pulled his disciple out of the small door.
When Sheikh Jamal came out of that meditation room, he was no longer an apprentice but had become a perfect lover. So even the love of a buffalo can bring us to an understanding of God and divine! For Sufis, everything is an expression of God, including buffalo, and it is no different with love: in love we meet – and become – God.
When the last century was in its sixties, I was in my early twenties; full of energy, enthusiasm, and exuberance. I was also a revolutionary. I fell in love with a married woman, ten years older than me. It was an unrequited love and I suffered much.
For my revolutionary friends, it was meaningless suffering. To console me in those days, they would frequently recite what was probably Karl Marx’s only quotation on love: “If you love someone without evoking love in return and your living expression does not convert yourself into a loving being then your love is impotent, a misfortune.”
But then, and now, I always believed that Karl Marx was wrong on that point. Even one-sided, unproductive love is not a misfortune. It has the potential to produce the most potent love in the world. Love, in whatever stage, in whatever shape, in whatever disguise, is still love. As Ross Heaven writes, love is energy – the most powerful energy. It has to go forward, upward, downward, and in all four directions. My love guided me to the Sufi path.
Love is the only theme, the only objective, the only point, the only centre, and the only core that all of Sufism revolves around. Extended ritual, great sufferings, mortification, and a warrior-like fight against one’s ego are just necessities or