The Case of The Cornell Seven

<p>Since the advent of the #MeToo movement about a decade ago, rape scandals have been a regular feature of the media landscape. The latest such, of which the reader is likely at least passingly aware, is the Cornell Seven case. I won’t rehearse the details of the allegations here beyond the bare essentials. What is alleged is that the accuser was, at a fraternity house party, intoxicated after consuming alcohol, marijuana and ketamine to the point where she was incapable of giving consent, and was subsequently gang raped. The counter-allegation is that such sexual contact as did occur was consensual, bar one young man who claims that <em>he </em>was inebriated beyond the point of being able to consent when the accuser performed a sex act on him.</p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!_WjM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F54f8bf7c-3c60-45be-a98b-56a4d83e8667_335x597.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!_WjM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F54f8bf7c-3c60-45be-a98b-56a4d83e8667_335x597.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!_WjM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F54f8bf7c-3c60-45be-a98b-56a4d83e8667_335x597.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_WjM!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F54f8bf7c-3c60-45be-a98b-56a4d83e8667_335x597.jpeg" width="1456" height="2595" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!_WjM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F54f8bf7c-3c60-45be-a98b-56a4d83e8667_335x597.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!_WjM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F54f8bf7c-3c60-45be-a98b-56a4d83e8667_335x597.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!_WjM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F54f8bf7c-3c60-45be-a98b-56a4d83e8667_335x597.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!_WjM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F54f8bf7c-3c60-45be-a98b-56a4d83e8667_335x597.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!_WjM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F54f8bf7c-3c60-45be-a98b-56a4d83e8667_335x597.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!_WjM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F54f8bf7c-3c60-45be-a98b-56a4d83e8667_335x597.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p></p><p>Commentary on the ongoing case has followed the course which has become exasperatingly predictable in polarized American political socio-discourse. <em>A priori </em>of the facts of any given incident, what has to be evaluated is which side in an alleged transgression aligns with the observers’ political ‘side’. Does a claim, if true, reinforce one’s political narrative? If so, it must be true. Most politically engaged people are, as Jason Brennan has it, “hooligans” who lack the self-discipline to cleave to the truth – even when it is inconvenient or uninteresting.</p><p>This is an unhelpful way to approach issues of such gravity, to say the least. Let us ‘take a step back’ and set the political implications of this alleged gang rape aside. Is the scenario described by the accuser plausible? Yes, clearly so. Unlike, say, the claims of Jussie Smollet, the events described do not, on their face, seem highly improbable. Does the counter-claim, that she regretted the events the next day and – out of shame – fabricated this story, seem wildly unlikely? No, it too seems entirely plausible. Both gang rapes and false accusations are, dispiriting though it may be, not unheard of.</p><p>It is inherent to the nature of the crime of rape that it is very difficult to prove. This is not, as some feminists claim, necessarily because of a pro-male bias (although, when it does exist, such bias clearly does compound the problem) but rather it is integral to the kind of crime that it is. Even if a rape kit is applied immediately afterwards, and even with the presence of injuries, a lack of consent is frustratingly difficult to ascertain. There is, unlike with a murder, rarely definitive proof that a crime even took place. Rape cases often turn on circumstantial evidence. This is why so few rape accusations turn into arrests, and why so few arrests translate into convictions. As galling as it may be that these facts favor victimizers, they remain facts.</p><p>To make matters all the more vexing, lowering the standard of proof simply isn’t an option. Indeed, erring in either direction, that is favoring <em>prima facie </em>either accuser or accused, is impermissible – which distinguishes rape from other policy problems. Consider, for example, global warming. If global warming is false and policy is made as if it is true, the consequence is that money is wasted. If, however, it is true and policy is made as if it is false the consequences are catastrophic. The same is true for abortion – having an unwanted child is a lesser evil than potentially killing a child. Not so with rape. Getting the wrong outcome either way is disastrous.</p><p>What is more, an approach in favor of either party also opens the door to wanton abuse beyond the risk of injustice in the case at hand. Excessive skepticism discourages reporting, consequently allow rapists to escape justice and encouraging further rape. The opposite approach, the well-known injunction to “believe all women”, is probably a good rule of thumb in personal interactions but it cannot be a court’s standard of proof. As a legal policy, this would give any Zuleikah the liberty to ruin whatever Joseph’s life she pleased.</p><p>The foregoing may seem obvious when spelled out, but the enflamed passions around cases like that of Cornell leave one with the impression that the debate is between those who do not believe rape claims are ever mendacious, and those who believe gang rapes don’t happen (or else, that they are only committed by Muslims).</p><p>Whether or not this particular gang rape actually occurred – I do not know. None of us may ever know. Indeed, given all the intoxicants consumed, the people involved may themselves not know. The socially permissive environment fostered by liberal modernity is such that there is great ambiguity around acceptable sexual behavior, consent and what even qualifies as rape. The contention of this essay is that it is more ambiguity than most humans are equipped to deal with.</p><p>Marriage was, speaking generally, taken for granted as the context in which sex occurred in Traditional societies. This was the case even in the case of those societies founded on religions like Buddhism, which do not explicitly prohibit pre-marital sex. Marriage, monogamous or polygamous, has a number of spiritual and social benefits. For the present purposes let us focus on just one. Namely, that it radically reduces the ambiguities around sex. This is not to say that rape or indeed false accusations thereof did not occur in Traditional societies. I just had occasion to make reference to one such incident in the Torah. Nor indeed is it to deny the existence of marital rape. But it is to say that reducing the uncertainty around sex is beneficial to our well-being, and this goes beyond what can straightforwardly be described as rape.</p><p>Is it rape if two (or more, as the case may be) intoxicated strangers have sex, and one of them regrets it the next day? This might not be a fair description of what transpired in Cornell, but this kind of thing is a fairly frequent occurrence and matches at least one version of what happened. Let us say for the sake of argument that it is not rape. Alright. It certainly isn’t a good thing, for anyone involved. It is entirely understandable that people engaging in such activities may feel violated – even if, for the sake of argument, the other party cannot be characterized as a predator. At the best, such scenarios could be characterized as a kind of inversion of the “victimless crime” – there is a victim, but no victimizer.</p><p>The sexual free-for-all of liberal societies does, in fact, often make consent difficult to gauge. If it is permissible for complete strangers, sober or otherwise, to engage in sex with each other with no expectation of future commitment or other necessary limitations beyond consent, this strikes one as a ‘perfect storm’ for unintentionally transgressing boundaries and producing feelings of hurt and degradation. These, even when rape or sexual assault as such does not occur. These are no trivialities. Sex is not a handshake, and bad sexual experiences – even if they are consensual – can be deeply degrading to human dignity. That is, once more, no trifling matter. And this is without considering that such environments make ideal stalking grounds for actual, indisputable sexual predators. To return to the Cornell case, let us assume that a rape did occur. In a social environment where casual sex was not normalized – even glamourized – the men’s alternative scenario, that the victim voluntarily engaged in such activity, would seem far less plausible.</p><p>The solution offered by liberals and feminists of a certain type, that consent should be continually and enthusiastically expressed vocally, is simply detached from reality. This is not how human beings interact in an erotic mode. Much less is such a high degree of responsibility and communication to be expected when intoxicants are introduced into the equation. But wasn’t the problem already solved prior to liberalism? Safety in sex is a reasonable concern, but doesn’t restricting sexual activity to those persons to whom one has a long-term commitment, and therefore a high degree of intimacy and familiarity, solve this problem without reducing the sex act to something performed on a bed of eggshells?</p><p>Indeed, if sexual safety is the primary concern of these types – and not some alternative imperative like maximizing liberty or equality, in the sense of the affirmation that sex differences are a fiction – then why is the following solution never considered? (I should clarify before continuing that I offer this only as a provocation, not a genuine proposal). Why not make it illegal for men, but not women, to have premarital sex?</p><p><a href="https://politicalperennialism.substack.com/p/the-case-of-the-cornell-seven?utm_source=substack&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_content=share&amp;action=share"><span>Share</span></a></p><div><div><div><p>Political Perennialism is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></div><div><div></div><div></div></div></div></div><p></p> <p><a href="https://politicalperennialism.substack.com/p/the-case-of-the-cornell-seven" target="_blank">- Enlace a artículo -</a></p> <p>Más info en https://ift.tt/lvc4Jo0 / Tfno. & WA 607725547 Centro MENADEL (Frasco Martín) Psicología Clínica y Tradicional en Mijas. #Menadel #Psicología #Clínica #Tradicional #MijasPueblo</p> <p>*No suscribimos necesariamente las opiniones o artículos aquí compartidos. No todo es lo que parece.</p>

Five Candles

