Muslim mystics treat God as love, lover, and beloved simultaneously. According to Sufi belief, the creation of the world was necessitated by God as the lover’s wish to contemplate Himself as the beloved. Therefore, created beings that contemplate the Real P esence and, through this contemplation, fall in love with Him, ultimately must be viewed as countless mirrors in which the Absolute Being contemplates itself in order to express its love to itself.
On a fundamental level, the dichotomy lover-beloved does have a degree of reality as a spiritual seeker who is striving to achieve union with his object of desire. Having already tasted something of the promised union, the lover still perceives himself as an entity different from the beloved—the metaphorical (ma-jazi) beloved still veils from him the true one. This metaphorical beloved, that is to say, the beloved human being, however, is supposed to serve as a catalyst that purifies the lover from the properties of plurality of forms and speeds up his movement toward the oneness of meaning.
As long as the distinction between the lover and the beloved remains in place, their relationship is usually described as “[pretended] indifference and need” (Persian nazu niyaz). However, as Jala1 al-DIn Rum! points out, being a lover or a beloved is a relative affair and depends on the aspect of consideration (Rum! 1925, 106).
That said, on the outward level, the lover-beloved relationship appears as total submission on the part of the lover and complete dominance on the part of the beloved. The beloved never ceases to test the lover’s faithfulness, subjecting the lover to tribulations. The lover, though, is happy to undergo these trials, because they are regarded as a sign of the beloved’s attention and jealousy. If the lover is allowed to sit in the dust before the beloved’s dwelling and enjoy the company of the dogs of his/her street, the former considers this as the beloved’s exceptional favor. More frequently, however, the lover is sent away to a distant place, to wait patiently for the tidings from the beloved. The eastern breeze (saba’) then acts as a messenger between them, but even it is often denied access to the presence of the beloved.
The lover’s encounters with the beloved are rare and brief, and therefore every detail acquires extreme importance and becomes an object of reflection. The Sufis developed an elaborate symbolism of the lover-beloved relationship, as well as that of the appearance of the beloved.
Sufi texts describing metaphorical love leave plenty of room for speculation. It is impossible to discern whether one is presented with subtle and refined eroticism, or the description of the mystic’s relationship with God. To make matters even more confusing, the Persian language has no genders, wherefore the gender of the metaphorical beloved can never be established with certainty.
