The Broken Ones
Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
Until you become an unbeliever in your own self, a believer in God you will remain.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
If you seek closeness to the Beloved, love everyone, in their presence or absence. See only their good.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
To be as clear and refreshing as the breath of the morning, like the sun: have nothing but warmth and light for everyone.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
Beloved, show me the way out of this prison. Make me needless of both worlds.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
Erase from mind all that is not you. Have mercy, Beloved, though I am nothing but forgetfulness. You are the essence of forgiveness. Make me needless of all but you.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
Piousness and the path of love are two different roads.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
Love is the fire that burns both belief and unbelief.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
Those who practice love have neither religion nor caste.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
Suppose you can recite a thousand holy verses from memory. What are you going to do with your ego self? The true mark of the heretic.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
Every time your head touches the ground in prayer, remember: this was to teach you to put down that load of ego which bars you from entering the Chamber of the Beloved.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
Be humble. Only fools take pride in their station here.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
Trapped in a cage of dust, moisture, heat, and air, no need to complain of calamities. This illusion of a life lasts but by the moment.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
To your mind, feed understanding. To your heart, tolerance and compassion.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
The simpler your life, the more meaningful. The less you desire of the world, the more room you will have in it to fill with the Beloved.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
The best use of your tongue is to repeat the Beloved’s name in devotion. The best prayers are those in the solitude of the night.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
The shortest way to the Friend is through selfless service and generosity to His creatures.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
Those with no sense of honor and dignity are best avoided. Those who change colors constantly are best forgotten. The best way to be with those bereft of the Beloved’s qualities is to forget them in the joy of silence, in your corner of solitude.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
Drink from this heart now, for all the loving it contains. When you look for it again, it will be dancing in the wind.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
Let sorrowful longing dwell in your heart. Never give up. Never lose hope.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
The Beloved says: Broken ones are my darlings.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
Crush your heart. Be broken.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
If you do not give up the crowds, you will not find your way to Oneness.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
If you do not drop yourself, you will not find your true worth.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
If you do not offer all you have to the Beloved, you will live this life free of that pain which makes it worth living.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
The Man Who Spoke These Words
Abu Sa’id Mubarak al-Makhzumi was born in 1013 CE in Hankar, a village near Mosul. He came to Baghdad as a young man and spent the rest of his life there. He followed the Hanbali school, the strictest of the four Sunni legal traditions. He served briefly as chief justice of Baghdad and gave the post up. He kept a small madrasa and ribat at the Bab al-Azaj, the Portico Gate, in the eastern Rusafa district of the city. He died there in 1119 CE and was buried at the entrance to his school.
He left no written works. The counsels above were preserved by his students and entered the written tradition through his successors.
He had received the dervish cloak, the khirqa, from Abu’l-Hasan Ali al-Hankari, who had received it from Abu’l-Faraj al-Tartusi, who had received it from Abu’l-Fadl Abd al-Wahid al-Tamimi, who had received it from Abu Bakr al-Shibli, the Baghdad Sufi who had been a disciple of Junayd. The cloak Abu Sa’id wore was Junayd’s cloak. The chain reaches back through Junayd to al-Hasan al-Basri, and through al-Hasan to Ali ibn Abi Talib, and through Ali to the Prophet.
The Disciple
In 1095 CE a young man arrived in Baghdad from the Caspian province of Gilan. His name was Abd al-Qadir. He was eighteen. His widowed mother had sewn forty gold dinars into the lining of his coat and made him promise on departure that he would always tell the truth. The caravan was attacked by bandits in the forest. The bandits asked the boy what he had. He told them: forty gold dinars sewn under my arm. They thought he was joking. They brought him to their leader. The leader tore open the coat, found the gold, and asked why he had told them. The boy answered that he had promised his mother never to lie. The bandit chief wept and repented on the spot. His sixty men did the same.
This was the boy who would become Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, founder of the Qadiriyya, the oldest of the Sufi orders, whose silsila now reaches into every Muslim country on earth.
He came to Baghdad to study Hanbali law. He studied it for years, under several masters. Among them was Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi.
The Encounter
The story is told by Jilani himself. The earliest written form is in al-Tadifi’s Qala’id al-Jawahir. It is the moment by which the Qadiri silsila identifies its own beginning.
Jilani had been wandering and fasting in the ruined Persian Tower at the edge of Baghdad. He had made a vow to Allah that he would not eat until food was placed before him. Forty days passed. On the fortieth day a stranger came with bread and a dish of food, set them down, and disappeared. Jilani’s body cried out. His ego whispered that the vow was now fulfilled. He did not move.
Abu Sa’id was passing on the road. Jilani writes:
By chance the scholar Abu Sa’id al-Mukharrimi happened to be passing by. He heard the screams of hunger of my flesh, though I was deaf to them. He came and saw my emaciated state and said: “What is this I see and hear, O Abd al-Qadir?” I said: “Don’t mind it, my friend. It is only the voice of the disobedient, unruly ego, while the soul is bowed in front of its Lord and is hopeful and peaceful and joyful.” He said: “Please come to my school at Bab al-Azj.” I did not answer, but inwardly I said: I will not leave this place without divine order.
~ Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, on his first encounter with Abu Sa’id
Jilani waited. Then, by his own account, Khidr came to him. The figure who appears throughout Sufi literature as the green-robed guide of seekers, the one who teaches Moses in the Qur’an, the unkillable initiator. Khidr told him: stand up and go to Abu Sa’id.
Jilani went. He found Abu Sa’id standing at the door of his house, waiting. Abu Sa’id said: was my word not enough that Khidr had to come and tell you the same thing? Then he took him in and fed him with his own hands.
That was the beginning of the disciple’s apprenticeship. Abu Sa’id later gave Jilani the cloak. Of the moment of investiture Jilani records what his teacher said:
O Abd al-Qadir, this is the cloak that was given to Ali by the Prophet. From Ali it passed to al-Hasan al-Basri, and from him it reached me.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi, conferring the khirqa on Jilani
When Abu Sa’id died, Jilani inherited the madrasa at Bab al-Azaj. He taught there for over forty years. The neighborhood was renamed Bab al-Sheikh, the Gate of the Sheikh, after Jilani’s death. It is still called that today. His tomb is there. The Qadiriyya has its center in the same building Abu Sa’id had built and given to him.
What Was Passed
Abu Sa’id is buried at the threshold of the school he handed to his student. His name appears in the silsila of the order he had no part in founding, two links above its founder. The order is called Qadiriyya, after Jilani, not Mukharrimiyya, after the man whose hand placed the cloak.
The counsels above are what came from his hand.
Drink from this heart now, for all the loving it contains. When you look for it again, it will be dancing in the wind.
~ Abu Sa’id al-Makhzumi
James Fleming for SpiritualRelief
Find.... The Secret of Secrets... by Jilani............. Jilani is next to Ghazali..... both are staples of comprehending this "being." Peace
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