<div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!QEnA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ac29c71-a52f-4104-9d30-a92a9b52ae79_1009x1800.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!QEnA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ac29c71-a52f-4104-9d30-a92a9b52ae79_1009x1800.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!QEnA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ac29c71-a52f-4104-9d30-a92a9b52ae79_1009x1800.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QEnA!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ac29c71-a52f-4104-9d30-a92a9b52ae79_1009x1800.jpeg" width="1456" height="2597" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!QEnA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ac29c71-a52f-4104-9d30-a92a9b52ae79_1009x1800.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!QEnA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ac29c71-a52f-4104-9d30-a92a9b52ae79_1009x1800.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!QEnA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ac29c71-a52f-4104-9d30-a92a9b52ae79_1009x1800.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!QEnA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ac29c71-a52f-4104-9d30-a92a9b52ae79_1009x1800.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!QEnA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ac29c71-a52f-4104-9d30-a92a9b52ae79_1009x1800.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!QEnA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ac29c71-a52f-4104-9d30-a92a9b52ae79_1009x1800.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>Townspeople examine an elephant in the dark. Folio from a Masnavi of Rumi, India, 1663. Walters Art Museum, W.626.</em></p><p>We open with two Europeans in Iraq a year apart: an Englishwoman with a camera in 1909, and a French scholar who met Hallaj in 1908. Then we cover the five masters selected for our new film, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtmFrocP7PY">Every Sufi Master Explained</a>. Lastly, we explore the two-thousand-year journey of the elephant in the dark.</p><div><hr></div><h3>Gertrude Bell</h3><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!-WAN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3a2cca13-e449-47ac-9b63-1b09c1355dda_1703x992.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!-WAN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3a2cca13-e449-47ac-9b63-1b09c1355dda_1703x992.png"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!-WAN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3a2cca13-e449-47ac-9b63-1b09c1355dda_1703x992.png"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-WAN!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3a2cca13-e449-47ac-9b63-1b09c1355dda_1703x992.png" width="1456" height="848" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!-WAN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3a2cca13-e449-47ac-9b63-1b09c1355dda_1703x992.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!-WAN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3a2cca13-e449-47ac-9b63-1b09c1355dda_1703x992.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!-WAN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3a2cca13-e449-47ac-9b63-1b09c1355dda_1703x992.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!-WAN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3a2cca13-e449-47ac-9b63-1b09c1355dda_1703x992.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!-WAN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3a2cca13-e449-47ac-9b63-1b09c1355dda_1703x992.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!-WAN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3a2cca13-e449-47ac-9b63-1b09c1355dda_1703x992.png"></a></figure></div><p><em>Bab al-Wastani, also called the Khorasan Gate, Baghdad. Photograph by Gertrude Bell, April 1909. Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.</em></p><p>Gertrude Bell went up to Oxford at seventeen and, two years later, became the first woman to take a first-class degree in Modern History. Women were not yet awarded degrees, so the university gave her one retroactively in 1920.</p><p>In May 1892 she arrived in Tehran to stay with her uncle, Sir Frank Lascelles, the British minister there. She wrote home that Persia was “paradise.” She studied Persian with a teacher called Shaikh Hasan, published a book of travel sketches anonymously in 1894, and in 1897 published <em>Poems from the Divan of Hafiz</em>. Hafez is the fourteenth-century poet of Shiraz whose writings about wine and taverns have long been read as a code for mystical intoxication.</p><blockquote><p>Bell did not translate Hafez word for word. She rewrote his poems as English poems, changing the order of lines as she went, so her versions read beautifully but don’t follow the Persian closely.</p><p>Friedrich Rosen, a German scholar who had learned Persian from the same teacher in Tehran, called her translations exquisite. He also noticed that she had quietly borrowed from an earlier German translation of Hafez.</p><p>Because her versions strayed so far from the originals, the Cambridge scholar E. G. Browne later made a list showing which Persian poem each of hers came from.</p><p>More than a century later, her Hafez is still read.</p></blockquote><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!p0x-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F70014586-4aa2-4504-b9e8-02142738acca_605x968.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!p0x-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F70014586-4aa2-4504-b9e8-02142738acca_605x968.png"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!p0x-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F70014586-4aa2-4504-b9e8-02142738acca_605x968.png"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!p0x-!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F70014586-4aa2-4504-b9e8-02142738acca_605x968.png" width="1456" height="2330" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!p0x-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F70014586-4aa2-4504-b9e8-02142738acca_605x968.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!p0x-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F70014586-4aa2-4504-b9e8-02142738acca_605x968.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!p0x-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F70014586-4aa2-4504-b9e8-02142738acca_605x968.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!p0x-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F70014586-4aa2-4504-b9e8-02142738acca_605x968.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!p0x-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F70014586-4aa2-4504-b9e8-02142738acca_605x968.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!p0x-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F70014586-4aa2-4504-b9e8-02142738acca_605x968.png"></a></figure></div><p><em>Poems from the Divan of Hafiz, translated by Gertrude Lowthian Bell. London: Heinemann, 1897. </em></p><p>Bell also climbed in the Swiss Alps. In 1901 she and her guides became the first people to cross a 2,632-meter peak from one side to the other, and it was named after her: the Gertrudspitze.</p><p>The next summer, in August 1902, she tried to climb the Finsteraarhorn, the highest mountain in the Bernese Alps, by its steep north-east ridge. High on the mountain, she and her guide Ulrich Fuhrer were caught in a blizzard. They could neither finish the climb nor get down safely, so they stayed roped together on the rock face for forty-eight hours before they finally made it off the mountain alive.</p><p>Around 1900, living in Jerusalem, Bell put Persian aside and learned Arabic, the language spoken across the deserts she wanted to cross.</p><p>On 5 February 1905 she rode out of Jerusalem, past the Mount of Olives and down through the Wilderness of Judaea to Jericho and the Jordan valley. From there she traveled north on horseback through Ottoman Syria, a province that then took in today’s Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, recording ruins along the way for archaeological journals. She crossed into Anatolia through Cilicia, the plain along Turkey’s southern coast, and ended at Konya, the city where Rumi lived, taught and is buried, and where the dervishes of his order still kept their lodge.</p><p>She called the book of that journey <em>The Desert and the Sown</em> (1907), after the two worlds she rode between: the open desert of the nomads and the farmed, settled land.</p><p>In the spring of 1909 she rode down the Euphrates with a camera. She measured ruins and photographed whatever she passed: Persian pilgrims leading horses through the water channels outside Karbala, the old towns of Hit and Samarra, and the desert palace of Ukhaidir, where the French scholar Louis Massignon had worked the spring before. </p><p>She reached Baghdad where she wrote to her stepmother that very little of old Baghdad could still be seen, “but that little I saw exhaustively.” She talked her way into official buildings to photograph it. One of the things she found was the Khorasan Gate, the last surviving gate of the medieval city walls. It was named for the road that led east toward Khorasan, the region of eastern Iran and Central Asia where many of the early Sufis came from.</p><p>In one of her albums there is a photograph of a dome with a single word written under it: <em>‘Abdul Qadir</em>. It is the tomb of Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, one of the five masters in this issue, on the east bank of the Tigris in Baghdad. The dome has a history of its own. In 1508 Shah Ismail of Iran, whose Safavid dynasty had made Shi’a Islam the state religion, took Baghdad, and the shrine of this Sunni saint was destroyed. In 1534 the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent took the city back, and the next year he had a new domed tomb built over Jilani’s grave. That Ottoman dome is the one in Bell’s photograph, and it still stands.</p><p>She wrote the journey up as <em>Amurath to Amurath</em> (1911). The title comes from Shakespeare’s <em>Henry IV, Part 2</em>, where the new king tells his court “Not Amurath an Amurath succeeds”: Amurath is the Ottoman sultan Murad, and the line means one Ottoman ruler simply replacing another. Bell was traveling in the months after the Young Turk revolution. Her preface opens: “When I was pursuing along the banks of the Euphrates the leisurely course of oriental travel...” Her measured drawings of Ukhaidir became <em>The Palace and Mosque of Ukhaidir</em> (1914), her most important archaeological book.</p><p>In the winter of 1913–14 Bell made her longest desert journey, about 1,800 miles: from Damascus south into Arabia, east across the peninsula to Baghdad, and back to Damascus. Its goal was Ha’il, a walled oasis town in northern Arabia ruled by the Rashid family, who were then fighting a war against Ibn Saud, the future founder of Saudi Arabia.