Only the One Being is. - Fakhr-al-Din Iraqi

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 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 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.