There are a pair of words often used in Sufi conversations that most would find very difficult to define: one is ‘beauty,’ and the other is ‘soul.’ No doubt everyone can point to ‘beauty’, in other words to a person, a place, an object or an experience that they find beautiful, but it would be impossible to reach universal agreement on any particular example. Remember the moment in the story of Leila and Majnun, when Majnun’s companions question his judgment, telling him that there are other girls more beautiful than Leila, to which Majnun replies that to see Leila’s beauty they must borrow Majnun’s eyes. It is tempting to interpret this to mean that beauty is merely a personal opinion – but if that is so, if beauty is purely subjective, then how are we able to speak of God in absolute terms as ‘the perfection of Beauty’?

As for the ‘soul,’ that is even harder to pin down. More than a hundred years ago one American physician attempted to show, by weighing patients as they died, that the soul was material, but the results were not convincing, and no one has ever been able to present a ‘soul’ or a portion thereof for examination and analysis. So, what is it?

Some people suppose that souls are the ghostly forms said to float around deserted houses or cemeteries on moonlit nights, or they visualise a quaking figure raised from the grave and facing Divine judgment, hoping perhaps to be allowed to fly upward to sit with the angels in the gardens of paradise but in dreadful fear of being cast in the other direction to be roasted by mocking devils. These images seem to equate the soul with our personal history, with all the thoughts and deeds of a lifetime – is that the view in Sufi teaching?

If the soul were only the record of our life, then would we have to say that a new-born baby has no soul? That doesn’t seem to be a satisfactory answer. However, this verse in Vadan Suras gives us a clue :
Verily, the soul has no birth,
no death, no beginning, no end.
Sin cannot touch it,
nor can virtue exalt it;
it has always been and always will be, and all else is its cover
like a globe over the light.
This tells us that although the soul may be dimmed by our personal story, or its radiance modified by certain episodes therein, it is nevertheless pure light, unchanged and unchangeable. It is owing to that purity that when we say, ‘Take us in Thy parental arms,’ it is above all the soul which is our Divine heritage.

The covering over the soul that filters and distorts the light within is what might be called the spirit. This cover casts an impression on the soul, either burdensome or uplifting, but does not alter the soul in any way. Naturally, each person’s spirit is their own, composed of the thoughts and deeds and memories of a lifetime, some more dense, some more translucent – and some, rarely, limpid to the point of transparency.

With this understanding we can now find a link between soul and beauty. In one of the Aphorisms Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan says : Beauty is the depth of the soul; its expression in whatever form is the sign of the soul’s unfoldment. He speaks here of the expression of beauty, which may be perceived in the blooming of personality, but the origin of the expression is the beauty within. In other words, beauty is the light of the soul itself, but since we are generally unable to perceive the light directly, we recognize it in whatever attracts us or touches us most. We see it in the charm of nature, and certainly in loved ones, as Majnun saw it in Leila, but we might put it this way, that he saw her beauty with his beauty, or that her beauty showed him the mirror of his beauty. It was in fact a glimpse of his own soul that he saw, and from that came their epic tale of love. Inevitably beauty awakens love since the power of love’s attraction is the recognition of our similarity.