Fakhr-al-Din Iraqi Quotes

By day I praised You but never knew it; by night slept with You without realising; fancying myself to be myself; but no, I was You
and never knew it.

Know yourself: a cloud
drifting before your sun.
Cut yourself off from your senses
and behold your sun of intimacy.

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.

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.

The magic spring
that gives eternal Life,
is in your own heart
but you have blocked the flow.

The Morning of Manifestation sighed, the breeze of Grace breathed gently,
ripples stirred
upon the sea of Generosity. The clouds of Abundance poured down the rain upon the soil of preparedness; so much rain that the earth shone with Light.

Before this there was one heart
but a thousand thoughts
Now all is reduced to "There is no God but God."

La ilaha illa'l-'ishq

Since we have quaffed
the beaker of Thy love, we yield our hearts
and make our Lives Thy ransom: since we come
again into Thy street, we turn our backs
on all that is, save Thee. Our souls are bound
to serve Thee, though in grief, and we have died
to selfhood! We are captives of Thy love
and have not strength to flee. Thy beauty's fever
has lit a flame: shall not our hearts be burned?

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

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).

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

(p. 72)

Only the One Being is.