The Sufi Meaning Of Layla And Majnun's Legend.

Hafiz said, "Piety and moral goodness have naught to do with ecstasy; stain your prayer-rug with wine."

This wine that Hafiz talks of is the wine of Divine Love and the intoxication of being besotted with none other than the Beloved himself.

"Love were as though a wine bearer filling the cups of the hearts to the brim; Lovers drink whatever is poured for them and grow drunk without understanding why!"

If madness is to be consumed by love like the moth immolates itself in the fires of its desire, then Majnun or Qays was mad.

He became an exile from the land of happiness. Good or evil, right or wrong had no meaning anymore----he was simply a lover. He exclaimed, "Love is all I have, all I am, and all I ever want to be."

He would say, "One name is better than two." ""If you know the reality of Love you would know that if you scratch a Lover, you find his Beloved."

"The name is a shell and nothing more. It is what the shell hides that counts. I am the shell, Layla is the pearl. I am the veil, she is the face beneath it."

Majnun became the proverbial madman who has lost consciousness in the face of his Beloved. He is the lover who is totally annihilated in the Beloved’s being. This annihilation is the secret to union.

It is said that Love is the strongest force in existence because it is out of Love that existence was born, and through Love that it is being sustained. Love has the power to make one forget all else excepting the thought of the object of Love. Therefore, on the Path of Self-Realisation, Love becomes an effective tool for the forgetting of the personal self. A person in love does not care about his comfort or sleep and is day and night only occupied in the contemplation of his Beloved. What is needed on the Path to Realisation is the same forgetfulness of personal needs and the desperate desire for the meeting with the True Beloved.

Wherever the Army of Love sets foot, it does not rest until razing all to the ground, decimating and routing every impulse, desire and element other than the yearning for the Beloved. It is not until the Beloved sees only His Face in the mirror of the Lover’s heart, and hears His Name alone in his heartbeats, that He deigns to turn His attention towards His Lover. When the state of the Lover is such that the one looking at him is reminded more of his Lover than himself, one knows that the Beloved has come to abide in him. That is why it is said that the true people of Allah are those who when looked upon remind one of Allah.

We like Majnun, have to be mad enough in Divine Love, that we lose consciousness of the self and find our Self in the Beloved.

Sufism is essentially the Path of Love, and the seeker is the lover in search of the Eternal Beloved. When the lover and the Beloved unite all that remains is Love. All that remains is the One, all that there is, is the Real.

Amat-un-Nur. 15th Sept. 2008.