LETTER 63: KEEPING PURE THE PATH OF FAITH

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate!

Dear Brother Shamsuddin, one should keep the path of faith free from any disgrace on one's own part. The thorns of human nature should be cut out, and one's own anger should be snatched from the way. Also, the miseries of human nature should be internally expunged for, as the wise have said, Everyone who strides forth according to his own desire and considers his own ego as more important for him than God cannot become a believer! In this context, how could the question of love even arise?

My ego, without my consent, swept me along. I had thought it was my friend, but it was my deadly foe. Up till now, I have befriended rank and honor, Like a moth that mistakes fire for light!

It is the teaching of the wise that if, even for a moment, the ego is given free rein, it will entwine you with a thousand sacred threads and will place a thousand idols before you. It behooves one never to consider it friendly to you for any person at all. If you contain your ego for a hundred thousand years, but then make even a single move according to its dictates, it will fling your Islam upon the ground.

The grief-filled repentance of a hundred years deceived the monk:

Caught by a single hair, he was drawn to the door of a tavern!

Thus it has been said: If you pay attention to your ego, you will never see God. All the trials of Satan came upon him because he took notice of his own soul. Those who make a claim on God do so as a result of paying attention to their own carnal soul. The audience hall of repentance is for the sake of this work, namely, that a person might advance and be released from the miseries of his own soul. O brother, realize that it is an extremely important duty to preserve one's faith from the misfortunes that arise from one's selfish soul. Except through repentance, this misery is easily aroused. The wealth of repentance has made its appearance from the time of Adam. The garment of Adam was the victory of the door of the court of repentance. Some beloved of God have said: If a hundred thousand treasurers of wealth and eternal bliss had been bestowed upon the descendants of Adam, it would not have been as beneficial as drawing Adam into the royal court of the wrath of God, for 'Adam disobeyed his Lord

(Q20:121) If he had placed the foot of refraining from sin in this royal court of destiny, then certainly the door of repentance would not have been opened up for his descendants. This was the arranging of the power and seclusion of the threshold of There is no god but God, for the reason that a pearl of this quality should be inscribed in the register of honor, for I created him with My own hand! (Q38:75). For such honor there should be no robe or cap less than this, that Adam disobeyed. A poet hinted at what was meant here

Heaven does not strike those who have no resources: It strikes at the foolishness of those richly endowed. Except for you and me, there was no one else in this garden. It was you and I who formed the new shoots of this garden.

Everything in paradise and in the abode of peace that had the power to comfort and delight fell in love with Adam, for the simple reason that, since he had not seen such wonderful things, all the hands of love took hold of his skirt. Adam, with great spiritual resolve, snatched his heart away from them all. It was preferable for him to come to the inn of commands and bear the burden of commands. Paradise, however, is the abode of display, and he could not discover the burden of obedience there. He said: The burden of God is to provide a pretext for me to escape from the clutches of the damsels of paradise! I found liberation in the wheat that was produced as a pretext. A voice was heard in the world Adam disobeyed his Lord (Q20:121). All hands were withdrawn from his skirt. Be careful, lest you call the very foundation of 124,000 prophets a sinner, otherwise, on the Day of Resurrection, your tongue will be cut out! And if you say, It is found in the Quran, 'Adam disobeyed his Lord'. I answer, Yes, so it is! It is also related that Adam's head was raised and that the crown of avoidance of sin was placed upon his head. But as for you and me, and others like us, we can make no such boast. Muhammad Shah Tughluq can say whatever he likes to Khwaja Jahan [his prime minister), but if you or I were to say what he says, our heads would not remain attached to our bodies!

O brother, you have not trodden the path of Adam, and so you cannot carry out what is related about Adam. It was grief lodged in the faith that caught hold of his skirt. An abode of peace was exchanged for one of trials. A voice came, Are you able to fight with Satan? How can you descend by choice? How can you stain a fair name by calling him a sinner? Can you make the sandal of seeking from the very crown of vicegerency? We gird ourselves for all this! he replied, do not on our account cause the grief of this saying to fall into oblivion! Thus did a disobedient one act: He rejected paradise and all its display!