</p><p>The Rashids were also fighting each other. Members of the family had been killing one another for the throne, and the emir when Bell arrived was a boy of sixteen. A companion on the road told her the family had been “ruined by their family quarrels.” She was held as a prisoner in Ha’il for eleven days before being allowed to leave. Only one foreign woman had reached the town before her, the English traveler Lady Anne Blunt. Afterward Bell summed the place up in one line: “In Hayil, murder is like the spilling of milk.”</p><p>The same woman was a founding member, in 1908, of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League.</p><p>During the First World War she was recruited for British intelligence, and from 1917 she served in Baghdad as Oriental Secretary. Iraqis called her <em>al-Khatun</em>, the Lady. She helped install Faisal as king of the new state of Iraq, wrote its antiquities law in 1924, and founded the museum that became the Iraq Museum. Its first real building opened in June 1926. </p><p>She died in her sleep in Baghdad on the night of 11–12 July 1926, two days before her fifty-eighth birthday. The cause was an overdose of sleeping pills, a barbiturate called allobarbital. No one knows whether it was deliberate or accidental. She was found in the morning and buried in Baghdad’s British cemetery at Bab al-Sharji, with considerable ceremony. Sources disagree on whether the burial was that same day or the next.</p><p>She died weeks after the museum she founded opened in its first real building, and shortly before she had planned to retire to England. Her photographs, diaries and letters are held at Newcastle University and can be explored online for free.</p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!kCI2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faa4685ac-a9d0-4ba9-8b04-cd5c269cb32e_1703x992.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!kCI2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faa4685ac-a9d0-4ba9-8b04-cd5c269cb32e_1703x992.png"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!kCI2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faa4685ac-a9d0-4ba9-8b04-cd5c269cb32e_1703x992.png"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kCI2!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faa4685ac-a9d0-4ba9-8b04-cd5c269cb32e_1703x992.png" width="1456" height="848" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!kCI2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faa4685ac-a9d0-4ba9-8b04-cd5c269cb32e_1703x992.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!kCI2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faa4685ac-a9d0-4ba9-8b04-cd5c269cb32e_1703x992.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!kCI2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faa4685ac-a9d0-4ba9-8b04-cd5c269cb32e_1703x992.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!kCI2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faa4685ac-a9d0-4ba9-8b04-cd5c269cb32e_1703x992.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!kCI2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faa4685ac-a9d0-4ba9-8b04-cd5c269cb32e_1703x992.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!kCI2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faa4685ac-a9d0-4ba9-8b04-cd5c269cb32e_1703x992.png"></a></figure></div><p><em>Gertrude Bell and her men measuring the walls of Ukhaidir, March 1909. Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.</em></p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!FrqJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F54a242a9-bcf4-4c1e-af41-85747efb3c10_1703x992.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!FrqJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F54a242a9-bcf4-4c1e-af41-85747efb3c10_1703x992.png"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!FrqJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F54a242a9-bcf4-4c1e-af41-85747efb3c10_1703x992.png"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FrqJ!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F54a242a9-bcf4-4c1e-af41-85747efb3c10_1703x992.png" width="1456" height="848" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!FrqJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F54a242a9-bcf4-4c1e-af41-85747efb3c10_1703x992.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!FrqJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F54a242a9-bcf4-4c1e-af41-85747efb3c10_1703x992.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!FrqJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F54a242a9-bcf4-4c1e-af41-85747efb3c10_1703x992.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!FrqJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F54a242a9-bcf4-4c1e-af41-85747efb3c10_1703x992.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!FrqJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F54a242a9-bcf4-4c1e-af41-85747efb3c10_1703x992.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!FrqJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F54a242a9-bcf4-4c1e-af41-85747efb3c10_1703x992.png"></a></figure></div><p><em>Gertrude Bell’s caravan and other travelers. Iraq, March 1909. Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.</em></p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!0kyq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb37f6757-bc25-4176-b6d9-e6140ee08388_1703x992.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!0kyq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb37f6757-bc25-4176-b6d9-e6140ee08388_1703x992.png"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!0kyq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb37f6757-bc25-4176-b6d9-e6140ee08388_1703x992.png"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0kyq!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb37f6757-bc25-4176-b6d9-e6140ee08388_1703x992.png" width="1456" height="848" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!0kyq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb37f6757-bc25-4176-b6d9-e6140ee08388_1703x992.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!0kyq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb37f6757-bc25-4176-b6d9-e6140ee08388_1703x992.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!0kyq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb37f6757-bc25-4176-b6d9-e6140ee08388_1703x992.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!0kyq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb37f6757-bc25-4176-b6d9-e6140ee08388_1703x992.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!0kyq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb37f6757-bc25-4176-b6d9-e6140ee08388_1703x992.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!0kyq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb37f6757-bc25-4176-b6d9-e6140ee08388_1703x992.png"></a></figure></div><p><em>Diary entry by Gertrude Bell, Karbala. March 1909. Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.</em></p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!pXxj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4da6b69a-465e-49d8-acdd-d1e3d6933aa8_1703x992.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!pXxj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4da6b69a-465e-49d8-acdd-d1e3d6933aa8_1703x992.png"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!pXxj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4da6b69a-465e-49d8-acdd-d1e3d6933aa8_1703x992.png"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!pXxj!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4da6b69a-465e-49d8-acdd-d1e3d6933aa8_1703x992.png" width="1456" height="848" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!pXxj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4da6b69a-465e-49d8-acdd-d1e3d6933aa8_1703x992.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!pXxj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4da6b69a-465e-49d8-acdd-d1e3d6933aa8_1703x992.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!pXxj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4da6b69a-465e-49d8-acdd-d1e3d6933aa8_1703x992.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!pXxj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4da6b69a-465e-49d8-acdd-d1e3d6933aa8_1703x992.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!pXxj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4da6b69a-465e-49d8-acdd-d1e3d6933aa8_1703x992.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!pXxj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4da6b69a-465e-49d8-acdd-d1e3d6933aa8_1703x992.png"></a></figure></div><p><em>From Album L: Ctesiphon, Baghdad, Samarra and Assur, 1909. Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.</em></p><div><hr></div><h3>Louis Massignon</h3><div><figure><div><div><source type="image/webp"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ryR_!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc4fb4f80-a9d3-4b3f-9de9-9758488799eb_150x223.jpeg" width="1456" height="2165" alt=""></source><div></div></div></div></figure></div><p><em>Louis Massignon (1883–1962).</em></p><p>As a teenager in Paris, Louis Massignon became the young friend of J.-K. Huysmans, the novelist who had written <em>Là-Bas</em>, a book about the Satanists of 1890s Paris, and then found his own way back to the Church. Huysmans died in 1907. Massignon, by then, was a lapsed Catholic.</p><p>Soon after, he was in Iraq on an archaeological mission, working at the desert palace of Ukhaidir. In Baghdad he lodged with the Alusi, a family of Muslim scholars, and began reading the trial records of a mystic hanged in their city in 922.</p><p>In May 1908 the Ottoman Empire was in the upheaval of the Young Turk revolution, and officials arrested Massignon as a spy. He was nearly killed and was sent back toward Baghdad under guard on a Tigris steamer. Feverish and in despair, close to taking his own life, he prayed for the first time in years, and the words came out in Arabic: God, help my weakness.</p><p>That night, 3 May 1908, something came to him. For the rest of his life he called it the Visitation of the Stranger. He placed it within sight of the Taq, the great ruined arch of the ancient Persian palace at Ctesiphon, and remembered it rising “like the phosphorescence of a fish rising from the bottom of the deepest sea.”</p><p>He believed he had been carried through it by others: the prayers of the Alusi, the Muslim family who helped save his life, and the prayers of the dead. Among the dead he named Hallaj, the mystic executed in Baghdad in 922, whose trial records he had been reading.</p><p>The Stranger stayed at the center of his thought for the rest of his life. If something sacred had come to him as a stranger, it could come through anyone. He thought of the old story, told in both the Bible and the Qur’an, of three strangers who appear at Abraham’s tent: Abraham welcomes them, feeds them, and only later learns they are divine messengers. Massignon tried to receive every guest and every foreigner the same way, as if they might be carrying something holy. He called it sacred hospitality, and he had first received it himself, from the Muslim family in Baghdad who took him in.</p><p>He came home a Catholic and gave the rest of his working life to Hallaj. In 1913 he published the first edition of Hallaj’s <em>Tawasin</em>. In 1922 came <em>The Passion of al-Hallaj</em>, expanded after his death into four volumes.