The Sawanih al-’ushshaq is the title of the first treatise on mystical love in the Persian language. It was composed by Ahmad al-Ghazali (d. 1126), whose more-celebrated elder brother, the Muslim Sunni theologian Abu Hamid Muhammad Ghazali (d. 1111), authored the famous Ihya’ ‘ulum al-din (Revivification of the Sciences of Religion).
Ahmad stood squarely in the center of both the Khurasanian and Baghdadian schools of Sufism. The influences of both Bayazid Bis-tami (d. 875) and Kharaqani as well as those of Mansur al-Hallaj (d. 922) and Abu’l-Qasim al-Junayd (d. 910) are clearly visible in his writings. He was the teacher of two important figures in the history of Sufism in particular: Abu’l-Najib al-Suhrawardi (d. 1168), who was in turn the master of his nephew Shihab al-Din Abu Hafs ‘Umar Suhrawardi (d. 1234), founder of the Suhrawardi order, famed as the “Mother of Sufi Orders.” He was also the master of the enigmatic mystical theologian ‘Ayn al-Qudat al-Hamadhani, who was executed in 1132 by fanatical Muslim clerics for the uncompromising Sufi beliefs that he expressed in his Tamhidat, a voluminous commentary on his master’s Sawanih. Today Ahmad al-Ghazali features as a central figure in the initiatic chains of most of the great Islamic Sufi orders.
The Sawanih is a short work on the spiritual psychology of divine love couched in the terminology of human erotic relationships. In this work, Ghazali followed Hallaj in identifying love with the Absolute Being as well as with ruh (the divine spirit). The main subject of Ghazali’s philosophy is ‘ishq (passionate love), which is not formally speaking Falsafa (philosophy), but comprises a sort of erotic theosophy apprehended by intuitional means (dhawq), and based on contemplative experience rather than rational meditation and deliberation.
Expressing little of the same animosity to Peripatetic philosophy manifested by his famous brother, almost all his teachings are set in the context of commentary on Qur’anic verses and Hadith (prophetic traditions). Ghazali deliberately abstained from using any overt philosophical vocabulary in the Sawanih, employing instead terminology from a number of other fields—ethics, erotic poetry, psychology, and others (Pourjavady 1979, 91-99).
In Ghazali’s metaphysics of love, there seems to be little or no differentiation between human and divine love. This approach is unlike that of Christian theological doctrine, which distinguished strictly between divine agape and human eros, holding the second to be a debased form of the first, and only indulged at the expense of the former. Thus, it is virtually impossible with Ghazali to distinguish between the metaphysics of the spirit and the erotics of the flesh. He maintained that these various forms of ‘ishq (love) differ only in degrees of intensity, not in kind; love to him is a single reality composed of various analogical graduations of intensity and weakness.
Nonetheless, in the Sawanih (Ritter 1989, 53-54) he states that ‘ishq-i khalq (human love) is finite and limited, and seldom—rather, never—penetrates the heart’s deepest core, for it proceeds from the outward and goes inward (toward God), in contrast to the pre-eternal love of the “divine covenant” which proceeds from within (from God) and goes out. By within, Ghazali refers here to the pre-eternal covenant mentioned in the Qur’an (7:172), wherein God asks the yet uncreated souls of Adam’s offspring, “Am I not your Lord?” and the souls in their unconscious, uncreated state reply, “bala” (yes), thus establishing their ongoing, immortal love-relationship with God.
There are three basic types of love: love of humans for God; love of God for humans; and love of God for himself. This threefold division of love was later adopted by Ghazali’s disciple, ‘Ayn al-Qudat Hamadhani, in his Tamhidat (Pourjavady 1979, 129-130). In the Sawanih, Ghazali declares that his discussion of love does not refer to either of the first two types of love, but to cosmic divine love itself. Referring to the Qur’anic verse “yuhibbuhum wa yuhibbunahu” (He loves them and they love Him) (Qur’an 5:54), Ghazali compares God’s love for humankind (them) to a seed sewn in pre-Eternity sprouting up in the tree of “they love Him” (Ritter 1989, 82). Hence, since there is only one love that pervades the hearts of human beings according to Ghazali, all love is ultimately spiritual, because all love ultimately originates from the bargah-i jan (Spirit’s Court).