Paradise with its milk and honey, damsels and castles, If bestowed on me without You, would be of no avail. You and I have only reached the stage of feathering our own nests! We are good at serving our own needs, but that is all. We have preached no other sermon than ourselves. It is cupidity that prompts us to find from Adam an inheritance, and yet, unless there is some relationship, there can be no inheritance. It is a long time since we have been ruined, and had the dust of hopelessness and suffering loss poured upon us in bad days. Lift up your hands and say, from an inflamed heart:

Everyone has reached the Kaaba of union with You, But I have remained among the unsuccessful ones. I am like some who, though unworthy of mercy. Can still hope to have the divine curse sent upon them!

Everyone who remains a stranger to the threshold of repentance has no share in all the states that constitute the inheritance of Adam. Take care lest you say that one should repent whenever a sin has been committed. O brother, since we ourselves are sin, it is now necessary to become something else! Have you not heard this?

When I asked what sin I had committed, Love replied: Your very existence is a sin! No other could be greater than that!

What question of sin was there for Moses, who said, I turn in repentance toward You! The Chosen One said Every day I beg forgiveness of God! O brother, just as you and I ought to repent of our wickedness and sins, so do the righteous have to repent of their righteousness! While unfaithful ones have to repent of oppressing others, all faithful and sincere people have to repent of their fidelity and sincerity. We worship ourselves, and have to repent of the way we pander to our own inclinations, while those who are masters of their own hearts have to repent of contemplating their own states. It is the saying of Sufi masters that, just as one should not commit sin, so one should be obedient to prescriptions of the Law and repent of everything. If you say, Sins should be committed first, then the wise say that all the righteousness, redemption, and devotion of the world should be brought forward and, when this is done, be handed over in order to destroy any semblance of independence. The secret is this:

You wish, by reciting the rosary and praying,

To make happy Him who has no needs!

Prayer is nourishment for the long road ahead,

Yet of your prayer He has no need at all!

If tomorrow all kingdoms were to be handed over to a beggar, it would be no cause for astonishment. Tomorrow, the beggars of this community will be brought forward and seated on the divine throne. They will be asked: O man of dust and water! How did you recognize the Lord of the world? They will reply: O God, the entire earth and heaven belongs to You! A word came: I have given everything in heaven and upon the earth to a beggar! They will say: O God, know that Your possession is the divine throne. A word came I have made the throne as a cushion upon which members of the community of Muhammad may recline, that they may realize that my kingship does not rest upon that! It cannot be contained either in your imaginations or understanding. All those graced by a mystic state wish to repent of their knowledge, unity, and mystical knowledge, and even be bound up in repentance, as it were. They repent, with shame, of their own mystical knowledge, but they remain bound to their own insights, and just as those in hell have to hear the distress of fetters and handcuffs, so they too will face shame on account of their restricted understanding of divine unity and gnosis.

When ascetics take Your eyebrow as the direction of their prayer,

Look at all the prayers they neglect, lost, as they are, in astonishment.

If they are asked on the Day of Resurrection how they have dis charged their duty of proclaiming There is no god but God, they will say: We were created slaves of religion. We have been tied in the knot of religion. For us the special quality of the Lord is There is no god but God! They were asked. Whom have We deputized to praise Us, since no one can recognize Him except Him O brother, it is not a work that can be fathomed by any intellect! All intellects and imaginations are useless at this threshold!

Imagination comes back destitute and barefooted, Just as the hand returns empty from His door!

The wise say that, if all the prophets and righteous men upon the face of the earth, as well as the close ones and the sinless ones of heaven, were to exercise their chaste tongues for all eternity in describing His unity, they would end up saying, We repent of whatever we have said

O brother, if the dress of your nature has been sewn from the chastity of all the pure ones, and the sincerity of all the sinless ones, be careful lest you become enamored of it! And if a thousand swords are sharpened with the destructive poison of the divine wrath and you are struck on the head, be careful lest by fleeing you become like that speaker about whom it was said by an inflamed one would to God that my heart were separated from You, or were acquainted with someone else! Yet if it abandoned its love for You, whom would it love? And if it were to abandon Your lane, where would it go.

Anyone in this abode who has not been inflamed with the fire of repentance will certainly have to endure the fire of hell. Everything you know about yourself, whether fault or virtues, should be burnt today in the fire of repentance, so that you might become receptive to this judgment: The person who has repented of his sins becomes like one who has not sinned Then, from an inflamed heart offer this prayer:

O God, have mercy, for we are polluted, stained by the blood of our hearts and livers. We have no power to purchase You with our coins, For we are but an alloy of lead and brass. Be gracious toward us, at least this once, For we are unable to bestow anything upon ourselves.

