Fakhr-al-Din Iraqi Quotes

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.

The world has spilled Love's secret — when could music ever hold its tongue?
Every atom babbles the mystery — Listen yourself, for I'm no tattletale!

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)

They look, they see, but do not comprehend.
They take no pleasure in the View, For to enjoy it one must know through the Truth of Certainty What he is seeing, through Whom, and why.

Love plays its lute behind the screen — where is a lover to listen to its tune?

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.

La ilaha illa'l-'ishq

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)

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.

The Beloved's Loveliness owns a hundred thousand faces; gaze upon a different fair one in every atom; for She needs must show
to every separate thing
a different aspect
of Her beauty.

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.

Beloved, I sought you
here and there, asked for news of you from all I met; then saw you through myself and found we were identical. Now I blush to think I ever searched for signs of you.

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

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

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).