The wine of love : mystical poetry of Imām Khomeinī

The mystical poetry of Imam Khomeini is a compendium of all the qualities and aspects of his personality. For, his turbulent spirit has visited all corners and horizons, and the lights of his personality have radiated in all stations. At the same time, the Imam’s poetry comprise his only unspoken secrets for which there was no audience in this world, for only words could withstand the weight of such unfathomable mysteries. Words are divine blessing for mankind, and God’s relations with men are through words. Words were a “well” for him to put his head, as in the case of Hadrat ‘Ali (‘a), and whisper his hidden secrets to it. This is how Imam Khomeini’s verses found form and how he occasionally composed some poetry. Since the poetry of Imam are gnostic in expression and meaning and his mystic personality was infinite, his lyric poems and odes have multiple strata, and each reader enjoys this ocean of insight and meaning according to his capacity of understanding. The spiteful, ignorant and uncultured enemy who naturally has very scant knowledge and understanding of these concepts and takes them to mean as he thinks, regards the term, love, in these poems to mean as what the vulgar think of it, and the term, Friend, is taken to mean what the vulgar consider it to mean. The book is Dr. Ghulam-Reza Awani and Dr. Muhammad Legenhausen's English rendition of the Persian book "Badeh-e- Ishq" ( The Wine of Love), which is a collection of Imam Khomeini's mystical poetry with the appendage of the eight Ghazal poems in an earlier and smaller collection, Sabu-ye Ishq ( The Jug of Love) as well as Prof. Legenhausen's On the Symbolism of Religious poetry as appendix. Table of Contents Preface i Translator’s Introduction xv The Wine of Love: Mystical poetry of Imam Khomeini  Letters 3 o Fatimah Tabataba’i’s Letter to Imam Khomeini 5 o Imam Khomeini’s Reply to Fatimah Tabataba’i 10 • Ghazal Poetry 17 • Ruba‘iyat[Quatrains] Poetry 71 Appendix: 89 Index 97