gurey25 wrote:lovely , but you should know the whirling dervishes have nothing to do with Sayyid Rumi,
the common story is that it was started by his son, but the reality is that it was formed by his followers around the time of his grandson, more than 50+ years after his death.
surprisingly he was a regular hanafi scholar, and judge and religious teacher.
with an unusual gift and a beautiful spirit.
Most orientalists completely forget that, he was a trained jurist in hanafi fiqh, and he was trained in the Islamic sciences of fiqh, hadith, tafsir, grammar, etc, that an alim must know.
Agentofchaos, it's so amazing what one can get from poetry.
If you are eager to be extinct
before you know who you are,
you rob yourself of your true being.
Until you understand extinction
you will never know true Faith.”
— Rumi.
Extinction (fana'a), in sufi understanding is a loss of self-awareness permeated with an awareness of Allah, you become so overwhelmed by your awareness of Allah that you completely forget your-self as if it is extinct. This is one of the highest levels of consciousness, which sufi's take to be what the rasul scw meant by "worship Allah as if you see him". Rumi is saying to the eager, young disciples if you want that kind of faith, you have to "know who you are". To know who you are is to know what prevents you from that, it is the undesirable traits in humans, such as jealousy, envy, impiety, lack of taqwa, greed, arrogance, etc. If you don't know these traits and don't work on removing them from you heart and replacing them with prophetic traits, then you "rob yourself of your true being", which is to say your purpose of being, to worship none other than Allah. Then he says "until you understand extinction..you will never know true faith", you cannot understand something unless you've experienced it, so he uses their "eagerness" to tread them on the hard path of self-emprovement and the battle against the nafs, because it leads to perfected faith. The perfected faith is to see Allah with the eyes of the heart, then one can truly say, I bear witness that there is no God but Allah, because you "worship Allah as if you see him".
