Good poetry rises out of the heart of the poet like a flame and throws light upon our life–but through the ages our ways of thinking and expression change, so that the light of a poem from long ago may not strike us in the same way as when it was written. Few people now read the sonnets of Shakespeare, for example, despite their graceful musicality and depth of feeling. In the same way, the verses of the Sufi poets, reaching to us across centuries but uprooted from their original language and coming from a culture of which we know little, may seem to us to be exotic oddities, of interest because they are ‘Sufi’ but without much relevance to our daily life. Some may read the poem by Fakhruddin Iraqi posted here in this way–but if we look carefully we may find there is a profound insight in his words.

The poem can be seen as a comparison of the horizontal and the vertical. Iraqi prostrates himself to kiss the earth, in humble supplication before his Lord, but the earth denounces his prayer as lies, even feeling stained by this touch. He visits the gambling den, symbolic of the unspiritual life, and finds kindness and truth, but when he goes to the places of worship, he finds deceit. The implication is that the life of the enemies of God (“Those who are not with me are against me.”), or in other words those who spend their time in pursuing earthly pleasures, those who live on the horizontal plane and do not reach upward, is much easier than the life of the spiritual aspirant who strives to rise to the heavens.

That journey involves a struggle which can only be achieved by throwing aside the self. Until it is cast away, our prayers, heard in ‘the mosque and the temple,’ are deceit, for without realising it we will have two deities in our heart, the Creator and our own ego. To truly rise, we must surrender completely.

This path is most demanding, and very few qualify for it, but for those who tread it, there is no choice.  It is, as the poet says, their fate.