</p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!gnVt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F11765669-bf0b-47a1-ad41-5c22830dfbac_1420x2387.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!gnVt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F11765669-bf0b-47a1-ad41-5c22830dfbac_1420x2387.png"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!gnVt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F11765669-bf0b-47a1-ad41-5c22830dfbac_1420x2387.png"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!gnVt!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F11765669-bf0b-47a1-ad41-5c22830dfbac_1420x2387.png" width="1456" height="2448" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!gnVt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F11765669-bf0b-47a1-ad41-5c22830dfbac_1420x2387.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!gnVt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F11765669-bf0b-47a1-ad41-5c22830dfbac_1420x2387.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!gnVt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F11765669-bf0b-47a1-ad41-5c22830dfbac_1420x2387.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!gnVt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F11765669-bf0b-47a1-ad41-5c22830dfbac_1420x2387.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!gnVt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F11765669-bf0b-47a1-ad41-5c22830dfbac_1420x2387.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!gnVt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F11765669-bf0b-47a1-ad41-5c22830dfbac_1420x2387.png"></a></figure></div><p><em>Kitab al-Tawasin, edited by Louis Massignon. Paris, 1913. </em></p><p>From Hallaj he took the idea of <em>badal</em>, substitution: taking on the suffering of others, in their place. Sufi tradition uses the plural, <em>abdal</em>, the Substitutes, for a rank of hidden saints whose number never changes, because when one dies another is put in his place.</p><p>Massignon made the idea a way to live. In 1934, at Damietta in Egypt, he and an Egyptian Christian friend, Mary Kahil, vowed to offer their lives for Muslims, in their place, without trying to convert them. They called it the Badaliya. Pope Pius XI, meeting him that year, called him “the Catholic Muslim.” In 1950 Rome allowed him, a married man, to become a priest of the Melkite church, an Eastern church that prays in Arabic. He was ordained in Cairo.</p><p>He took one more idea from Hallaj and handed it on: <em>le point vierge</em>, the virgin point at the bottom of the heart where, in Massignon’s reading of Hallaj, only the divine can enter. Thomas Merton, who never met him but wrote to him from 1959 until Massignon’s death, built one of his best-known passages around it.</p><p>The eighteenth sura of the Qur’an, the same chapter that holds the story of Moses and his mysterious guide Khidr, tells of young men who fled persecution for their faith, hid in a cave and slept for centuries, then woke to a changed world. Christians know them as the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. In 1954, as the war in Algeria began, Massignon founded a pilgrimage for Christians and Muslims together in a Breton hamlet called Vieux-Marché, at a chapel of the Seven Sleepers. The chapel stands on a dolmen. Beside it, a spring runs from seven points. Christians and Muslims still walk there together every July. After Algeria’s independence, the bell of the Catholic cathedral of Algiers was hung in the village church.</p><p>He died on 31 October 1962.</p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JBub!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F10921326-be47-4abc-9379-2f5a6e4f2c2a_960x1707.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JBub!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F10921326-be47-4abc-9379-2f5a6e4f2c2a_960x1707.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JBub!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F10921326-be47-4abc-9379-2f5a6e4f2c2a_960x1707.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JBub!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F10921326-be47-4abc-9379-2f5a6e4f2c2a_960x1707.jpeg" width="1456" height="2589" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JBub!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F10921326-be47-4abc-9379-2f5a6e4f2c2a_960x1707.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JBub!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F10921326-be47-4abc-9379-2f5a6e4f2c2a_960x1707.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JBub!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F10921326-be47-4abc-9379-2f5a6e4f2c2a_960x1707.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JBub!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F10921326-be47-4abc-9379-2f5a6e4f2c2a_960x1707.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JBub!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F10921326-be47-4abc-9379-2f5a6e4f2c2a_960x1707.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JBub!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F10921326-be47-4abc-9379-2f5a6e4f2c2a_960x1707.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>The Chapel of the Seven Saints, built over a dolmen at Vieux-Marché, Brittany. </em></p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!gSkH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2b2d00ce-f5ee-4219-8b05-e8ff18de78cd_2945x3866.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!gSkH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2b2d00ce-f5ee-4219-8b05-e8ff18de78cd_2945x3866.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!gSkH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2b2d00ce-f5ee-4219-8b05-e8ff18de78cd_2945x3866.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!gSkH!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2b2d00ce-f5ee-4219-8b05-e8ff18de78cd_2945x3866.jpeg" width="1456" height="1911" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!gSkH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2b2d00ce-f5ee-4219-8b05-e8ff18de78cd_2945x3866.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!gSkH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2b2d00ce-f5ee-4219-8b05-e8ff18de78cd_2945x3866.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!gSkH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2b2d00ce-f5ee-4219-8b05-e8ff18de78cd_2945x3866.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!gSkH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2b2d00ce-f5ee-4219-8b05-e8ff18de78cd_2945x3866.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!gSkH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2b2d00ce-f5ee-4219-8b05-e8ff18de78cd_2945x3866.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!gSkH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2b2d00ce-f5ee-4219-8b05-e8ff18de78cd_2945x3866.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>The Companions of the Cave and their dog, from a Persian manuscript. </em></p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!3MyM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4766012a-2893-46d4-9dc9-e212efebe99f_3873x2826.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!3MyM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4766012a-2893-46d4-9dc9-e212efebe99f_3873x2826.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!3MyM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4766012a-2893-46d4-9dc9-e212efebe99f_3873x2826.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!3MyM!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4766012a-2893-46d4-9dc9-e212efebe99f_3873x2826.jpeg" width="1456" height="1062" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!3MyM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4766012a-2893-46d4-9dc9-e212efebe99f_3873x2826.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!3MyM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4766012a-2893-46d4-9dc9-e212efebe99f_3873x2826.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!3MyM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4766012a-2893-46d4-9dc9-e212efebe99f_3873x2826.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!3MyM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4766012a-2893-46d4-9dc9-e212efebe99f_3873x2826.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!3MyM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4766012a-2893-46d4-9dc9-e212efebe99f_3873x2826.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!3MyM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4766012a-2893-46d4-9dc9-e212efebe99f_3873x2826.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>Ctesiphon, where Massignon placed his night of the Stranger. Gertrude Bell photographed the arch the following year. Album L, Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.</em></p><p><a href="https://spiritualrelief.substack.com/subscribe?"><span>Subscribe now</span></a></p><div><hr></div><h2>From the Film</h2><h3>Hallaj</h3><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!a1bl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F756ff0f7-694d-4ff4-8c2a-6c36f1108634_1008x1500.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!a1bl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F756ff0f7-694d-4ff4-8c2a-6c36f1108634_1008x1500.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!a1bl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F756ff0f7-694d-4ff4-8c2a-6c36f1108634_1008x1500.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!a1bl!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F756ff0f7-694d-4ff4-8c2a-6c36f1108634_1008x1500.jpeg" width="1456" height="2167" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!a1bl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F756ff0f7-694d-4ff4-8c2a-6c36f1108634_1008x1500.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!a1bl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F756ff0f7-694d-4ff4-8c2a-6c36f1108634_1008x1500.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!a1bl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F756ff0f7-694d-4ff4-8c2a-6c36f1108634_1008x1500.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!a1bl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F756ff0f7-694d-4ff4-8c2a-6c36f1108634_1008x1500.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!a1bl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F756ff0f7-694d-4ff4-8c2a-6c36f1108634_1008x1500.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!a1bl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F756ff0f7-694d-4ff4-8c2a-6c36f1108634_1008x1500.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>The Execution of Mansur Hallaj, from the Warren Hastings Album. Mughal, 1600–1605. Brooklyn Museum.</em></p><p>Hallaj was put to death in Baghdad in 922. Among his poems is one that asks to be killed:</p><blockquote><p>Kill me, my trusted friends, for in my killing is my life. My death is in my living, and my life is in my dying.