Those are wise who treat an acquaintance as a friend, and those are foolish who treat a friend as an acquaintance, and those are impossible who treat friends and acquaintances as strangers; you cannot help them.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
Friendship as the average person understands it is perhaps little more than acquaintance; but in reality it is more sacred than any other connection in the world. To a sincere person, entering into friendship is like entering the gates of heaven; and a visit to a friend is a pilgrimage to a true loving friend.
When, in friendship, a thought arises, ‘I will love you as you love me,’ or, ‘I will do to you as you do to me,’ this takes away all the virtue of the friendship, because it is a commercial attitude, prevalent everywhere in the commercial world: everything is done for a return, and measure is given for measure. … One ought to look upon acquaintanceship as the sowing of the seed of friendship, not as a situation forced upon one; for those who turn their backs on people and look at them with contempt also do that to God. To think, ‘That person is perhaps of no value; that person is of no importance,’ is impractical, besides being unkind. As all things have their use, both flowers and thorns, both sweet and bitter, so all people are of some use; what position, what class, what race, what caste they belong to makes no difference.
Friendship with good and bad, with wise and foolish, with high and low, is equally beneficial, whether to yourself or to the other. What does it matter if another be benefited by your friendship, since you would like to be benefited by someone else’s friendship? Those are wise who treat an acquaintance as a friend, and those are foolish who treat a friend as an acquaintance, and those are impossible who treat friends and acquaintances as strangers; you cannot help them.
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
The supreme idea of friendship is that God is the friend, not a friend, but the friend. In other words, there is not friendship in any sense of separation, but in the sense of union, as of lovers. The wrong view of friendship is to think of it, to consider it at all with the discriminating mind. In this case, there is no real bond, there is attachment of nufs, and although no doubt this has an element of truth in it — no doubt there is a real bond between the two hearts — yet it is covered by the idea of self.
It is this which causes consideration of friend as “other” instead of regarding friend as “self.” Consequently there is a line of demarcation caused by this discrimination, from the action of the nufs in making the heart-love submissive to the mind-thought. Therefore, the friend is not a confidant, but an acquaintance even when there is harmony of feeling.