Fakhr-al-Din Iraqi Quotes

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.

Only the One Being is.

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)

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

It speaks to me in the silence of this one
then through the words of that one speaking;
it whispers to me through an eyebrow raised
and the message of an eye winking.

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

(p. 72)

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!

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.

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

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 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.

The world but seems to be yet is nothing more
than a line drawn between light and shadow.
Decipher the message of this dream-script
and learn to distinguish time from Eternity.

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.

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.