For this reason, the two often occur together among religious adherents such as monks, corrupt Sufi ascetics, and others. Poetry derives its name from perception: it makes the soul perceive what moves it, even if it is untrue, arousing love or aversion, desire or fear through the imaginative representations it contains. This is poetry’s distinctive feature, and it is therefore that Allah described poets as being followed by those who go astray. Waywardness consists in following desires, for poetry stirs people to desire and aversion, joy and sorrow, without knowledge. This is waywardness, whereas falsehood misleads people in matters of knowledge, causing them to believe something contrary to its actual nature.
If the soul is moved sometimes by conviction and faith, and sometimes by poetry, the latter is blameworthy except for what has been exempted. Allah Most High says:
“We have not taught him poetry, nor is it fitting for him. This is only a reminder and a clear Quran.”
The reminder is unlike poetry: it is truth and knowledge that the heart recalls, whereas poetry merely moves the soul. Thus, among Sufis who have deviated, listening to odes and poems has largely replaced listening to the Quran and the reminder. It merely stirs love or some other emotion in them, without that emotion arising from knowledge and conviction.
For this reason, those who prefer it to listening to the Quran offer the excuse that the Quran is truth sent down from the True One, whereas souls love falsehood. This is because truthful and sound speech imparts knowledge and belief to the heart as a whole, while souls devoted to falsehood do not love the truth. Its effect is therefore baseless, spreading from the soul, for it is a branch without a root. Yet it affects the soul by stirring, agitating, and influencing it, not by imparting conviction and knowledge