Attar's Pen

To credit myself in attainment and success,
And to fault another for failure and dishonor,
This is not the Way.

To credit others for attainment and success,
And to fault myself for failure and dishonor,
Is a single step along the Way.

To be unmoved by attainment and success,
And untroubled by failure and dishonor,
Is the second step along the Way.

Who can speak of that third self-annihilating step?
If you possess the lion's courage, you are still a coward on this road.

I slept in a palace and woke to find myself in a ruin.
I dreamt of the houri and woke to find myself alone.

And from Attar's pen I heard that Voice,
"You are rejected by Us, depart from this door;
You are unworthy of Us."

A Lost Scrap from The Trial of Paris

Al-Doushu said, "Through the lens of science, there are some things you cannot see, except that you choose the proper instrument. You cannot scan the heavens with the microscope, nor view the atom with the telescope. With a scalpel you presume to dissect the Infinite Absolute. These are the limits of science. On this point, you cannot disagree."

Ibn Ganas said, "I agree that with every study, I must carefully choose the tools of study; that the instrument used to seek should be most appropriate to the thing being sought. When you declare 'It is impervious to science.' Then what in your faith is there for me to study? If the scalpel is not the tool, then tell me what is? If you say, as you have said, 'insight,' then the tool I use to seek is precisely the thing I'm seeking, which is a kind of reasoning that has a circumference and is bounded yet is infinite, insofar as walking in a circle is infinite. Whatever name a religion goes by, however contradictory to every other religion, it announces itself likewise impervious to study. You cannot compare knowledge that is accessible to an insight that is inaccessible, and furthermore defines itself by its very inaccessibility. Therefore, your critiques of science and your presumptions about its limits are not fairly raised, nor do they need to be refuted to establish, without question, that religion and science have no concourse together and are inalterably opposed to one another."