Islamic Quarterly, 1, 79-82
I said: 'What you say is beyond my reason and increases my confusion. Please try to speak a little more intelligibly.
He said: 'Well, once the mystics who accept suffering (ahl al-bala) encounter God's fait accompli (hadith) within them and the exercise of his authority over them, their inmost essences (asrar) are thrown off their balance and their souls are distraught for life eternal. Their habitual haunts offer them no refuge nor can their acquired habits (amakin) hide them [from God]. Desperately do they yearn for him who causes them to suffer, and bitterly do they wail at the loss of him who is far away. Their [sense of] loss distresses them, and their [sense of] finding [God] humbles them as they yearn and ache for him, longing for him in their ecstasy.
Their yearning he requites with a raging thirst which ever increases and grows in their bowels, while they strive desperately to know themselves and are lavish in losing themselves. He gives them a thrist for him and all manner of mourning and grief. He raises for them all manner of signs causing them to savour the taste of denudation (faqr) and renewing for them the prospect of enduring [yet more] striving; yet even in the aftermath of their troubles they incline [towards him], longing to be chastised with grief, seeking to be made whole, clinging to any trace of the Beloved as he reveals himself [to them], viewing what is remote with the eye of propinquity. So are they completely concealed [from themselves], for they have lost the veil [that hid God from them] and they are no longer divided from him. Affliction [is removed] from them and they are no longer punished. And how should any veil divide them from him? for they are his captives, imprisoned before him, and even as they are afflcited, they find favour with him in that they are destroyed in what is manifested to them. They no longer aim at looking after themselves, content with God's love and their dependence on him and their nearness to him.
In the swiftness of their awakening they behold the myriad glances [that proceed] from him so that the very destruction [of their human individuality] is [itself] drowned in the tide that flows over them in eternal being and violent suffering, until their very suffering is turned to joy and their abiding in it brings them delight in God, for they see that he is near to ward off their suffering and to draw its sting. Then the soul no longer turns away from the buren of suffering out of faint-heartedness, nor is it grieved by it nor chafed. These are the [real] heroes of mystical experience because God has revealed his secrets to them, and they have taken up their abode in his ominpotence (qahr), awaiting his command, that God [himself] may fulfil a deed performed.