Life
Ruzbihan Baqli was born in 1128 to a family of Daylami origin in the town of Fasa in Fars. Although Ruzbihan Baqli had religious visions at ages three, seven, and fifteen, he claims that his family was unfamiliar with any sort of religion. At the age of fifteen, these visions, also described as dreams and powerful ecstasies in his own text, The Unveiling of Secrets, caused him to abandon his trade as a grocer (the name Baqli is derived from the word for grocer) and take refuge in the desert. He spent a year and a half in the desert, all the while receiving visions. After he left the desert, he joined a Sufi sect.
In his autobiography, The Unveiling of Secrets, Ruzbihan Baqli says he had his first “unveiling” in his training with the Sufi sect. He then returned to his home in Fasa to seek a master and spiritual guide. It is then that he met and became a disciple of Shaykh Jamal al-Din Abi al-Wafa’ ibn Khalil al-Fasa’I. While there are no sources to confirm this, it is speculated that Ruzbihan Baqli spent the next years travelling. He went to Syria, Iraq, Kirman, Arabia, and made the hajj (or pilgrimage to Mecca) twice. Finally he returns to Shiraz in 1165 and set up a hospice where he taught for 50 years until his death. His center for Sufi training and his teachings remained popular several generations after his death. He married several wives and had two sons and three daughters. Ruzbihan Baqli died in 1209 in Shiraz and was placed in a tomb in his ribat. For several generations after his death, Ruzbihan Baqli’s legacy as a Sufi master continued and Shiraz became a place of pilgrimage. However, the popularity of his order waned and eventually disappeared and his tomb fell into disrepair. In 1972, his tomb was restored by the Iranian Department of Antiquities.
Read more about this topic: Ruzbihan Baqli
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“I have three phobias which, could I mute them, would make my life as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water: I hate to go to bed, I hate to get up, and I hate to be alone.”
—Tallulah Bankhead (1903–1968)
“To see self-sufficiency as the hallmark of maturity conveys a view of adult life that is at odds with the human condition, a view that cannot sustain the kinds of long-term commitments and involvements with other people that are necessary for raising and educating a child or for citizenship in a democratic society.”
—Carol Gilligan (20th century)
“The true poem is not that which the public read. There is always a poem not printed on paper,... in the poet’s life. It is what he has become through his work. Not how is the idea expressed in stone, or on canvas or paper, is the question, but how far it has obtained form and expression in the life of the artist. His true work will not stand in any prince’s gallery.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)