Love & Beauty made a pact in pre-eternity never to be separate from one another

Ruzbihan Baqli of Shiraz in Iran in Persia (1128-1209) writes:

"love and beauty made a pact in pre-eternity never to be separate from one another."

LOVE & BEAUTY MADE A PACT IN PRE-ETENITY
NEVER TO BE SEPARATE FROM ONE ANOTHER

Love and Beauty made a pact in pre-eternity
never to be separate from one another.

Hermeneuitics of Immortality
Ruzbihan Baqli of Shiraz in Iran in Persia (1128-1209) writes:
"Love and Beauty made a pact in pre-eternity never to be separate from one another."
Mughal Prince Dara Shikuh commissioned a translation of Ruzbihan's commentary on the Qur'an, The Brides ofr Elucidation.
Chishti Shykh ‘Aziz Allah (d. 975/1567-8) taught his students the Brides of Elucidation.
Khwaja Ghulam Farid the Great Chishti master of the Punjab lectured to his students on the commentary on the Qur'an. The contemporary popular scholar and shakh Dr.. Javad Nurbaksh frequently quotes Ruzbihan.
RUZBIHAN WROTE THE BRIDES OF ELUCIDATION OF THE EXEGESIS OF THE QUR'AN ('ARA'IS AL-BAYAN)

Ruzbihan was awe-inspiring and charismatic. He feared God. He lived the "ihsan" or "doing the beautiful" that come up in the hadith of Gabriel. The Prophet Muhammad says that how to practice virtue or how to do the beautiful is to act as if you see God and that is you don’t see him know that he sees you. This has two parts. First act as if you see God. Can you imagine acting as if you see God? Second it asks you that if you don’t see God then to know that he sees you. How often do we find out or know or experience or believe that God is watching us? Ruzbihan celebrated God as passionate love (‘ishq) and beauty (jamal).

Every day Ruzbihan would experience an unveiling from the spiritual world. These unvelings were vividly real – even if different – ways of seeing the world. We must assess these against Ruzbihan’s own model of the stations and their relationship to each other.
Ruzbihan’s grandson Shamsuddin writes about his great grandfather Ruzbihan Baqli, the Shining Faced Grocer.

“His face was always so beautiful that anyone who saw him was freshened and quickened in spirit, and would see the trace of sainthood on his forehead which was the reflection of his blessed interior made external.” (Ernst, 1996, p. 6)

Another great-grandson writes with awe and projects awe. Sharafuddin writes:
“The master had a fine appearance, but awe-inspiring, and most of the time he was cheerful; for him hope was preponderant over fear.” (Ernst, 1996, p. 6). So the awe and cheer of Ruzbihan impressed people. He preached in the principle mosque of Shiraz for much of his life. He obviously commands respect and authority. His Family’s Sufi Order lasted for five to fourteen generations so that possibly Hafiz was one of the dervishes amongst the six generation of teachers.
So these writings are rhetorical acts of hagiographic construction which define some of the context for how these texts can be read. These are the flowers among a garden that includes garlands of genealogies. These symbolic constructions called “chains” of transmission (silsilah) create an immortality symbol by projecting the idea of a transmission shared among two people, in a setting that some would choose to call initiatic or at least transformative. The lineage tree establishes awe and wonder in that it is practicially a non-visual icon of immortality. It is a theoretical chart, chain, list or tree a garland of genealogical descent the genealogy of one’s spiritual ancestry or training and traditions. All of this is the hagiographical construction of a reality called the cult of the saints.

One of the popular tools of the cult of the saints was the story about an enigmatic figure who was so sagacious that he was beyond even Moses. And he also happened to be immortal, had traveled as Alexander the Great’s personal assistant and he had in the process drunk the water of immortality (part of his job would likely have been taste-tester.

So Khidr the Green Man comes with a rich background of symbols of immortality.
So we will explore levels of authority. Some authority is evoked by invoking immortality. This certainly sets up a context. The story opens with a divine mission: find this teacher and learn from him the wisdom you don’t know. In some versions, the hadith emphasize this point to affirm that Moses had commensurate, but just different, knowledge as Khidr has. Each to their own domain. Hagiographic construction around Ruzbihan will follow some of the swame literary techniques fro hagiographic construction. Ruzbihan seems fearless. And when one says that one knows that it means at soime level they have made peace with that pivotal question of death.

