Love in Sufism
Contents
Love is a central theme of human life as it was conceived by the act ‘Kun’ (‘Be!’) of Him who gave meaning and life to all things. A theme with many facets, the most glittering of which belong to the spiritual dimension, that dimension which Islam calls ‘tasawwuf’ (Sufism). There the concept of love occupies a generative place, and it is expressed in majestic, even masterly forms.
For those who travel this path of the subtle understanding of unity, the love of God, or the love with which God has favoured us, has an origin. To grasp and explain it, they turn to the Qur’an, where it is said that before the creation of Adam, we, the Adamic creation selected in eternity, made a covenant with our Creator, al-Khaliq, in pre-eternity. At His question, ‘Am I not your Lord?’, we answered ‘Indeed!’ (Qur’an VII, 172). With that answer a covenant was concluded, and it is the core of this feeling of unity inseparable from love, the ontological love that the human creature has for its Lord.
Divine love
Spiritual initiation, and the inner conditions that may awaken in a person the need to seek it, are a quest to recover a state lost by all human beings, yet one all can regain, provided they are ‘troubled by the thought of God’, in the beautiful phrase of Shaykh Ahmad al-’Alawi (1874-1934) of Mostaganem. Or provided, too, that the layer of clouds covering their soul is thin enough for at least a few shafts of the heart’s light to pierce the darkness, restore an awareness of spiritual reality and so offer ‘a presentiment of the higher states’.
In the Qur’an, the word ‘hubb’, and all those derived from it, notably ‘mahabba’, which renders the term ‘love’ most fully, are present at the crucial moments. The most significant verse, the one the Sufis would take as the foundation of their worship, says precisely: ‘God will bring a people whom He will love and who will love Him’ (Qur’an V, 54). It is He who loves first and who calls. The Sufi’s love, then, is a response to the gift of grace, to the divine initiative.
To grasp more fully the reach of this divine love for man, and of man’s love for God, the sayings of the classical Sufis on love illustrate the spirituality of these holy forebears. Gentle masters, stern masters, expansive masters, masters in contraction: each spoke of love out of his own nature (fitra), his spiritual state (hal) and his station on the way (maqam). The verses of some on love border on ecstasy, on spiritual intoxication; those of others on mortification; those of yet others on the perfect union between the lover and the Beloved. Yet all contain reverence for the divine Law, and the effort made in that work is sung too.
Concerning union in love, one of the founding masters of Sufism, Sari al-Saqati (d. 867), said: ‘Love between two is not complete until one can say to the other: “O myself!”’ For this Other, of whom we can grasp only the manifestations of His unique existence, envelops us in lights that annihilate our illusory existence in favour of His, alone true. Only love can overcome the immeasurable distances between creation and the Creator: we acknowledge the Creator’s unity, and we realise it by being consistent and coherent within ourselves and with the Law, which is the divine secret.
Human love
Al-Harith al-Muhasibi (781-857) defined love in these terms: ‘Love is to turn towards a thing with your whole being, then to prefer it to your own soul, your mind or your property, then to be in harmonious accord with it inwardly and outwardly, and finally to know that, even after all that, you are still wanting in your love for it.’ With this formulation by the man regarded as the censor of the people of the path, we draw near to a feeling built up by an education in awareness, through the soul that blames itself.
In answer to the literalist interpreters, Yahya ibn Mu’adh (830-871) said: ‘I prefer a grain of mustard’s worth of love to seventy years of worship offered without love.’ In his view, the best guarantee that religion will be observed at all lies neither in fear of hell nor in hope of reward in paradise, but in love without reserve and without calculation. His words echo the celebrated saying of a great figure of classical Sufism, this time a woman, regarded as the very voice of divine love: Rabi’a al-’Adawiyya (714-801).
The aim of every Sufi is to deepen God’s unity within ourselves and to live it existentially: to dwell in one’s heart, in concordance with one’s body, what one’s words attest: ‘there is no god but God’, la ilaha illa Llah. Only within this coherence does true love become possible. Outside it, a human being, man or woman, when he or she loves, loves only himself or herself; and so remains in a state of fierce strife between fidelity and betrayal. Why? Because we are weak and because everything is fleeting. When the fleeting is joined to the eternal, it is steeped in the quality of eternity: thus the love of human for human becomes truly possible when it passes through the love of God, in concordance with His Law.
As heirs of the Prophet Muhammad, the Sufis teach us that true love of the creation is that which passes through the Creator. That requires a first awakening, a hunger for noble spiritual foods, a journey, a companion who knows the way and who, throughout the course, shows us how to come down from those little mountains of the ego, to leave the darkness of unconsciousness, to slip free of the nets of self-indulgence, and finally to expose ourselves to the Sun, to melt into the Ocean and regain the Origin. For in the beginning was Love.
The experience of love among the Sufis is a great adventure. One can barely imagine what humanity might have lacked in fulfilment without that extraordinary expression.
Zakia Zouanat (1957-2012), author of “Soufisme, quête de lumière” (éd. Koutoubia), from which this text is taken.
