Читать книгу The Kashf al-mahjúb: The oldest Persian treatise on Súfiism онлайн

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God, therefore, has exalted Poverty and has made it a special distinction of the poor, who have renounced all things external and internal, and have turned entirely to the Causer; whose poverty has become their pride, so that they lamented its going and rejoiced at its coming, and embraced it and deemed all else contemptible.

Now, Poverty has a form (rasm) and an essence (ḥaqíqat). Its form is destitution and indigence, but its essence is fortune and free choice. He who regards the form rests in the form and, failing to attain his object, flees from the essence; but he who has found the essence averts his gaze from all created things, and, in complete annihilation, seeing only the All-One he hastens towards the fullness of eternal life (ba-faná-yi kull andar ru´yat-i kull ba-baqá-yi kull shitáft). The poor man (faqír) has nothing and can suffer no loss. He does not become rich by having anything, nor indigent by having nothing: both these conditions are alike to him in respect of his poverty. It is permitted that he should be more joyful when he has nothing, for the Shaykhs have said: “The more straitened one is in circumstances, the more expansive (cheerful and happy) is one’s (spiritual) state,” because it is unlucky for a dervish to have property: if he “imprisons” anything (dar band kunad) for his own use, he himself is “imprisoned” in the same proportion. The friends of God live by means of His secret bounties. Worldly wealth holds them back from the path of quietism (riḍá).