</p></blockquote><p><em>Hallaj, from the Diwan</em></p><p>In Sufi language, the one who has to be killed is the self, the “I” that stands in the way. When it dies, what remains is what Sufis call the Real. Read after 922, the poem also reads as a description of his own end.</p><p>These two lines carried his name across the Persian world:</p><blockquote><p>I am the one I love, and the one I love is I. We are two spirits dwelling in one body. When you see me, you see Him. And when you see Him, you see us both.</p></blockquote><p><em>Hallaj, from the Diwan</em></p><p>The lover is Hallaj, and the one he loves is the Real. He is saying the two have become one, so that whoever looks at him is looking at the Real.</p><p>In Hallaj’s day, Baghdad’s leading Sufis followed a master named Junayd. They believed that what a mystic finds at the deepest point, the self dissolving and something else remaining, should be kept quiet. You could speak of it only to trusted students, in careful language, and in public you behaved like any devout Muslim. That is what they meant by sobriety: you go through the overwhelming experience and come back composed.</p><p>Hallaj did the opposite. He said it out loud in the streets of Baghdad: <em>Ana’l-Haqq</em>, “I am the Real,” the Real being one of the names of God. To ordinary listeners that sounded like a man claiming to be God. To Junayd’s circle it was a different offense. He had taken an inner experience meant for the few and shouted it to everyone, where it would be misunderstood and put him, and them, in danger. They called it giving away the secret. They did not object to what Hallaj had experienced. They objected to his saying it in the street.</p><p>Hallaj thought the secret could not be handed over in careful words anyway. In his <em>Tawasin</em> he wrote about a moth. The moth that circles the lamp and comes back to describe the light knows something. Only the moth that flies into the flame knows the fire, and it never comes back to tell. Everything short of that is a report.</p><p>Nearly a thousand years later, the report found a reader in Louis Massignon, whose story opens this issue.</p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ASNO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9c5c7cce-fd53-4a93-8c74-f6daf0ec9be8_3603x4586.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ASNO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9c5c7cce-fd53-4a93-8c74-f6daf0ec9be8_3603x4586.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ASNO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9c5c7cce-fd53-4a93-8c74-f6daf0ec9be8_3603x4586.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ASNO!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9c5c7cce-fd53-4a93-8c74-f6daf0ec9be8_3603x4586.jpeg" width="1456" height="1853" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ASNO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9c5c7cce-fd53-4a93-8c74-f6daf0ec9be8_3603x4586.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ASNO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9c5c7cce-fd53-4a93-8c74-f6daf0ec9be8_3603x4586.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ASNO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9c5c7cce-fd53-4a93-8c74-f6daf0ec9be8_3603x4586.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ASNO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9c5c7cce-fd53-4a93-8c74-f6daf0ec9be8_3603x4586.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ASNO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9c5c7cce-fd53-4a93-8c74-f6daf0ec9be8_3603x4586.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ASNO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9c5c7cce-fd53-4a93-8c74-f6daf0ec9be8_3603x4586.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>The execution of Hallaj outside Baghdad. From a life of Rumi illustrated in Baghdad, 1590s. Morgan Library &amp; Museum, MS M.466.</em></p><p>Watch: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WBZi81TCnI">The Birds That Said “I Am the Real”</a></p><div><hr></div><h3>Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani</h3><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!dMmO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa20f7835-dd74-44e4-849e-92bd4c001b70_1703x992.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!dMmO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa20f7835-dd74-44e4-849e-92bd4c001b70_1703x992.png"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!dMmO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa20f7835-dd74-44e4-849e-92bd4c001b70_1703x992.png"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dMmO!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa20f7835-dd74-44e4-849e-92bd4c001b70_1703x992.png" width="1456" height="848" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!dMmO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa20f7835-dd74-44e4-849e-92bd4c001b70_1703x992.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!dMmO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa20f7835-dd74-44e4-849e-92bd4c001b70_1703x992.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!dMmO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa20f7835-dd74-44e4-849e-92bd4c001b70_1703x992.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!dMmO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa20f7835-dd74-44e4-849e-92bd4c001b70_1703x992.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!dMmO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa20f7835-dd74-44e4-849e-92bd4c001b70_1703x992.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!dMmO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa20f7835-dd74-44e4-849e-92bd4c001b70_1703x992.png"></a></figure></div><p><em>The shrine of Abd al-Qadir in Baghdad, captioned in Gertrude Bell’s album with a single name: ‘Abdul Qadir. Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.</em></p><p>In Sufism, the teaching passes from hand to hand. A master places a cloak, the <em>khirqa</em>, on a disciple’s shoulders, and with it the right to teach. Each disciple can name who cloaked him, who cloaked that master, and so on back through the generations. That chain is called a <em>silsila</em>.</p><p>The first hand in Jilani’s chain belongs to a judge. Abu Sa’id al-Mukharrimi was a jurist of the Hanbali school of Islamic law who ran a small school in Baghdad, and he was also the Sufi master who gave the young man from Jilan his cloak. One saying of his has come down to us: <em>The Beloved says, broken ones are my darlings.</em> In Sufi language the Beloved is the divine, and the saying means it comes nearest to those whose hearts have been broken.</p><p>Before he taught, the accounts say, Jilani spent twenty-five years as a recluse in the deserts and ruins of Iraq. When he finally took the pulpit in Baghdad, he said the sentence his order has repeated ever since:</p><blockquote><p>This foot of mine is on the neck of every friend of God.</p></blockquote><p><em>Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, as reported in the Bahjat al-Asrar</em></p><p>A “friend of God,” a <em>wali</em>, is what Sufis call a saint. Jilani was saying that every saint of his time stood beneath him. His followers still call him <em>al-Ghawth al-A’zam</em>, the Supreme Help, the highest rank among the saints. The story goes that at that moment saints across the Islamic world lowered their heads, some of them in cities hundreds of miles away.</p><p>He also looked back two centuries, at Hallaj. “Hallaj stumbled,” Jilani is reported to have said, “and there was no one in his time to take his hand. If I had been there, I would have taken his hand.” He was defending Hallaj and naming what he lacked: a master beside him to steady him at the edge of the fire.</p><p>That hand became the Qadiriyya, the first of the great Sufi orders. Its lineage trees, chains of names running back through Jilani, were drawn up and kept for centuries. The one below comes from a shrine at Dhar, in India.</p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!8R4c!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff9721f73-fd39-46d1-a04f-71605d13c4dd_953x726.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!8R4c!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff9721f73-fd39-46d1-a04f-71605d13c4dd_953x726.png"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!8R4c!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff9721f73-fd39-46d1-a04f-71605d13c4dd_953x726.png"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8R4c!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff9721f73-fd39-46d1-a04f-71605d13c4dd_953x726.png" width="1456" height="1109" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!8R4c!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff9721f73-fd39-46d1-a04f-71605d13c4dd_953x726.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!8R4c!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff9721f73-fd39-46d1-a04f-71605d13c4dd_953x726.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!8R4c!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff9721f73-fd39-46d1-a04f-71605d13c4dd_953x726.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!8R4c!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff9721f73-fd39-46d1-a04f-71605d13c4dd_953x726.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!8R4c!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff9721f73-fd39-46d1-a04f-71605d13c4dd_953x726.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!8R4c!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff9721f73-fd39-46d1-a04f-71605d13c4dd_953x726.png"></a></figure></div><p><em>Qadiri writing, Dhar, India, after 1839. British Library Endangered Archives Programme, EAP1416.</em></p><p>Watch: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6gfB453Grk">What al-Jilani Learned in the Ruins</a></p><div><hr></div><h3>Ibn Arabi</h3><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!vfIF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fca6d7dd5-d2f2-4218-b7bc-3790dec285a2_300x436.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!vfIF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fca6d7dd5-d2f2-4218-b7bc-3790dec285a2_300x436.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!vfIF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fca6d7dd5-d2f2-4218-b7bc-3790dec285a2_300x436.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vfIF!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fca6d7dd5-d2f2-4218-b7bc-3790dec285a2_300x436.jpeg" width="1456" height="2116" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!vfIF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fca6d7dd5-d2f2-4218-b7bc-3790dec285a2_300x436.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!vfIF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fca6d7dd5-d2f2-4218-b7bc-3790dec285a2_300x436.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!vfIF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fca6d7dd5-d2f2-4218-b7bc-3790dec285a2_300x436.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!vfIF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fca6d7dd5-d2f2-4218-b7bc-3790dec285a2_300x436.