Significance of Sufi Poetry

Sufi path is a love-oriented path serving as a bridge between the creation and the Creator, while at the same time conveying a message that there exists no bridge between the creation and Creator. The Creator and the creation exist like two circles where centers meet without touching the peripheries.

To the Sufi, Allah is more of a Beloved than a Creator. A Sufi strives to lose himself in love to find the Beloved just as a shade loses itself in order to find the light; hence all of his actions are directed to please Allah. This is how, an unusual relationship exist between the lover and the Beloved giving rise to subtlest of feelings, at times in the form of poetic utterances for expressing inexplicable. Thus, poetry of the Sufis is meaningful not only as pieces of praiseworthy literature but provides a treasure of aesthetics embedded in metaphors and similes for the spiritual progress of disciples too. It is like drawing a map of love through the poetic verses, where whole universe can be found at the right moment. Such poetry is not only read and shared in the Sufi ceremonies, but also is an integral part of Sema/Qawwali i.e the Sufi music. A disciple under the supervision of Shaykh, while listening to the poetry in sema, gets in tune with the soul of creativity that gives rise to the ecstatic songs of love and gets colored in the same color rising to a higher spiritual state finding unity in diversity and divinity in humanity.