Reza Aslan Quotes

As for the people of Tasawwuf, they affirm the love of Allah, and this is more evident among them than all other issues....the affirmation of the love of Allah is well-known in the speech of their [old] and recent masters, just as it is affirmed in the Holy Qur'an and the Sunnah and in agreement of the ways of the early generation (Salaf)

Time exists so that you can experience these flavors as deeply as possible. On the path of devotion, if you can experience even a glimmer of love, its possible to experience a little more love. When you experience that a little more, then the next degree of intensity is possible. Thus, love engenders love until you reach the point of saturation, when you totally merge with the divine love. this is what the mystics mean when they say that they plunge into the ocean of love to drown themselves.

If God did not love us, we could not love him. And Sufis are those who have realized this love.

I do not think reading the mystics would hurt you myself: you say you must avoid books which deal with 'feelings' - but the mystics don't deal with feelings but with love which is a very different thing. You have too many 'feelings,' but not nearly enough love.

The reason for our loving God is God.

The revealed and mystic literature of mankind bears ample testimony to the fact that religious experience has been too enduring and dominant in the history of mankind to be rejected as mere illusion. There seems to be no reason, then, to accept the normal level of human experience as fact and reject its other levels as mystical and emotional.

As God can only be seen by His own light, so He can only be loved by His own love.

The Holy Spirit illuminates the minds of people, makes us yearn for God, and takes spiritual truth and makes it understandable to us.

The religion of the Sufi is the religion of the heart. The principal moral of the Sufi is to consider the heart of others, so that in the pleasure and displeasure of his fellow-man he sees the pleasure and displeasure of God.

God is a pure no-thing, concealed in now and here; the less you reach for him, the more he will appear.

The speech of God is silence. His Word is solitude.

Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God.

And yet I do love a kind of light, melody, fragrance, food, embracement when I love my God; for He is the light, the melody, the fragrance, the food, the embracement of my inner self - there where is a brillance that space cannot contain, a sound that time cannot carry away, a perfume that no breeze disperses, a taste undimisnished by eating, a clinging together that no saiety will sunder. This is what I love when I love my God.

The people who know God well—mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator.

The business and method of mysticism is love.

Some day I shall sing to thee in the sunrise of some other world, I have seen thee before in the light of the earth, in the love of man.

Could you gaze into heaven five minutes, you would know more than you would by reading all that ever was written on the subject.

We should try to learn the nature of [the spirit of revelation]. . . . This is the grand means that the Lord has provided for us, that we may know the light, and not be groveling continually in the dark.

These transcending truths restructure our understanding of ourselves and of the universe and bring within our view resplendent reality. To be seen only by those who have eyes to see, these flakes of fire are embedded in the holy scriptures. There these tr.

Thou hidden love of God, whose height, Whose depth unfathomed no man knows, I see from far thy beauteous light, Only I sigh for thy repose.

You cannot love a fellow creature fully till you love God.

I have loved my friends as I do virtue, my soul, my God.