It’s interesting that he did not weite much poetry because he could have written the most exquisite poetry beyond what you or I might imagine, except that his diaries are certainly strong poetic statements, reeal acts of poetry. This is poetry at many levels it is poesis, creativity. Ruzbihan was not a romantic; he was a realist. He writes poetically but always precisely.
And his authority is in the lived dimension of haqq where the Khidr story is set. The story of Khidr is a profound engagement with the questions of what it means to be human. Suddenly we see the person Moses begged to study under doing “terrible things.”

And what Khidr does, Khidr’s acts, two of destruction and one of mysterious enigmatic incongruity. Moses lost patience with Khidr’s acts. Hearing about Khidr demonstrating mysterious situations to Moses with Moses rule-bound not to ask about the situation until Khidr the EDvergreen teacher gioves the indication of approval.

Hearing the story of Moses evokes terror because it invokes questions such as what it means to die and how does reward and punishment work in relation to death, and how do people create an eternal self beyond the body. And since the story comes at this central existential question of what lives on of me after I die? Who will I be when I die. When I die I want to be…
I think that Ernest Becker points to our sphere of practices where we plant seeds on a sysmbolic soil of culture. Culture is focused on heroes who overcome death. That’s the big story. That factors in my work. The Islamic Green Man, the story’s protagonist is considered to be an immortal. The legend is that when he served as Alexander’s assistant, he found and drank the water of eternal life on behalf of his master, Alexander the Great, but when Alexander came to the spot, it had eluded himn it had shifted. So now Alexander’s assistant jhad become immortal, but not Alexander.

To say that Khidr is immortal means to Muslims, that he’s like Enoch, Elijah and Jesus.

Christians believe (and that’s a social action) that Christ conquered death. That’s the Good News (Evangelium – triumphant news). So this story of Khidr shares with the story of Jesus that background.

But even without this background, hearing this story told introduces a powerful set of images and questions. Hearing this story told makes the listener confront death first in the form of a dangerous act, then a murder, then a buried treasure, part of a legaqcy of mercy. The hidden treasure of death is the legacy of mercy.

After protesting the dangerous act, dangerous because innocent peopke would drown. Drowning means dying. The motif raises the theme of death and immortality. Hearing the killing of a child raises questions about death and presents killing. This is an intentional death. This is a murder. Then comes the curious events the village.
The village is the seat of culture in this context. The village is created as a place where people can practice adab. Adab means hospitality and good manners and good etiquette and knowing how to act with honor and dignity in social situations. It is a civil and spiritual virtue. It is something everyone agrees on. Ruzbihan stands firmly on the points of adab and that God is passionate love (‘ishq) and beauty (jamal).

There lived in the village to which Moses and Khidr had come a saintly man (he who buried a treasure). He taught that it was a hidden mercy from God. This buried treasure is a hidden mercy from God. That is alos a very bo9ldly enunciated immortality symbol, to narrate the immortality as residing symbolically in this treasure, its transmission and we should be grateful to the generous being who gives these gifts.

The village is defined by a wall that is a crafted work of art. Khidr performs masonry and rebuilds a dilapidated wall. Khidr is restoring cvulture. Now Khidr is also introducing actually in narrative time introduce the ppiece de resistance of the story the motif of burial is linked to treasure and rahma, compassion.


If we believe Islamically that Gid breathed the ruh into the body, the spirit into the body perhaps even specifically on the fortieth day, but if we blelieve that Gid breathed the spirit or the soul also related to the word breathing, then that soul is independent of that body although now wed to it at the meeting place of its twol seas that it shares nbetween them. At the breatrh those two seas can mneet. No the person can construct himself as a language andnd social-ritual action practitioner and become a master of etitquete and manners.



What happens in readings of Sufi texts when the reader knows the irony that "Die before you die" is not something you have to do because you've already been doing it for your whole life and it’s long been one of your central concerns and problems! You had to repress it to go about life. Each human being has been living with a fundamental question: death and immortality? First, we ask what does it mean that I will die? Second, we ask how can we triumph over death. So we create a hero who is immortal and a hero who triumphs over death. The hero has to be the object of transference. So every day the question of death hovers in the background. It is the spindle around which we weave the fabric of our symbolic self. So I read Khidr's story as a strategy of immortality orientation. The story also features resolutions and explanations of various deaths and dangers. It even includes a figure who is immortal and includes a monument, a village wall, the artistic act of creating a boundary and creating protection. Culture is the creation of a strategy to deal with the terror of death.

