Sol 5.6

  1. The eye of Reality has no beholder

    save one among seventy thousand.

  2. A rare one—no sound judgment can encompass him.

    How many a seeker has lost his way in the wilderness of the Path!

  3. The sea of Reality brims and roars;

    even Ibn Arabi was cast off by its waves,

  4. and al-Hallaj, by his own utterances, made his execution binding.

    May my Lord have mercy on him: he was a devout worshipper.

  5. He was rightly killed, though in truth

    he followed the Way in accordance with the Sacred Law.

  6. Each of the two sides had its warrant:

    slayer and slain, each had their purposes.

  7. They took the outward sense of his saying and judged

    that he be killed—the jurists—but they did not know

  8. that beyond every knower lies knowledge beyond knowledge.

    They are the champions of the Faith; none opposes them.

  9. He did say, “I am the Truth,” and the intended sense follows—

    men of the Unseen—which is prior?

  10. This is my substantiated defense

    of him: let us neither overreach nor contend.

  11. And the spiritual states deepened his bewilderment

    until he broke into ecstatic speech, saying what he said.

  12. A learned gnostic, pure in deeds,

    he spoke of what he used to behold.

  13. He said, “Glory be to me!”—words with meanings

    of which God tells in another discourse.

  14. This is the very text of al-Ghazali, master of meanings—

    Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Hamid.

  15. Likewise, the imam of the Faith, foremost among his peers,

    the virtuous Abd al-Qadir al-Iraqi,

  16. gave cups of union and encounter to drink.

    He too wandered, enraptured, in his prose and poems.

  17. Yet none of them departed from the Sacred Law.

    How then could one slip, when obedient to him are

  18. his ego, his appetites, and nature itself?

    The perfect gnostics are indeed illustrious.

  19. Oh, blessed is that bewilderment! If only one who has

    a draught of it might cool through union his burning thirst—

  20. by the honor of him whom the Lord of heaven exalted:

    Muhammad the Praised, possessor of all praiseworthy qualities.

Sol 5.6