Every thorn that ought to be removed from the path of religion, if it is not removed today, will some day become an arrow piercing your heart and liver! Do you not see what happened to Moses when he was blessed? God spoke with Moses (Q4:164), and 120,014 words were bestowed upon him without any intermediary, and from the tip of his head to his toenails, all his members became ear, with the result that they heard Him in such a way that, by listening to every word spoken, Moses himself ceased to exist, absorbed as he was with such a total listening. Every time that he became clever, then this wound was inflicted on his heart: O Moses, you killed an Egyptian (Q20:40), Without My revelation you were doomed. If the punishments of the seven divisions of hell had been unfolded before his vision at that moment, they would not have flashed into his mind like that deed of his! It was in such comfort, and after having passed along the way in such a robe of thorns, that Moses resolved to see the divine wealth.

You must also have heard the story of Umar. He drew his sword, came forward, and said: As long as I live, who is there who would dare insult Lat or Uzza? I myself have prayed to Lat and Uzza and have vowed to them that I would go and bring back the head of Muhammad! In a word, from the day he drew his sword, and as good as did the deed, whenever he displayed his fighting prowess on the battlefield in a superior way, a voice used to come to him: Are you not that Umar who came forward with drawn sword to remove the head of the Messenger of God and destroy the kingdom of 'There is no god but God? When he was thus addressed, he used to feel brokenhearted and wish that the earth would split open and swallow him up! His discomfort arose on account of this saying. Every time it was repeated to him, he could do nothing for a whole week. He would go out to the pebble strewn water courses of Mecca and rub his face in the dust and say: O Lord, take away the life of Umar, that he might not have to stare into the mirror of his own oppression! O dust, be upon my head and yours, that Umar was in a church engaged in idol worship, and woe upon this prayer and fast, and upon all work not permitted by God! If it were placed in front of a dog, he would not accept it!

Our days have been marked by depravity and wickedness, And our cup and jug filled with forbidden things. Fortune laughs at our devotion, prayer, and fasting. While we ourselves shed tears!

Peace!

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate!

Dear Brother Shamsuddin, one should keep the path of faith free from any disgrace on one's own part. The thorns of human nature should be cut out, and one's own anger should be snatched from the way. Also, the miseries of human nature should be internally expunged for, as the wise have said, Everyone who strides forth according to his own desire and considers his own ego as more important for him than God cannot become a believer! In this context, how could the question of love even arise?

My ego, without my consent, swept me along. I had thought it was my friend, but it was my deadly foe. Up till now, I have befriended rank and honor, Like a moth that mistakes fire for light!

It is the teaching of the wise that if, even for a moment, the ego is given free rein, it will entwine you with a thousand sacred threads and will place a thousand idols before you. It behooves one never to consider it friendly to you for any person at all. If you contain your ego for a hundred thousand years, but then make even a single move according to its dictates, it will fling your Islam upon the ground.

The grief-filled repentance of a hundred years deceived the monk:

Caught by a single hair, he was drawn to the door of a tavern!

Thus it has been said: If you pay attention to your ego, you will never see God. All the trials of Satan came upon him because he took notice of his own soul. Those who make a claim on God do so as a result of paying attention to their own carnal soul. The audience hall of repentance is for the sake of this work, namely, that a person might advance and be released from the miseries of his own soul. O brother, realize that it is an extremely important duty to preserve one's faith from the misfortunes that arise from one's selfish soul. Except through repentance, this misery is easily aroused. The wealth of repentance has made its appearance from the time of Adam. The garment of Adam was the victory of the door of the court of repentance. Some beloved of God have said: If a hundred thousand treasurers of wealth and eternal bliss had been bestowed upon the descendants of Adam, it would not have been as beneficial as drawing Adam into the royal court of the wrath of God, for 'Adam disobeyed his Lord

(Q20:121) If he had placed the foot of refraining from sin in this royal court of destiny, then certainly the door of repentance would not have been opened up for his descendants. This was the arranging of the power and seclusion of the threshold of There is no god but God, for the reason that a pearl of this quality should be inscribed in the register of honor, for I created him with My own hand! (Q38:75). For such honor there should be no robe or cap less than this, that Adam disobeyed. A poet hinted at what was meant here

Heaven does not strike those who have no resources: It strikes at the foolishness of those richly endowed. Except for you and me, there was no one else in this garden. It was you and I who formed the new shoots of this garden.

