Having concluded his presentation of the story of Leila and Majnun in the previous post, Hazrat Inayat Khan now begins to speak of the moral of love, quoting one of the Sufi thoughts in the first paragraph. In the fourth paragraph, a nautch girl means a professional dancer in the Mughal era.

There is one moral; the love that springs forth from self-denial and blooms in deeds of beneficence.

The orthodox say, ‘This is good, that is bad. This is right, that is wrong,’ but to a Sufi the source of all good deeds is love. Someone may say that this is the source of bad deeds also, but that is not so; it is lack of love.

Our virtues are made of love, and our sins are caused by lack of it. Love turns sins into virtues, and its lack makes virtues meaningless. Christ said when a woman was brought before Him accused of sin, ‘Her sins are forgiven, for she loved much.’ Heaven is made so beautiful with love, and life becomes a hell through the lack of it. Love in reality creates harmony in one’s life on earth and peace in heaven.

A nautch girl was once watching two funerals from her window, and she said to her lover, ‘The first of those two is a soul that has gone to heaven, the second is a soul that has gone to hell, I am sure.’ He said, ‘How can you, a nautch girl, pretend to know a thing only a saint could know?’ She said, ‘I know it by the simple fact that all the people who followed the first funeral had sad faces, and many had tears in their eyes. And all those who followed the second funeral had dry eyes and their faces were cheerful. The first proved that he loved and won the affection of so many, and therefore surely he was entitled to enter the heavens, and the next cannot have loved anybody, for no one grieved at his departure.’

Therefore, as this world is a hell to the loveless, the same hell will become distinct in the next world. If the soul and heart are incapable of love, even a man’s relations and nearest friends are strangers. He is indifferent to them, and dislikes their company.

It is easy to begin to love, and this everybody, more or less, does. But it is difficult to continue to love, because love opens the eyes of the lover to see through the beloved, though it closes the eyes of the lover to all else. First, the more the lover knows the beloved, the more he begins to see the defects as well as the merits, which naturally in the beginning of love casts the beloved down from the high pedestal on which the lover had put her.

Another thing is that besides the attributes that attract the lovers to one another, there are inclinations in each which draw them asunder. The ego always plays a trick in bringing two hearts together and then separating them. Therefore in the world nearly everyone says, ‘I love,’ or ‘I have loved,’ but there are rare cases where love has been ever on the increase since it began. To a real lover it is an absurd thing to hear anyone say, ‘I have loved her, but now I love her no more.’

To be continued…