Kemal ran to him. "Father! I have been sending you tahlil for ten years! Thousands of 'La ilaha illallah'! Why are you still suffering?"
Confused, Kemal woke and rushed to the lodge of Rumi. He found the poet not in a mosque, but in a garden, watching a rosebush shed its petals. tahlil arwah rumi
"What happened?" Kemal asked.
"Exactly," said Rumi. "Your father's soul is no longer a clay pot—a collection of sins and virtues. It has returned to the River of Oneness. When you recite tahlil thinking, 'I am a good son sending a package to a dead man,' you are throwing stones at the river. But when you recite La ilaha illallah as a state of your own annihilation—when you forget the sender, the sent, and the one you are sending to—that is not a stone. That is a raindrop returning to the ocean. And that raindrop becomes the ocean." Kemal ran to him
Kemal obeyed. That night, he did not count beads or names. He sat in utter silence until his ego crumbled like dry earth. Then, from that emptiness, the phrase La ilaha illallah arose—not as his voice, but as the very breath of the universe. Thousands of 'La ilaha illallah'
Rumi smiled and picked up two stones. "If I throw this stone at a clay pot," he said, "the pot shatters. If I throw this second stone at a river, what happens?"
In that moment, he saw a vision: his father was no longer struggling with a rope. He was sitting beneath a tree, laughing. The frayed rope had turned into a garland of light around his neck.