Everything in paradise and in the abode of peace that had the power to comfort and delight fell in love with Adam, for the simple reason that, since he had not seen such wonderful things, all the hands of love took hold of his skirt. Adam, with great spiritual resolve, snatched his heart away from them all. It was preferable for him to come to the inn of commands and bear the burden of commands. Paradise, however, is the abode of display, and he could not discover the burden of obedience there. He said: The burden of God is to provide a pretext for me to escape from the clutches of the damsels of paradise! I found liberation in the wheat that was produced as a pretext. A voice was heard in the world Adam disobeyed his Lord (Q20:121). All hands were withdrawn from his skirt. Be careful, lest you call the very foundation of 124,000 prophets a sinner, otherwise, on the Day of Resurrection, your tongue will be cut out! And if you say, It is found in the Quran, 'Adam disobeyed his Lord'. I answer, Yes, so it is! It is also related that Adam's head was raised and that the crown of avoidance of sin was placed upon his head. But as for you and me, and others like us, we can make no such boast. Muhammad Shah Tughluq can say whatever he likes to Khwaja Jahan [his prime minister), but if you or I were to say what he says, our heads would not remain attached to our bodies!

O brother, you have not trodden the path of Adam, and so you cannot carry out what is related about Adam. It was grief lodged in the faith that caught hold of his skirt. An abode of peace was exchanged for one of trials. A voice came, Are you able to fight with Satan? How can you descend by choice? How can you stain a fair name by calling him a sinner? Can you make the sandal of seeking from the very crown of vicegerency? We gird ourselves for all this! he replied, do not on our account cause the grief of this saying to fall into oblivion! Thus did a disobedient one act: He rejected paradise and all its display!

Paradise with its milk and honey, damsels and castles, If bestowed on me without You, would be of no avail. You and I have only reached the stage of feathering our own nests! We are good at serving our own needs, but that is all. We have preached no other sermon than ourselves. It is cupidity that prompts us to find from Adam an inheritance, and yet, unless there is some relationship, there can be no inheritance. It is a long time since we have been ruined, and had the dust of hopelessness and suffering loss poured upon us in bad days. Lift up your hands and say, from an inflamed heart:

Everyone has reached the Kaaba of union with You, But I have remained among the unsuccessful ones. I am like some who, though unworthy of mercy. Can still hope to have the divine curse sent upon them!

Everyone who remains a stranger to the threshold of repentance has no share in all the states that constitute the inheritance of Adam. Take care lest you say that one should repent whenever a sin has been committed. O brother, since we ourselves are sin, it is now necessary to become something else! Have you not heard this?

When I asked what sin I had committed, Love replied: Your very existence is a sin! No other could be greater than that!

What question of sin was there for Moses, who said, I turn in repentance toward You! The Chosen One said Every day I beg forgiveness of God! O brother, just as you and I ought to repent of our wickedness and sins, so do the righteous have to repent of their righteousness! While unfaithful ones have to repent of oppressing others, all faithful and sincere people have to repent of their fidelity and sincerity. We worship ourselves, and have to repent of the way we pander to our own inclinations, while those who are masters of their own hearts have to repent of contemplating their own states. It is the saying of Sufi masters that, just as one should not commit sin, so one should be obedient to prescriptions of the Law and repent of everything. If you say, Sins should be committed first, then the wise say that all the righteousness, redemption, and devotion of the world should be brought forward and, when this is done, be handed over in order to destroy any semblance of independence. The secret is this:

You wish, by reciting the rosary and praying,

To make happy Him who has no needs!

Prayer is nourishment for the long road ahead,

Yet of your prayer He has no need at all!

If tomorrow all kingdoms were to be handed over to a beggar, it would be no cause for astonishment. Tomorrow, the beggars of this community will be brought forward and seated on the divine throne. They will be asked: O man of dust and water! How did you recognize the Lord of the world? They will reply: O God, the entire earth and heaven belongs to You! A word came: I have given everything in heaven and upon the earth to a beggar! They will say: O God, know that Your possession is the divine throne. A word came I have made the throne as a cushion upon which members of the community of Muhammad may recline, that they may realize that my kingship does not rest upon that! It cannot be contained either in your imaginations or understanding. All those graced by a mystic state wish to repent of their knowledge, unity, and mystical knowledge, and even be bound up in repentance, as it were. They repent, with shame, of their own mystical knowledge, but they remain bound to their own insights, and just as those in hell have to hear the distress of fetters and handcuffs, so they too will face shame on account of their restricted understanding of divine unity and gnosis.

