LOVE'S FAITHFUL

(Quoted from the book:) Al-Mas‘udi, another Arabic wise man, contemporary of Ibn Hazm, regales us with yet another example of the same belief when, alluding to his beloved, he proclaims: “My soul was bound to hers before we were created.” And a Sufi sage (a sage who adheres to Sufism, the biggest strand on the “reverse side” of Islam), the Persian Ruzbihan Baqli of Shiraz will, one century later, express an identical conviction in his treatise on mystical love The Jasmine of the Fedeli d’Amore (The Jasmine of the Love’s Faithful)… But first, what are The Love’s Faithful? “Love’s Faithful” is what numerous ancient sages and poets of mystical temperament, both in the East and the West, often called themselves. These ancient sages, Blanca, were protectors of a belief essential to the theory of twin souls: the belief that erotic love has its ontological roots in Divinity. The Love’s Faithful served as a secular religion: a religion without temples, or Scriptures, priests, or dogmas. A secret religion where they worshipped God under the name of Love (which is the most appropriate name for Him, my dear, for, as A. Afifi explains, to these mystics “love is not an abstract quality superadded to [God’s] Essence”, but rather “the reality of love is identical to the Essence”) and access to God wasn’t achieved through meditation, but through human love.

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