Sufi Shrine Quotes

In Pakistan, you often find that a wife is Shia, the husband Sunni. And in the past this was never a problem, but now extremists want to divide us. Sufism and Sufi shrines play a very important role against this, by bridging Sunni and Shia. When someone asks me if I am Sunni or Shia I reply that like my saints I really do not care. It is irrelevant. I think only of the will of God.

In the most profound of Sufi teachings, we discover that the goal of Sufi practice is to create a kind of twin. In other words, for every apparently living human being, through profound exercises, the Sufi creates a spiritual counterpart (a twin) in the spirit realms. In addition, for every spirit dwelling in the spiritual realms, there exists a physical counterpart in the apparent world. This is precisely why Sufis pray at the Shrines (tombs) of Sufi saints who have made the transition, because these saints are very much alive and puissant in the physical or apparent world.

The person who makes God his Beloved, what more does he want? His heart becomes awakened to all the beauty there is within and without. To him all things appeal, everything unfolds itself, and it is beauty to his eyes, because God is all-pervading, in all names and all forms; therefore his Beloved is never absent. How happy therefore is the one whose Beloved is never absent, because the whole tragedy of life is the absence of the Beloved, and to one whose Beloved is always there, when he has closed his eyes the Beloved is within, when he has opened his eyes the Beloved is without. His every sense perceives the Beloved; his eyes see Him, his ears hear His voice. When a person arrives at this realization, then he, so to speak, lives in the presence of God; then to him the different forms and beliefs, faiths and communities do not count. To him God is all-in-all; to him God is everywhere. If he goes to the Christian church or to the synagogue, to the Buddhist temple, to the Hindu shrine, or to the mosque of the Muslim, there is God. In the wilderness, in the forest, in the crowd, everywhere he sees God.

After the fall of Mubarak, Salafist groups had been sprouting throughout Egypt. Nobody knew where they came from. But they were blamed for a string of deadly attacks on Copts and their churches, as well as against the shrines of Sufi Muslims— the latter number in the millions and are considered by the Salafis infidels because they worship local saints.7 Salafis hijacked mass demonstrations against a newly appointed Coptic governor in the southern city of Qena, soon swelling the numbers from a few thousand to tens of thousands. Many waved the Saudi flag.8 And in July 2011, they descended on Tahrir Square in the hundreds of thousands in the biggest demonstration since the revolution and demanded that Egypt be declared an Islamist state with strict, Saudi-style religious laws.9 That broke a postrevolutionary pact with the liberal, leftist, and secular groups that had led the uprising.

Love arrived, beloved unveiled himself upon its arrival. Love has lifted, embraced and surrounded itself to my being. Beautiful perfect master's dust has made me capable of understanding, knowing and comprehending truth and immediately upon which love arrived. I was searching into books, places and shrines but when I touched my master's feet love arrived. I could not recognized him even after encircling the kaaba but when my heart encircled my perfect master love arrived. Identity, identifying and identified is dis classified, Love is no longer a hidden treasure to be identified. Love has removed the distinction of "You" & "I" when love arrived. Ayaz, hold love close dearer nearer to your life, He himself revealed himself through blink of an eye.

He was the leader of the Prophet David’s army,’ said the Sheikh. ‘David had him killed so that he could marry Nebi Uri’s beautiful wife. Two angels, Mikhail and Jibrael, appeared and asked David why he needed an extra wife when he already had ninety-nine others. You know this story?’ ‘Yes. I think we Christians know Nebi Uri as Uriah the Hittite.’ It was an unlikely tangle of tales: a medieval Muslim saint buried in a much older Byzantine tomb tower had somehow been confused with the Biblical and Koranic Uriah; perhaps the saint’s name was Uriah, and over the passage of time his identity had been merged with that of his scriptural namesake. More intriguing still was the fact that in this city, long famed for the shrines of its Christian saints, the Muslim Sufi tradition had directly carried on from where Theodoret’s Christian holy men had left off. Just as the Muslim form of prayer, with its bowings and prostrations, appears to derive from the older Syriac Christian tradition that I had seen performed at Mar Gabriel, and just as the architecture of the earliest minarets unmistakably derives from the square late-antique Syrian church towers, so the roots of Islamic mysticism and Sufism lie with the Byzantine holy men and desert fathers who preceded them across the Near East. Today the West often views Islam as a civilisation very different from and indeed innately hostile to Christianity. Only when you travel in Christianity’s Eastern homelands do you realise how closely the two religions are really linked. For the former grew directly out of the latter and still, to this day, embodies many aspects and practices of the early Christian world now lost in Christianity’s modern Western incarnation. When the early Byzantines were first confronted by the Prophet’s armies, they assumed that Islam was merely a heretical form of Christianity, and in many ways they were not so far wrong: Islam accepts much of the Old and New Testaments, and venerates both Jesus and the ancient Jewish prophets. Certainly if John Moschos were to come back today it is likely that he would find much more that was familiar in the practices of a modern Muslim Sufi than he would with those of, say, a contemporary American Evangelical. Yet this simple truth has been lost by our tendency to think of Christianity as a Western religion rather than the Oriental faith it actually is. Moreover the modern demonisation of Islam in the West, and the recent growth of Muslim fundamentalism (itself in many ways a reaction to the West’s repeated humiliation of the Muslim world), have led to an atmosphere where few are aware of, or indeed wish to be aware of, the profound kinship of Christianity and Islam.