The Book of Ecstasy

The long-standing Sufi tradition of using suitable imagery to project experiences and teaching, has naturally caused great confusion among literal thinkers, particularly in the West. The great Arifi of Herat produced a cosmological tour-de-force and literary sensation by writing his great mystical poem entirely in terms of the game of polo. This important work, written in just two weeks and cherished for centuries as a classic, is presented here with the Persian text and an explanatory introduction. Much of its interest is referred to in the conclusion of a Dervish master, that it ‘is really the book of the fallacies of raw expectation of the limitations of meditation alone, and of the incompleteness of excitement’.