What shall we make of Sheldon Solomon’s the theory (which I have not been yet able to explore) that humans first settled in villages for the purpose of praying? Praying, not farming? Praying! People settled in villages for the purpose of praying? And our narrative offers the story of Khidr rebuilding the defining feature of the village – its wall.

The idea here at the bedrock is that every cultural expression every symbol of thought and action belongs to a universal ubiquitous human project of working against death by creating symbolic realities that will "live forever." We are organized around the quest of immortality because we are symbol creating and sharing creatures who have invented the pronoun "I" around which to cluster a symbolic complex (and this is still prehistoric data, imagine the increased reality of the symbolic self as an immortality project -- anyone can have a website !!!.

Ernest Becker says human beings can't sustain the intense and continuous joy the angels sustain.

Dying...we've been doing it all along. So the hadith is ironic. We are always "dying before we die." We have thought about this questiion and our projects vocation and art is directed at creating simulations of or the presence of an immortal realm. Wh have our immortal heroes and triumphant victorious heroes, eternal heroes, cosmic heroes. They are clear and specific instances of engaging the hermeneutic of immortality: the icon of a persona or persona, a voice (sona) behind the person. The superhero is the ultimate symbol of immortality. The superhero implies a triumph over death. The greatest super hero of all is Christ. His story asks us to identify him as the Christ the Anointed Son of God. His story sometimes comes with a reverence for Jesus Christ’s mother Mary. Mary is already an immortality symbol by birthing Jesus that it is a miracuolous affirmation of God’s generous grace that she is honored. Muslims accept the Virgin Birth and the Annunciation in the visitation by the Archangel Gabriel.

Other Islamic superheroes include Khidr the Green Man. He carries a rich legacy of storues that register in the Qur’an, the hadith, the tafsir, the folklore, the legends, the sufi poetry the songs, the Alexanderf Romance. He’s huge. And Khidr the Green Man of Islam got grafted onto Saint George and Elihyahu (Elijah). The story ois a unique and rich part of Islamic culture.
The story of Khidr the Islamic Green Man is a treasury to which many commentators from various walks of life have brought their personal encounter. Sometimes the encounter with this story is problematic because of the way that it deals with presenting questions about death The story’s lessons are presented in a dramatic context certainly a very unique and autonomous context. This story belongs to and shares a setting and a sharing in circles of storytelling people. And it is such an important story, since it is the story that presents questions of life and death so intently and with such a precise set of learning tasks. The story sets a curriculum for a mini-course in death, dying and immortality. It includes an immortal human being as a teacher.
The telling of the story is an event that engages a person in an encounter with their own death. It is enigmatic and in that enigma attracts people to reflect on its star figure as a cosmic immortal hero.
The book and narrative is itself holy sacred pure, and immortal, eternal, endless, timeless. The multi-leveled contexts for this storytelling event is a brilliantly crafted theater of a journey of training. This story is a virtual-reality game of taking a wayfarer’s journey by hearing the story of what happened when Moses took that journey. We get to look at it through Moses eyes and through the eyes of God who is narrating this story. And now many humans have narrated this story in their own varied versions and his fame as al-Khidr, the Green Man is local culture and popular folklore.




Thought for Reflection: Individuals construct a symbolic self around the invented tool of the pronoun “I” and the object of a discourse about itself called the self, as if it were of the realms of things which it is not.





Mughal Prince Dara Shikuh commissioned a translation of Ruzbihan's commentary on the Qur'an, The Brides ofr Elucidation.

Khwaja Ghulam Farid the Great Chishti master of the Punjab lectured to his studnets on thei commentary on the Qur'an. The contemporary popular scholar and shakh Dr.. Javad Nurbaksh frequently quotes Ruzbihan.

RUZBIHAN WROTE THE BRIDES OF ELUCIDATION OF THE EXEGESIS OF THE QUR'AN ('ARA'IS AL-BAYAN)

His movement did not advance into organizations and institutions. As a small local tariqa it lasted into into a fifth generation and even lasted in some places fourteen generations. Hafez was possibly a dervish during the sixth generation.