Isaiah 53:2 · World English Bible
For he grew up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of dry ground. He has no good looks or majesty. When we see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.
Ẓāhir and bāṭin: the outside and the inside Sufis use these two words for a surface and for what sits behind it. People read each other fast, stopping at looks, family, and whether someone carries any shine.
From the Sufism reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
SUFISM
Ẓāhir and bāṭin: the outside and the inside Sufis use these two words for a surface and for what sits behind it. People read each other fast, stopping at looks, family, and whether someone carries any shine. When the outside offers nothing to admire, the person gets filed as empty, and this pair is what keeps that verdict from standing.
God does not look at your appearances but at your hearts: a different measuring The Prophet said this, and Sufis return to it whenever looks decide something. Being passed over stings most when the reason is nothing you did: a plain face, a poor family, no presence in a room. The saying leaves the crowd's reading of the surface alone and moves the weight to a place the crowd never checked.
Baṣīra: the sight that is not in the eyes Al-Ghazali writes about an inner eye that can be clouded while the ordinary eyes work fine. A whole crowd can look straight at someone and register nothing, because the looking is done with the part of them that only picks up surfaces. This explains how two people can face the same person and only one of them sees anything.
Malāmatiyya: the people who keep their good hidden An early group in Nishapur made a practice of showing nothing impressive outwardly. They had watched what admiration does: it feeds the part of a person that wants to be seen, and then that part takes over. So they looked ordinary on purpose, and being underestimated stopped counting as a loss.
My friends are hidden under My domes, and no one knows them but Me: the unrecognized ones Sufis repeat this line, in which God speaks about the people closest to Him. It meets a fear that surfaces whenever a life goes unnoticed: that being unseen means being nothing, that if nobody witnessed it, it never counted. The line puts the knowing on God's side, so a life no one applauded is still known in full.
Sufism lens
Who have I decided about from the outside, without ever really looking?
The great square has no corners, the great sound is hard to hear, and the greatest form seems to have no shape at all. What matters most rarely announces itself.
He tells of the gnarled, useless tree that nobody cut down, and of ugly men whom people could not stop wanting to be near. The eye that only grades surfaces keeps missing.
He was a lame former slave, and he taught that where you came from and how you look have nothing to do with what you are. People will judge the outside; that is their business, not yours.
Free · No account needed
Lensightful opens every verse of the Bible through the traditions you choose. Save readings, ask a follow-up question, and get one verse a day.
Get Lensightful on the App Store
Sufism