Reverence for God; profound respect in the heart for the Divine.

“The finest form of loving God is the kind that is surrounded on one side by the awe of God and on the other by the fear of God.”¹⁾

“Tears are the clouds formed when emotions in the heart—sorrow and grief, joy and delight, mercy and compassion—swell up and pour out through the eyes. Anxiety and pain, love and yearning, ambition and hope, separation and reunion all make sensitive souls weep, but even more than these it is by the fear of God and the awe of God that move those whose hearts keep watch on the horizon of the Beloved. Other kinds of crying spring from the mixed physical-spiritual nature of man; they are instinctive, widespread, not the inmost voice, and are therefore ordinary.”²⁾

“If the ‘viral zones’ of a person’s spiritual life are left open to such bodily and ego-driven desires, death for that person’s conscience becomes inevitable. Once that most vital system—meant to be nourished by the fear and awe of God—is thus paralyzed, he can no longer read himself correctly; he cannot grasp the lofty purpose implied in being created ‘in the best form’; he cannot look at the dizzying human anatomy as an index of all the heavens and earth—and so cannot evaluate existence through such a contemplation. He cannot locate his true position amid events and things; sometimes he even gets swept into the whirlpool of causes and starts humming the songs of naturalism…”³⁾

“Among the radiant faces whose eyes are fixed on God’s good pleasure and whose hearts tremble with the fear of God and the awe of God is the Prophet Jonah—known as ‘Dhunnun.’”⁴⁾

“Bediüzzaman was a monument of chastity. When he stayed six months in Ömer Pasha’s palace in Bitlis at the age of fifteen to twenty, he never even came to recognize the pasha’s daughters. Likewise, arriving in Istanbul at twenty-five and lodging in Çamlıca with Yusuf İzzettin, he would often wander down to Üsküdar, cross the water by boat, and walk along the Golden Horn—yet even when men and women, young and old, crowded the shore singing and playing music, he did not raise his eyelids once to look at them. Asked why, he gave a brief reply: ‘I am preserving the dignity and honour of being a scholar.’ In truth he was so locked into the fear of God and the awe of God that, from the horizon of heart and spirit on which he lived, such sights simply lay outside his field of vision.”⁵⁾

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