodox community.