Love hails from qidam (Eternity), having descended down from a state of intimate converse and covenant with God into the temporal realm of wujud (being) where it is incarnated in two forms: (i) ma’shuq (the beloved), who is described as the saz-i wisal (instrument of union), and who is a manifestation of beauty; and (ii) ‘ashiq (the lover), who is described as the saz-ifiraq (instrument of separation).
The latter—’ashiq, the lover—is the person who apprehends and contemplates beauty and who has personally verified the reality of divine unity (tawhid) on the psychospiritual level of the Spirit (Pourjavady 1979, 197). Yet in its own essence, love itself “is independent of all these attachments and causes [that is, beloved and lover]” (Sawanih 1989, 61).
Love is also described as sukr—”an intoxication in the very organ of apprehension, which is itself an obstacle to obtaining perfect apprehension.” This intoxication initially exalts but ultimately inhibits the idrak (suitor’s apprehension) of his beloved, since his giddy vision of her qualities impedes his deeper comprehension of her essence. Although this is reminiscent of Socrates’ prayer “that those things that pertain to the body may not impede the beauty of the soul” (Plato 2002, 279b-c), Ghazali’s doctrine of intoxication alludes to something more profound. In fact, it is the central theme of Sufi epistemology—which he sums up in the Arabic adage “al-’ijz ‘an darak al-idrak idrakan” (the inability to apprehend apprehension comprises apprehension) (Sa-wanih 1989, 74-75). That is to say, the summit of knowledge lies in a kind of drunken inapprehension that equates to apprehension without any of the limitations of subjective consciousness. And that view is, by the way, the original Muslim mystic’s version of Saint de la Cruz’s no saber sabiendo . . . toda sciencia trascendiendo (knowing without knowing . . . all knowledge transcending) (Cuevas 1988, 103-104).
This degree of intoxication with the beloved transcends both separation and union—states that pertain only to the early stages of love. Both those states relate to a knowledge gained through imagination, but when the presence of the beloved is intuitively known in the deepest level of the heart, even that imagined knowledge vanishes. On this level, wherein the mudrak-i khiyal (object of apprehension of the imagination) has become itself the very mahall-i khiyal (locus of imagination)—which Ghazali calls yaft in Persian or wajd in Arabic (realization or attainment)—one obtains “realization without consciousness of realization” (Sawanih 1989, 49-50).
Thus, ‘ilm (knowledge) is unable to grasp ‘ishq (love). Ghazali compares the former to the shore of the sea and the latter to a pearl in an oyster buried in its lowest depths. Forever shorebound in immanence, neither ‘aql (dry reason) nor ‘ilm (barren knowledge) can ever access or apprehend the transcendent truths of Love’s apophatic teachings. The farthest reach of knowledge remains the dry bank of love’s ocean. Knowledge is also likened to a moth and love to a candle: Any “knowledge” that the moth possesses of flame is purely exoteric and external, seeing that all its understanding is consumed away and vanishes once that knowledge enters the fire.
If, as Ghazali says, love is beyond knowledge, it is also supraontological—beyond being. Ghazali paradoxically describes this understanding of love that is beyond knowledge as being a kind of surmise or conjecture (Arabic: zann; Persian: guman). This conjectural wisdom is higher than yaqin (certainty), for it is only that surmise or conjecture that can swim love’s ocean to dive under in pursuit of its pearl (Sawanih 1989, 11-14).
Despite its strange, transcendent nature, love can be discerned intuitively through the faculty of imagination. In chapters 37-38 of the Sawanih, Ahmad Ghazali explains that “sometimes [Love] makes an appearance through the zulf (curl), sometimes by the khatt (down), sometimes by the khal (beauty-spot or mole), sometimes by the qadd (lofty stature), sometimes by the dida (eye), sometimes by the ru’y (face), sometimes by the ghamza (coquettish glance), sometimes by the beloved’s laugh, and sometimes by her reproach. Each of these ma’ani (spiritual realities) is a sign testifying to the quest of the lover’s soul.”
Many later important works of erotic spirituality were composed in the same vein as the Sawanih and penned in imitation of its style, vocabulary, and terminology, copying its topics and themes. Because of the erotic mysticism of his Sawanih and the many works of imitations it spawned, Ahmad Ghazali is today generally regarded as the foremost metaphysician of love in the Sufi tradition. He is celebrated as the founder of the literary genre and mystical persuasion known as madhhab-i ‘ishq (the religion of love) in Islam.
