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Islam & Philosophy

Love & Emptiness in the Sufi Tradition

Medha Ninad Tambe meditates on Rumi, love and self-negation.

What does it mean to love? Is to be loved really to be known? Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207-1273 CE), an eminent poet and mystic from the Sufi tradition, would vehemently disagree. Rumi would argue that to love is in fact to enter the unknown: to love is to empty the self of all self-knowledge entirely.

Rumi’s poetry is extensive, and extraordinarily wide-ranging in content, containing a myriad of themes, and meandering through existential ideas from infinity to divinity. Emptiness is one theme on which he comments frequently (albeit often briefly and in passing), weaving it into poems about love, identity, and God. Through considering Rumi’s exploration of emptiness, his criticisms of knowledge as an eventual impediment to achieving it, and his metaphysical musings on interpersonal connections, I will argue that the Sufi conception of emptiness he expresses is in fact, a paradoxical state of infinite fullness – a complete dispossession of self in which we may experience love in its purest form, and thus enter into union with the divine.

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