SOURCE: Khalifa 'Abdul Hakim, "Love," in The Metaphysics of Rumi: A Critical and Historical Sketch, 1933.Reprint by The Institute of Islamic Culture, 1959, pp. 43-61.

In the following essay, originally published in 1933, Hakim compares Rumi's "philosophy of love" to the theories of Plato.

If there is anything in Rumi's mysticism that defies all attempts at analysis, that is his ecstatic utterances about Love. It is exactly here that theory has so very little in common with life and experience, and the words of Mephistopheles are justified: "Grau … ist alle Theorie Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum." If it were concerned only with lyrical fervours and ecstasies, there would no doubt be much that touches our own inner chords and stirs emotions in the soul that are too deep for words. But that is not all that we find in Rumi. He tells us that what he means by...