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!vfIF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fca6d7dd5-d2f2-4218-b7bc-3790dec285a2_300x436.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!vfIF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fca6d7dd5-d2f2-4218-b7bc-3790dec285a2_300x436.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>The Meccan Openings (al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya), from the Konya manuscript corrected in Ibn Arabi’s own hand.</em></p><p>In the eighteenth sura of the Qur’an, Moses follows a mysterious servant of God who sinks a boat, kills a boy and rebuilds a wall, and only afterward explains the hidden reasons. Tradition names this servant Khidr, the Green One. Ibn Arabi counts him among the few who have never tasted death, and Sufis hold that he still appears to seekers and can initiate them directly, with no human teacher in between.</p><p>Ibn Arabi tells, in the <em>Meccan Openings</em>, of a man named Ali ibn Jami’ who lived in an orchard outside Mosul. Khidr had cloaked Ibn Jami’ there, in his garden. In 1204 Ibn Arabi came to Mosul, and Ibn Jami’ cloaked him in the same place, the same way. So the first link in Ibn Arabi’s chain is held to be still alive.</p><p>What he taught is clearest in his own words, from the opening chapter of the <em>Bezels of Wisdom</em>:</p><blockquote><p>The Real willed, from the side of His most beautiful names, which are beyond counting, to see their essences, or you may say, to see His own essence, in a comprehensive being that would contain the whole affair. He had already brought the whole cosmos into existence as a shaped form with no spirit in it, like an unpolished mirror. So the affair required the polishing of the mirror of the cosmos. And Adam was the very polishing of that mirror, and the spirit of that form.</p></blockquote><p><em>Ibn Arabi, Fusus al-Hikam, the chapter of Adam</em></p><p>“The Real” is Ibn Arabi’s word for ultimate reality, and the “names” are its qualities: the Merciful, the Knowing, the Living and the rest. In his telling, the Real wanted to see those qualities, to see itself, so it brought the world into being. But the world on its own was like a mirror that had not been polished. It held everything and reflected nothing. The human being is the polish. Adam here stands for every human being, the one place in the cosmos where the Real sees its own face. This is the doctrine of the Perfect Human, and it is why Ibn Arabi has been called both the Greatest Master and a heretic.</p><p>As a teenager he was summoned by Averroes, chief judge of Cordoba and the great philosopher of his age, who had heard that the boy reached through a single retreat what philosophers reach through reason. Averroes asked whether the two were the same. Ibn Arabi said yes, and Averroes was delighted. Then he said no, and that between the yes and the no, spirits fly from their matter and heads from their bodies. Averroes turned pale. In Ibn Arabi’s telling, the philosopher admitted he had only ever known that state in theory, and thanked God he had lived to meet someone who had it.</p><p>Years later Ibn Arabi watched the philosopher’s funeral pass through Cordoba: the coffin loaded on one side of a pack animal and his books on the other side to balance it. He made a line of verse on the spot:</p><blockquote><p>Here is the imam, and here are his works. Would that I knew whether his hopes were fulfilled.</p></blockquote><p><em>Ibn Arabi, al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya</em></p><p>The question was whether all those books had taken their author where he hoped to go.</p><p>Europe kept the books. Averroes’s commentaries on Aristotle were translated into Latin and read in the medieval universities, where he was called simply the Commentator. Thomas Aquinas wrote against him, and a Florentine fresco shows Averroes seated at Aquinas’s feet. Raphael is traditionally thought to have painted him into the <em>School of Athens</em>, in a turban, reading over Pythagoras’s shoulder.</p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!_9Ur!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc10f3b7a-78af-4407-870a-59309462bbf0_1920x1490.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!_9Ur!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc10f3b7a-78af-4407-870a-59309462bbf0_1920x1490.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!_9Ur!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc10f3b7a-78af-4407-870a-59309462bbf0_1920x1490.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_9Ur!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc10f3b7a-78af-4407-870a-59309462bbf0_1920x1490.jpeg" width="1456" height="1130" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!_9Ur!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc10f3b7a-78af-4407-870a-59309462bbf0_1920x1490.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!_9Ur!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc10f3b7a-78af-4407-870a-59309462bbf0_1920x1490.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!_9Ur!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc10f3b7a-78af-4407-870a-59309462bbf0_1920x1490.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!_9Ur!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc10f3b7a-78af-4407-870a-59309462bbf0_1920x1490.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!_9Ur!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc10f3b7a-78af-4407-870a-59309462bbf0_1920x1490.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!_9Ur!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc10f3b7a-78af-4407-870a-59309462bbf0_1920x1490.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>The figure traditionally identified as Averroes. Raphael, School of Athens, 1509–1511. Vatican Museums.</em></p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!0m_J!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F42afbd11-1dce-464e-a59b-9dff06f2a84c_900x615.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!0m_J!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F42afbd11-1dce-464e-a59b-9dff06f2a84c_900x615.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!0m_J!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F42afbd11-1dce-464e-a59b-9dff06f2a84c_900x615.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0m_J!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F42afbd11-1dce-464e-a59b-9dff06f2a84c_900x615.jpeg" width="1456" height="995" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!0m_J!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F42afbd11-1dce-464e-a59b-9dff06f2a84c_900x615.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!0m_J!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F42afbd11-1dce-464e-a59b-9dff06f2a84c_900x615.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!0m_J!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F42afbd11-1dce-464e-a59b-9dff06f2a84c_900x615.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!0m_J!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F42afbd11-1dce-464e-a59b-9dff06f2a84c_900x615.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!0m_J!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F42afbd11-1dce-464e-a59b-9dff06f2a84c_900x615.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!0m_J!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F42afbd11-1dce-464e-a59b-9dff06f2a84c_900x615.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>Averroes seated beneath Thomas Aquinas. Andrea di Bonaiuto, Spanish Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence, 1365–1367.</em></p><p>Watch: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mbgd3LxQyFE">Al-Khidr: The Hidden Initiator</a></p><div><hr></div><h3>Shams of Tabriz</h3><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!IAau!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0ce3034d-9ffb-4629-954b-b465fa9408b8_739x1260.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!IAau!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0ce3034d-9ffb-4629-954b-b465fa9408b8_739x1260.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!IAau!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0ce3034d-9ffb-4629-954b-b465fa9408b8_739x1260.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!IAau!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0ce3034d-9ffb-4629-954b-b465fa9408b8_739x1260.jpeg" width="1456" height="2482" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!IAau!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0ce3034d-9ffb-4629-954b-b465fa9408b8_739x1260.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!IAau!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0ce3034d-9ffb-4629-954b-b465fa9408b8_739x1260.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!IAau!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0ce3034d-9ffb-4629-954b-b465fa9408b8_739x1260.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!IAau!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0ce3034d-9ffb-4629-954b-b465fa9408b8_739x1260.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!IAau!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0ce3034d-9ffb-4629-954b-b465fa9408b8_739x1260.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!IAau!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0ce3034d-9ffb-4629-954b-b465fa9408b8_739x1260.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>Shams of Tabriz as a Qajar painter imagined him, c. 1840. The inscription reads: Shams of Tabriz, who has been drunk since pre-eternity. Private collection.</em></p><p>“Pre-eternity,” <em>azal</em>, is the time before creation, when, in the Qur’an, God gathered every soul and asked, “Am I not your Lord?” and they answered yes. Sufis call it the Day of Alast. To be drunk since pre-eternity is to have been intoxicated with the divine since before you were born.</p><p>Shams wrote no books. What survives of him, the <em>Maqalat</em>, is what listeners in Konya managed to write down while he talked. The teaching passed in conversation, between two people sitting face to face. Sufis call this <em>sohbet</em>, companionship.</p><p>He ranked love above every kind of piety, including his own father’s:</p><blockquote><p>He was a good man, but he was not a lover. A good man is one thing, and a lover is another.</p></blockquote><p><em>Shams of Tabriz, Maqalat</em></p><p>A “good man” here means pious, honest and law-abiding. A “lover” means someone consumed by love of the divine. For Shams, the first without the second was not yet the path.</p><p>In 1244 he met Rumi, then a respected professor in Konya. In one telling he threw Rumi’s books into a pool. In another, he asked Rumi who was greater: the Sufi Bayazid, who said “Glory be to me, how great is my majesty,” or the Prophet, who prayed “We have not known You as You should be known.” Rumi answered that the Prophet was greater. One mouthful filled Bayazid’s cup, and he thought he had arrived. The Prophet’s thirst grew with every drink.