Rumi’s love for Allah was a fiery one, with a constant weeping and longing for God’s mysteries. Love for anything other than God is not real Love: ‘Wherever I put my head, that is my place of worship. No matter where I am, that is where God is. Vineyards, roses, nightingales, the sema and loving . They are all symbols, the reason is always Him.’ Allah is the Beloved and Rumi bewails his separation from Him, as theney weeps at its separation from the reed bed whence it came and longs for return. 

He experienced love and passion both through his solitary asceticism and his communal engagements and said: ‘The way of God’s Messenger is the way of Love. We are the children of Love. Love is our mother.’ It was in his solitariness that he became most open to the truest union with God, and it was in his separation from all things except God that he became like a ball of fire. And while such a sense of burning would prove difficult for many to bear, Rumi, considered it an essential part of passion, and not complaining was viewed as a tradition of loyalty.

To him, those who profess a love of God must necessarily accompany their statement of ‘I love’ with a sense of furious burning—this is the price one must willingly pay for being close to God or in union with Him: ‘I was raw, I am now cooked and burnt.’ Additionally, one must engage in ascetic behavior such as moderate eating, drinking, sleeping, and a constant awareness and directedness towards God in one’s speech, and one must inevitably experience bewilderment at God’s bounties.

Rumi cannot understand how a lover can sleep in an immoderate way, as it takes away from time shared with the Beloved. For him, excessive sleeping was offensive to the Beloved. As God instructed David by saying, ‘O David, those who indulge in sleeping without contemplating Me, while they claim passion for Me, are really lying,’ so also Rumi states, ‘When the darkness falls, lovers become intense.’

Rumi continually prescribed this in word, and also showed it in his actions.