5 Quotes by Annemarie Schimmel

The eye of the mystic who is enraptured in love sees traces of eternal beauty everywhere and listens to the mute eloquence of everything created. Whatever he mentions, his goal is the essence of the beloved—like Zulaykha, who, longing for Joseph's beauty, applied to him "the name of every thing, from rue-seed to aloes-wood."If she piled up a hundred thousand names— her meaning and intention was always Joseph. (M 6:4022-37)

The metaphors that Sumnun the Lover used to express the ineffable experience of this love, of which he was only a fragile vessel, are not taken from the vocabulary of worldly love. Rather, they are perfectly chaste, lucid, almost immaterial:"I have separated my heart from this world— My heart and Thou are not separate. And when slumber closes my eyes,I find Thee between the eye and the lid." (A 10:310)

When people began to throw stones at him, Shibli—so the legend has it—threw a rose, and Hallaj sighed. Asked the reason for his sigh, he answered: "They do not know what they do, but he should have known it."And the saying that "the rose, thrown by the friend, hurts more than any stone" has become a Turkish proverb.

Behind all created beauty the mystic sees a witness to the source of eternal beauty – the ruby is the heart of the stone, which has been transformed into a priceless jewel through patience and shedding its blood...

It is better to restore one dead heart to eternal life than to restore to life a thousand dead bodies.