</p><p>After that meeting, Rumi left the life he had built. For about three years the two were inseparable. Then, around 1247, Shams vanished. A tomb in Khoy, in northwest Iran, carries his name, and Konya keeps a shrine of its own.</p><p>Six centuries later, Iran’s court painter Sani’ al-Mulk painted the scene at the pool on a lacquer pen box: a tool for writing, decorated with a man drowning books.</p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ZynO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F98573ed4-7dd6-40b8-9263-0e9d292a3946_3000x1947.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ZynO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F98573ed4-7dd6-40b8-9263-0e9d292a3946_3000x1947.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ZynO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F98573ed4-7dd6-40b8-9263-0e9d292a3946_3000x1947.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ZynO!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F98573ed4-7dd6-40b8-9263-0e9d292a3946_3000x1947.jpeg" width="1456" height="945" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ZynO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F98573ed4-7dd6-40b8-9263-0e9d292a3946_3000x1947.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ZynO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F98573ed4-7dd6-40b8-9263-0e9d292a3946_3000x1947.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ZynO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F98573ed4-7dd6-40b8-9263-0e9d292a3946_3000x1947.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ZynO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F98573ed4-7dd6-40b8-9263-0e9d292a3946_3000x1947.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ZynO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F98573ed4-7dd6-40b8-9263-0e9d292a3946_3000x1947.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ZynO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F98573ed4-7dd6-40b8-9263-0e9d292a3946_3000x1947.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>Pen box with Shams-i Tabrizi casting Rumi’s book into the water. Abu’l-Hasan Ghaffari, Sani’ al-Mulk, Iran, c. 1861–1866. Harvard Art Museums.</em></p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Dr3u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F67b4141f-5454-4bf1-bb20-3f7b0270c145_3603x4586.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Dr3u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F67b4141f-5454-4bf1-bb20-3f7b0270c145_3603x4586.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Dr3u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F67b4141f-5454-4bf1-bb20-3f7b0270c145_3603x4586.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Dr3u!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F67b4141f-5454-4bf1-bb20-3f7b0270c145_3603x4586.jpeg" width="1456" height="1853" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Dr3u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F67b4141f-5454-4bf1-bb20-3f7b0270c145_3603x4586.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Dr3u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F67b4141f-5454-4bf1-bb20-3f7b0270c145_3603x4586.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Dr3u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F67b4141f-5454-4bf1-bb20-3f7b0270c145_3603x4586.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Dr3u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F67b4141f-5454-4bf1-bb20-3f7b0270c145_3603x4586.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Dr3u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F67b4141f-5454-4bf1-bb20-3f7b0270c145_3603x4586.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Dr3u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F67b4141f-5454-4bf1-bb20-3f7b0270c145_3603x4586.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>Shams sees the sun reflected in a pool while Rumi points to the sun itself. Shams means “sun.” Baghdad, 1590s. Morgan Library &amp; Museum, MS M.466.</em></p><p>Watch: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjvSYuSVhn0">The Maqalat: Rumi’s Teacher in His Own Words</a></p><div><hr></div><h3>Rumi</h3><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!NXLR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20d5c945-1390-4193-9a45-13fe31b0fbe6_416x679.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!NXLR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20d5c945-1390-4193-9a45-13fe31b0fbe6_416x679.png"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!NXLR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20d5c945-1390-4193-9a45-13fe31b0fbe6_416x679.png"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!NXLR!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20d5c945-1390-4193-9a45-13fe31b0fbe6_416x679.png" width="1456" height="2377" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!NXLR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20d5c945-1390-4193-9a45-13fe31b0fbe6_416x679.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!NXLR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20d5c945-1390-4193-9a45-13fe31b0fbe6_416x679.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!NXLR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20d5c945-1390-4193-9a45-13fe31b0fbe6_416x679.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!NXLR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20d5c945-1390-4193-9a45-13fe31b0fbe6_416x679.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!NXLR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20d5c945-1390-4193-9a45-13fe31b0fbe6_416x679.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!NXLR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20d5c945-1390-4193-9a45-13fe31b0fbe6_416x679.png"></a></figure></div><p><em>Rumi raising Hamza the flute player. Baghdad, 1590s. Morgan Library &amp; Museum, MS M.466.</em></p><p>A Persian poet signs a poem by working his own pen name into the last couplet. After Shams vanished, Rumi put Shams’s name there instead of his own. The collection is still called the <em>Divan of Shams of Tabriz</em>.</p><p>Then Rumi found what Shams had given him in other people. Walking past the shop of the goldsmith Salah al-Din, he heard the hammer beating gold and began to turn in the street. Years later his student Husam al-Din asked him for a long poem in the old style. Rumi reached into his turban and took out a sheet with the first eighteen couplets already written: the Song of the Reed, the lament of a flute cut from its reedbed, which opens the <em>Masnavi</em>. For the rest of his life he dictated, and Husam wrote it down and read it back to him. Six books came out of that arrangement.</p><p>This is one of its most quoted passages:</p><blockquote><p>I died as a mineral and became a plant. I died as a plant and rose to animal. I died as an animal and I was human. Why should I fear? When was I ever less by dying? Once more I will die as a human, to soar with the angels. And when I am sacrificed from the angel, I will become what no mind has ever imagined.</p></blockquote><p><em>Rumi, Masnavi, Book III</em></p><p>Rumi is climbing a ladder of being: stone, plant, animal, human, angel. Each step up comes through a death, and each death leaves the soul greater than before. The last step, past the angels, is <em>fana</em>, the self passing away into the Real.</p><p>The order his son built read the dervish’s clothes as that same death. The tall felt hat is the tombstone of the ego. The white skirt is its shroud.</p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!1YED!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb2534afd-0763-49ac-a12c-885b45d8f961_3417x1308.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!1YED!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb2534afd-0763-49ac-a12c-885b45d8f961_3417x1308.png"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!1YED!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb2534afd-0763-49ac-a12c-885b45d8f961_3417x1308.png"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1YED!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb2534afd-0763-49ac-a12c-885b45d8f961_3417x1308.png" width="1456" height="557" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!1YED!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb2534afd-0763-49ac-a12c-885b45d8f961_3417x1308.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!1YED!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb2534afd-0763-49ac-a12c-885b45d8f961_3417x1308.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!1YED!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb2534afd-0763-49ac-a12c-885b45d8f961_3417x1308.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!1YED!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb2534afd-0763-49ac-a12c-885b45d8f961_3417x1308.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!1YED!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb2534afd-0763-49ac-a12c-885b45d8f961_3417x1308.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!1YED!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb2534afd-0763-49ac-a12c-885b45d8f961_3417x1308.png"></a></figure></div><p><em>Mevlevi dervishes. Sébah &amp; Joaillier, Istanbul, 1888–1900. Rijksmuseum.</em></p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ok3K!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5356ac28-b96a-40ba-9e56-b8ad5420b6e1_401x669.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ok3K!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5356ac28-b96a-40ba-9e56-b8ad5420b6e1_401x669.png"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ok3K!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5356ac28-b96a-40ba-9e56-b8ad5420b6e1_401x669.png"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ok3K!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5356ac28-b96a-40ba-9e56-b8ad5420b6e1_401x669.png" width="1456" height="2429" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ok3K!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5356ac28-b96a-40ba-9e56-b8ad5420b6e1_401x669.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ok3K!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5356ac28-b96a-40ba-9e56-b8ad5420b6e1_401x669.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ok3K!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5356ac28-b96a-40ba-9e56-b8ad5420b6e1_401x669.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ok3K!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5356ac28-b96a-40ba-9e56-b8ad5420b6e1_401x669.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ok3K!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5356ac28-b96a-40ba-9e56-b8ad5420b6e1_401x669.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ok3K!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5356ac28-b96a-40ba-9e56-b8ad5420b6e1_401x669.png"></a></figure></div><p><em>Sama in a Mevlevi house. Baghdad, 1590s. Morgan Library &amp; Museum, MS M.466.</em></p><p>Watch: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QA6hI467V8">Rumi Said There Is One Thing You Must Not Forget</a></p><div><hr></div><h3>The Elephant in the Dark</h3><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!bSeU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F79d31b3e-7267-4995-8d69-a7bfd484d8f7_960x696.