KNOWLEDGE AND LOVE 29
Islam which is founded on at-tawhid, the doctrine of
Unity, and so gives an intellectual orientation which is
imposed on all varieties of the spiritual life. As for

love, love is born spontaneously wherever the Divine
Reality is felt or contemplated.

This brings us back to the opinion that only those
Sufis who manifest an attitude of love truly represent the
mystical aspect of Islam. In support of this opinion
criteria are wrongly applied which are valid only in re-
lation to Christianity, the basic theme of which is Divine
Love so that those who are the mouthpieces of gnosis
in Christianity express themselves—though there are
some rare exceptions—through the symbolism of Love.
This is not the case in Islam where at every level know-
ledge takes unquestioned precedence.! Moreover true
knowledge or gnosis in no way implies an emphasis on
the mind at the expense of the emotional faculties : its
organ is the heart, the secret and ungraspable centre of
man’s being, and the radiations of knowledge penetrate
into the whole sphere of the soul. A Sufi who has
realised utterly “ impersonal ”’ knowledge may none the
less make use of the language of love and reject all doct-
rinal dialectic; in such a case the intoxication of love
will correspond to states of knowledge which are beyond
forms and outstrip all thought.

In reality the distinction between the way of know-

1. It may be noted in passiog that, if Muhyi-d-Din ibn ‘Arabi gives a
more universal meaning to the word ‘2/m, which is also translated as “Know-
ledge”, than to ma‘rifah, that is because in Islamic theology the former corres-
ponds to a Divine attribute. Al-ma‘rifah is an incidental participation in
Divine Knowledge and could be translated as ‘‘gnosis,” in the sense in which
that word was used by Clement of Alexandria.