When ascetics take Your eyebrow as the direction of their prayer,

Look at all the prayers they neglect, lost, as they are, in astonishment.

If they are asked on the Day of Resurrection how they have dis charged their duty of proclaiming There is no god but God, they will say: We were created slaves of religion. We have been tied in the knot of religion. For us the special quality of the Lord is There is no god but God! They were asked. Whom have We deputized to praise Us, since no one can recognize Him except Him O brother, it is not a work that can be fathomed by any intellect! All intellects and imaginations are useless at this threshold!

Imagination comes back destitute and barefooted, Just as the hand returns empty from His door!

The wise say that, if all the prophets and righteous men upon the face of the earth, as well as the close ones and the sinless ones of heaven, were to exercise their chaste tongues for all eternity in describing His unity, they would end up saying, We repent of whatever we have said

O brother, if the dress of your nature has been sewn from the chastity of all the pure ones, and the sincerity of all the sinless ones, be careful lest you become enamored of it! And if a thousand swords are sharpened with the destructive poison of the divine wrath and you are struck on the head, be careful lest by fleeing you become like that speaker about whom it was said by an inflamed one would to God that my heart were separated from You, or were acquainted with someone else! Yet if it abandoned its love for You, whom would it love? And if it were to abandon Your lane, where would it go.

Anyone in this abode who has not been inflamed with the fire of repentance will certainly have to endure the fire of hell. Everything you know about yourself, whether fault or virtues, should be burnt today in the fire of repentance, so that you might become receptive to this judgment: The person who has repented of his sins becomes like one who has not sinned Then, from an inflamed heart offer this prayer:

O God, have mercy, for we are polluted, stained by the blood of our hearts and livers. We have no power to purchase You with our coins, For we are but an alloy of lead and brass. Be gracious toward us, at least this once, For we are unable to bestow anything upon ourselves.

Every thorn that ought to be removed from the path of religion, if it is not removed today, will some day become an arrow piercing your heart and liver! Do you not see what happened to Moses when he was blessed? God spoke with Moses (Q4:164), and 120,014 words were bestowed upon him without any intermediary, and from the tip of his head to his toenails, all his members became ear, with the result that they heard Him in such a way that, by listening to every word spoken, Moses himself ceased to exist, absorbed as he was with such a total listening. Every time that he became clever, then this wound was inflicted on his heart: O Moses, you killed an Egyptian (Q20:40), Without My revelation you were doomed. If the punishments of the seven divisions of hell had been unfolded before his vision at that moment, they would not have flashed into his mind like that deed of his! It was in such comfort, and after having passed along the way in such a robe of thorns, that Moses resolved to see the divine wealth.

You must also have heard the story of Umar. He drew his sword, came forward, and said: As long as I live, who is there who would dare insult Lat or Uzza? I myself have prayed to Lat and Uzza and have vowed to them that I would go and bring back the head of Muhammad! In a word, from the day he drew his sword, and as good as did the deed, whenever he displayed his fighting prowess on the battlefield in a superior way, a voice used to come to him: Are you not that Umar who came forward with drawn sword to remove the head of the Messenger of God and destroy the kingdom of 'There is no god but God? When he was thus addressed, he used to feel brokenhearted and wish that the earth would split open and swallow him up! His discomfort arose on account of this saying. Every time it was repeated to him, he could do nothing for a whole week. He would go out to the pebble strewn water courses of Mecca and rub his face in the dust and say: O Lord, take away the life of Umar, that he might not have to stare into the mirror of his own oppression! O dust, be upon my head and yours, that Umar was in a church engaged in idol worship, and woe upon this prayer and fast, and upon all work not permitted by God! If it were placed in front of a dog, he would not accept it!

Our days have been marked by depravity and wickedness, And our cup and jug filled with forbidden things. Fortune laughs at our devotion, prayer, and fasting. While we ourselves shed tears!

Peace!