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!bSeU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F79d31b3e-7267-4995-8d69-a7bfd484d8f7_960x696.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!bSeU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F79d31b3e-7267-4995-8d69-a7bfd484d8f7_960x696.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bSeU!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F79d31b3e-7267-4995-8d69-a7bfd484d8f7_960x696.jpeg" width="1456" height="1056" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!bSeU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F79d31b3e-7267-4995-8d69-a7bfd484d8f7_960x696.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!bSeU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F79d31b3e-7267-4995-8d69-a7bfd484d8f7_960x696.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!bSeU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F79d31b3e-7267-4995-8d69-a7bfd484d8f7_960x696.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!bSeU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F79d31b3e-7267-4995-8d69-a7bfd484d8f7_960x696.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!bSeU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F79d31b3e-7267-4995-8d69-a7bfd484d8f7_960x696.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!bSeU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F79d31b3e-7267-4995-8d69-a7bfd484d8f7_960x696.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>Blind Monks Examining an Elephant. Hanabusa Itchō (1652–1724), Japan. </em></p><p>The story is older than every master in this issue, and each teller changed one thing.</p><p>Its oldest known version is in the Pali canon of the Buddha’s teachings. Wandering ascetics and brahmin priests have come into the city of Savatthi, quarreling over whether the world is eternal or not, finite or infinite, whether the soul is the body, whether a perfected one exists after death. These are questions the Buddha refused to answer. The text says the ascetics wounded one another with “mouth-javelins.”</p><p>The Buddha answers with a story. A king of Savatthi once had every man born blind in the city brought before an elephant. Each was given one part. The ones who felt the head said an elephant is a jar. The ear was a winnowing basket, the tusk a ploughshare, the trunk a plough, the body a granary, the foot a pillar, the back a mortar, the tail a pestle, the tuft of the tail a broom. They came to blows over it, and the king, the text says, was highly delighted. Then the Buddha spoke a verse:</p><blockquote><p>Well is it known that some Samanas and Brahmanas, Who attach themselves to methods of analysis, And perceiving only one side of a case, Disagree with one another.</p></blockquote><p><em>The Udana, translated from the Pali by D. M. Strong, 1902</em></p><p>Samanas are the wandering ascetics, Brahmanas the brahmin priests: the quarreling parties from the start of the sermon, each sure his side of the case is the whole of it.</p><p>More than a thousand years later, the Persian poet Sanai of Ghazni, who died around 1131, retold it in his <em>Walled Garden of Truth</em>. In his version a whole city in the mountains of Ghur is blind. A king camps on the plain outside with a great elephant. A few of the blind go out, feel it, and come home, and the whole city gathers around them to hear what the elephant is like. The ones who touched it become the teachers, and everyone else learns the elephant secondhand.</p><blockquote><p>Every one had seen some one of its parts, and all had seen it wrongly. No mind knew the whole. Knowledge is never the companion of the blind. All, like fools deceived, fancied absurdities. Men know not the Divine essence; into this subject the philosophers may not enter.</p></blockquote><p><em>Sanai, Hadiqat al-Haqiqa, translated by J. Stephenson, 1910</em></p><p>In Sanai’s version the elephant is the “Divine essence,” and the city of the blind is everyone who argues about it from hearsay, the philosophers first among them.</p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5Qmp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcdff22ae-6bfc-4ac6-8b45-163bea2f1fbd_1478x1146.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5Qmp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcdff22ae-6bfc-4ac6-8b45-163bea2f1fbd_1478x1146.png"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5Qmp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcdff22ae-6bfc-4ac6-8b45-163bea2f1fbd_1478x1146.png"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5Qmp!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcdff22ae-6bfc-4ac6-8b45-163bea2f1fbd_1478x1146.png" width="1456" height="1129" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5Qmp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcdff22ae-6bfc-4ac6-8b45-163bea2f1fbd_1478x1146.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5Qmp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcdff22ae-6bfc-4ac6-8b45-163bea2f1fbd_1478x1146.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5Qmp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcdff22ae-6bfc-4ac6-8b45-163bea2f1fbd_1478x1146.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5Qmp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcdff22ae-6bfc-4ac6-8b45-163bea2f1fbd_1478x1146.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5Qmp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcdff22ae-6bfc-4ac6-8b45-163bea2f1fbd_1478x1146.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5Qmp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcdff22ae-6bfc-4ac6-8b45-163bea2f1fbd_1478x1146.png"></a></figure></div><p><em>The First Book of the Hadiqatu’l-Haqiqat, translated by J. Stephenson. Calcutta, 1910. </em></p><p>About a century after Sanai, Rumi put the story in the third book of the <em>Masnavi</em>. In his telling, Hindus have brought the elephant to put on show, so the animal arrives from the country the story came from. And no one in the room is blind.</p><blockquote><p>The elephant was in a dark house. Some Hindus had brought it to show. Many people went into that darkness to see it. Since seeing it with the eye was not possible, each one felt for it in the dark with the palm of his hand. One man’s hand fell on the trunk. He said, “This creature is like a water pipe.” Another’s hand touched its ear. To him it seemed like a fan. Another took hold of its leg. He said, “I found the elephant’s shape is like a pillar.” Another laid his hand on its back. He said, “This elephant is like a throne.” Their words differed because of where each one stood. One called it <em>dal</em>, another called it <em>alif</em>. If there had been a candle in each one’s hand, the difference would have gone out of their words. The eye of the senses is only like the palm of the hand. The palm cannot reach the whole of it. The eye of the sea is one thing, and the foam another. Leave the foam and look with the eye of the sea.</p></blockquote><p><em>Rumi, Masnavi, Book III</em></p><p><em>Dal</em> and <em>alif</em> are two letters of the Arabic alphabet. <em>Dal</em> is bent. <em>Alif</em> is a single straight stroke, and the first letter of the name of God. The foam is the world of separate forms on the surface. The sea is the one reality moving underneath them. To look “with the eye of the sea” is to see from the whole instead of from the part your hand happens to be on.</p><p>Sanai’s people are blind, and blindness is permanent. Rumi’s people are in the dark, and darkness can be lit. The candle is seeing for yourself, instead of feeling your way through other people’s descriptions.</p><p>The story kept traveling. In nineteenth-century Bengal, the mystic Ramakrishna told it with a sighted passer-by who settles the quarrel by saying the elephant is all of these things at once. Men quarrel about religion the same way, he said, each having seen a different aspect of God. In the same century the Vermont poet John Godfrey Saxe turned it into comic verse about “six men of Indostan,” and that is the version most English speakers learned:</p><blockquote><p>So, oft in theologic wars The disputants, I ween, Rail on in utter ignorance Of what each other mean, And prate about an Elephant Not one of them has seen!</p></blockquote><p><em>John Godfrey Saxe, “The Blind Men and the Elephant”</em></p><p>Tolstoy put it in his fables for children. In Edo-period Japan, Hanabusa Itchō painted blind monks running their hands over the animal.</p><p>The Buddha’s king laughs at the blind men. Sanai’s king rides on. In Rumi’s room there is no king at all, only the candle nobody thought to bring.</p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!YpmQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7ab3710-1373-4540-8ad3-104c2b9b94ff_1009x1800.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!YpmQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7ab3710-1373-4540-8ad3-104c2b9b94ff_1009x1800.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!YpmQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7ab3710-1373-4540-8ad3-104c2b9b94ff_1009x1800.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YpmQ!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7ab3710-1373-4540-8ad3-104c2b9b94ff_1009x1800.jpeg" width="1456" height="2597" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!YpmQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7ab3710-1373-4540-8ad3-104c2b9b94ff_1009x1800.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!YpmQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7ab3710-1373-4540-8ad3-104c2b9b94ff_1009x1800.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!YpmQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7ab3710-1373-4540-8ad3-104c2b9b94ff_1009x1800.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!YpmQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7ab3710-1373-4540-8ad3-104c2b9b94ff_1009x1800.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!YpmQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7ab3710-1373-4540-8ad3-104c2b9b94ff_1009x1800.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!YpmQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7ab3710-1373-4540-8ad3-104c2b9b94ff_1009x1800.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>The elephant in the dark house, from a Masnavi copied in India, 1663. Walters Art Museum, W.626.</em></p><p>Watch: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtmFrocP7PY">Every Sufi Master Explained</a></p><div><hr></div><div><div><div><p>SpiritualRelief Journal is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></div><div><div></div><div></div></div></div></div> <p><a href="https://spiritualrelief.substack.com/p/five-candles" target="_blank">- Enlace a artículo -</a></p> <p>Más info en https://ift.tt/lvc4Jo0 / Tfno. & WA 607725547 Centro MENADEL (Frasco Martín) Psicología Clínica y Tradicional en Mijas. #Menadel #Psicología #Clínica #Tradicional #MijasPueblo</p> <p>*No suscribimos necesariamente las opiniones o artículos aquí compartidos. No todo es lo que parece.</p>