Still Water, Burning Heart

About this book

In ninth-century Baghdad-the largest city on earth-a man sat in a corner for thirty years.He was not a caliph or a general. He was the son of a glass merchant. He never sought fame, never claimed miracles, never built an empire. He sat in a corner and turned his attention inward with a seriousness that, over eighty years, transformed him into one of the most influential spiritual figures in Islamic history.His name was Junayd al-Baghdadi. When he died in 910 CE, sixty thousand people came to bury him.STILL WATER, BURNING HEART is the story of a man who found the deepest thing available to a human being and spent his life articulating how to get there. Drawing on Junayd's extraordinary surviving letters-precise, warm, still useful a thousand years after they were written-this book follows the full arc of his interior life: from his childhood in the glassmaker's quarter, through the decades of hidden practice and the crisis of his student al-Hallaj's execution, to the still water of his final years.At the center of Junayd's teaching was a radical insistence: the mystical life is not about ecstasy. It is about integration. The practitioner who chases overwhelming states and mistakes the experience for the goal has confused the vehicle for the destination. Genuine development-the kind that lasts, the kind that produces wisdom rather than drama-requires sobriety: the patient, unglamorous, daily work of the ordinary life conducted from the deepest possible ground.Still Water, Burning Heart is narrative nonfiction at its most intimate: a book about what it actually costs to organize a life around the one thing that matters most, and what such a life, fully lived, produces in the world.Perfect for readers of: Rumi, Ibn Arabi, The Cloud of Unknowing, Thomas Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation, Karen Armstrong's A History of God, Seyyed Hossein Nasr's writings on Islamic spirituality, and anyone drawn to the interior dimensions of human experience.