Sanai

Belief brings me close to You
but only to the door.
It is only by disappearing into
Your mystery
That I will come in.

- Hakim Sanai

Sanai was a Persian poet who lived in the 11th and 12th centuries. While travelling in India he met a Sufi teacher and himself became a Sufi, giving up a life of wealth and luxury as a court poet.
The Walled Garden of Truth (Hadiqat al Haqiqa) is his master work, and the first Persian mystical epic of Sufism.

There is nothing else but the Self

The beginning, the end, the manifest and the hidden.
The seer and the listener, all is Him,
He is in everything yet He is beyond,
there is nothing else, everything is Him;
abandon the duality of me and you,
see one, there aren't two at all,
understand this and disappear in it;
when you are not, then truly He is.

- Hazarat Ali

Hazarat Ali was the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad. Sufis identify him as the founder of their strain of Islam. For his courage, wisdom and compassion he is revered by Muslims (the Alawis even consider him to be an incarnation of the Divine), and he has also been greatly praised by Western scholars since the 18th century. The poet Kahlil Gibran wrote of Ali:

"In my view, ʿAlī was the first Arab to have contact with and converse with the universal soul. He died a martyr of his greatness, he died while prayer was between his two lips. The Arabs did not realise his value until appeared among their Persian neighbors some who knew the difference between gems and gravels."

The Prophet, Ali, Husayn and Hasan in Paradise, public domain image from wikimedia commons.

Annihilation of ego

"Fanaa (فناء) is the Sufi term for extinction. It means to annihilate the self, while remaining physically alive. Persons having entered this state are said to have no existence outside of, and be in complete unity with, Allah.

Fanaa is similar to the concepts of nirvana in Buddhism and Hinduism or moksha in Hinduism, which also aim for annihilation of the self. Fanaa may be attained by constant meditation and by contemplation on the attributes of God, coupled with the denunciation of human attributes."

-Wikipedia

The 'self' to be annihilated refers to the ego, while 'Allah' is the Self of the universe.
The term Jihad originally referred to the struggle against one's own inner enemies: the false desires and aversions, and ego that drag us away from the Self. Like so many things in religion, a spiritual, internal concept has been debased into a physical, external one, and has come to be interpreted as war against others instead of the ego-self.

"In western societies the term jihad is often translated by non-muslims as "holy war". Scholars of Islamic studies often stress that these words are not synonymous. Muslim authors, in particular, tend to reject such an approach, stressing non-militant connotations of the word."
-Wikipedia

The Goddess fighting demons (symbolising inner enemies such as lust, greed and the ego), Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The First Mother

“This primordial nature is the breath of the Merciful God in his aspect as Lord. It flows throughout the universe and manifests Truth in all its parts. It is the first mother through which Truth manifests itself to itself and generates the universe”.

-Ibn al 'Arabi 

Ibn 'Arabī (1165 – 1240) was an Andalusian Moorish Sufi mystic and philosopher.