claimed in different tongues the same principles of eternal goodness and eternal truth which flow from the divine Soul of the world.’ One night when Rúmí and Shams were seated together, there was a knocking at the door and a voice calling. Shams rose and said, ‘I am called to my death’. He left Rúmí, and walked out to the darkness, where seven murderers fell on him with their knives. It was in memory of him that Rúmí founded the order of dancing dervishes who spin and spin down the centuries, copying the motions of the planets and listening to music sung by the stars—all because of that long dead love. Browne explains that to the ṣúfís the doctrine of Divine Oneness (tawḥíd) means not only, as Islám has it, that ‘There is no god but God’—but that ‘there is nothing but God.’ God ‘is Pure Being, and what is “other than God” … only exists in so far as His Being is infused into it, or mirrored in it. He is also Pure Good … and Absolute Beauty: whence He is often called by the mystics in their pseudo-erotic poems, “the Real Beloved.”’ Beauty desires to be known, Browne continues, and a thing can be known only by its opposite. Thus Evil ‘is a necessary consequence of this manifesta- tion [of Eternal Beauty] so that the Mystery of Evil is really identical with the Mystery of Creation, and inseparable therefrom. But Evil is merely the Not-Good, or … the Non-Existent.’[6] About here in a commentary of this type the usual procedure is to mention John of the Cross, but for a change we shall remind the reader of Catherine of Siena or any number of others resembling those saints. George Herbert, in England’s seventeenth century, was still another mystic to whom God was a lover, seeking and being sought; he writes: My God, what is a heart, That Thou shouldst it so eye, and wooe, Powring upon it all Thy art, As if that Thou hadst nothing els to do? Or this: How sweetly doth ‘My Master’ sound! ‘My Master!’ As amber Breese leaves a rich scent Unto the taster: So do these words a sweet content, An orientall fragrancie, ‘My Master.’ Or again:
6. Reminiscence; the same sense is given in Promulgation, p. 44 7. Thompson, unpublished diary. 8. Promulgation, p. 45 9. Promulgation, p. 66 10. ibid. p. 65 11. ibid. p. 80 12. Reminiscence. 13. Promulgation, p. 409 records this interview. 14. Star of the West, September 8, 1912, records this interview. 15. Reminiscence, also recorded in Howard Colby Ives, Portals to Free- dom, (George Ronald, Oxford, 1943) 16. Promulgation, p. 209 17. Star of the West, September 8, 1912 18. ibid. 19. Reminiscence. 20. Reminiscence by the author’s father. 21. Reminiscence. 22. Star of the West, November 4, 1913 23. Promulgation, p. 371 24. Reminiscence. 25. Reminiscence. 26. Reminiscence by Mr. and Mrs. Edward B. Kinney. 27. Reminiscence by Mrs. Ella G. Cooper. 28. Promulgation, pp. 465–6 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: Portrayals from East and West 1. Promulgation, pp. 32–3 2. God Passes By, p. 276 3. ibid. p. 288 4. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, “The Universal Language of the Spirit”, Star of the West, October 1922, p. 163 5. “The Passing of Bahíyyih Khánum, the Most Exalted Leaf,” The Bahá’í World, (Bahá’í Publishing Committee, New York, 1936), vol. V, p. 169 6. ibid. p. 172 7. God Passes By, p. 247 8. “The Passing of Bahíyyih Khánum,” p. 169 9. ibid. p. 171 10. Rúhíyyih Khánum, “Twenty-Five Years of the Guardianship”, The Bahá’í World, vol. XI, p. 113 11. Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 150 12. Personal letter. Will and Testament 1. The Persian Bayán 6:4; excerpt translated by M.G.