Love is one and the same reality to these Arab lovers {n: poets} and to me, but the objects of our love are different, for they loved a manifestation, whereas I love the Essential. We have a pattern in them, because God only afflicted them with love for human beings like themselves, in order that He might show, by means of them, the falseness of those who pretend to love Him and yet feel no such transport and rapture in loving Him as deprived those enamoured men of their reason and made them unconscious of themselves.

Stephen Hirtenstein, The Unlimited Mercifier