ʿIshq

From the Arabic root ʿ-sh-q, which speaks of love’s excess—its overflow, its burning surfeit. Garcin de Tassy transliterates it as ischc and renders it as “love,” yet the Persian of ʿAṭṭār does not confuse ʿishq with mere inclination: this is love raised to white heat, the kind that leaves nothing standing. Where ordinary love seeks to possess its object, ʿishq seeks to be abolished in it.

In the poem, the hoopoe places love immediately after the search: first one seeks, then one loves, and love is “without limit.” To cross this valley, it is not enough to love fire—one must “be fire itself.” ʿAṭṭār draws from this his paradoxical law: “with love, neither good nor evil exists anymore,” and “when love comes, reason flees at once.” The true lover stakes his head in hard coin; he does not calculate, he consumes himself. This fervor is what propels the bird through the valleys that follow, toward pure unity (tawhid) and extinction (fanāʾ), beyond which no one remains to love.

ʿIshq ≠ love-as-attachment: the latter tightens the self around what it desires, while the former dissolves it into the beloved. And ʿishq ≠ profane eros, which seeks its own pleasure: Sufi passion wants nothing for itself, it wants the lover to vanish into love itself. This is why ʿAṭṭār can write that “the existence of love is gradually destroyed by love’s very intoxication”—fire ends by burning even the fire, and love undoes the lover one once was.