The Gaze of Love–Reprint

Most people dont see Quran as a Book of Love. Shams e Tabrizi explains why so many people fail to understand that the Quran is the Book of Love.
He says, “The flaw is that people do not look at God with the gaze of
Love. They look at Him with the gaze of learning, or the gaze of
science, or the gaze of philosophy. The gaze of Love is something
else.” According to Shams in order to see that the Quran is a Book of
Love, we need to look at God with the gaze of Love; not the gaze of
jurisprudence, not the gaze of engineering, not with the gaze of
neurobiology.

But what exactly is Love?

For us now a days it is an emotion typically understood through the
lens of biology or physiology as one of the many phenomena of human
situation, a by product of biological processes or social forces. But
this, from Islamic point of view, is to begin at the bottom, rather
than the top. Rumi contrast the top view with the bottom view in the
verse, he says, “For the elect Love is a tremendous eternal light. For
the common people love is a form of sensuality.”

So in the Quranic worldview Love is identical with the eternal light of
God. In order to understand Love we need to begin at the top, with the
Divine Reality Itself. Once we know that God is Love and then we hear
that God created man in His own image, then we should be able to
understand .. if we grasp the reality of Love, we might understand the
role of Love in human affairs in the entire universe.

Two Axioms of Unity

To see how Love fits into the Quranic worldview you got to go back to Quran’s basic teachings. The most basic of all of these can be boiled
down to two axioms, first “there is god but God”; second “Muhammad is
God’s Messenger.” They are known as Shahada or bearing witness, the witnessing and the Shahada is the first act of muslim practice.

Now when you look at the sentence, “there is no god but God” taken on its own, its called the formula of Tawhid.
Tawhid means ‘asserting the Unity of God’. Its the first principal of
Islamic faith.  A typical way to understand God as He presents Himself
in the Quran is to place any Name of God mentioned by the Quran.

For example, the Quran says: God is Living, Alive. What does it mean?

This mean that there is nothing alive but God, there is no true life
but God’s Life and the life that we experience is in fact not true
life. If it were true life there would be no death or deaths.

The Quran says that God is Knowing. This means no one truly knows but God. Our knowledge is infact ignorance, masquerading as knowledge. What
little knowledge we may have is a gift from God. As the Quran says,
“they encompass nothing of His knowledge save as He wills.” The Quran
says that there is no true reality but God’s reality and everything
other than God is derived from the Reality of God, always and forever.
So that’s the first axiom, Tawhid.

The second axiom is “Muhammad is God’s Messenger” which also means that Quran is God’s message and part of this message I remind you is that
God sent Prophets to all human beings, from the time of Adam to the
time of Muhammad. Adam was the first Prophet.

So the Quran provides us two basic axioms about the nature of things.
First, ‘no reality but Supreme Reality’, second, ‘human beings get
access to that Reality only by the Prophetic reality and Scriptures or
Messages.’

Creative Command and Religious Command

One of many ways the Quran talks about this dual perspective is in terms of two source of Divine Commandments (Amr) issued by God. The first is called the Creative Command (example, ‘and God brings the universe into existence’), the second source is often
called the Religious Command, by means of theis second sort of command,
God issues instruction.

Example of Creative Command, ‘When He desires a thing, His command is
Be, and it comes into being.’ This Command is eternal and its outside
of time and God is always bestowing existence.

By means of the Religious Command, God issues instruction, the ten
commandments for example. Notice that implicit in the notion of
Religious Command is the idea of free will. The religious command is
directed at those who have the capacity to accept or reject it. Those
who follow the Command is called abdal or servant, servants of God.

The most obvious way in which the Creative Command differs from
Religious Command, is in this question of free will. People are free to
obey or disobey the Religious Command, but no  one can disobey the
Creative Command. From the point of Religious Command, only those who
obey are called servants. From the standpoint of the Creative Command,
everything is God’s servant by definition because God is constantly
creating everything with the eternal word, “Be”.

We have two sorts of servant in keeping with the two source of
commands. First sort are Compulsory Servants, everything in the
universe fits into that category. The second sorts are Voluntary
Servants, who are also Compulsory Servants but in addition they freely
chose to follow the Religious Commands.

The Creative Command is a direct consequence of Tawhid, there is no god
but God; there is no creator but God, there is no reality but God,
there is nothing that bestows being but God. The statement of tawhid
explains the nature of state that God alone is truly Real and
everything else is contingent. And He commands things to be and they
are. The Religious Command is a direct consequence or corollary of the
second half of the shahada, ‘Muhammad is God’s Messenger’. God’s act of sending Prophets brings the Religious Command into existence.

So the Quranic Worldview distinguishes between the realm of being,
which is the actual situation of all of reality and the realm of
religion in which people are instructed to recognize the fact that they
are in fact compulsory servants of God and people are requested to
employ the freewill that they have, as little that may be, the freewill
they perceive in themselves, they are requested to employ that freewill
in appropriate ways, ways appropriate to their servanthood.

Let me go back to Love and show you what is the connection. In the Quranic Worldview, Love is a single reality, it has different implications
depending on how we look at it. From the stand point of Tawhid, Quran’s
basic axiom, Love motivates the Creative Command.

Why God created universe? Out of Love.

From the standpoint of Prophecy, Love brings the Religious Command into existence. Why did God sent Prophets? Out of Love.

Now, then what exactly is Love?

First, I won’t be so fool as to try to define Love, Anyone who has been
in Love, knows that Love is indefinable. If its true about human love,
its much more true about Divine Love. In Islamic text, almost no one
tries to define Love, because its too close to Being Itself, because
its too close to Reality Itself, beyond our understanding.

Nonetheless, numerous books have been written describing the symptoms
of the consequences of Love.  Its all yearning. One of the more common
ways to sum up the implications of love is to say that Love is yearning
for union. The point is very clear. Lovers want to be together. When
you are in love, you want togetherness. As a working definition of what
Love implies – its a  good one. Its often cited.

At the outset, it seems to me that Quran makes ten basic points about
Love. Now the first of these I have already referred to and its simply
that God Himself is identical with Love. When the Quran talks about God
as Love, the words used: Wud and Hubb, both of them in theology is considered as synonyms. In the usual lists of Divine Names, the 99 Names is al-Wadud is given as a Name of God, from Wud. Al-Wadud
- grammatically it means Lover and it also means Beloved. One of those
Arabic forms that have both an active participle and a passive
participle.

There is no Lover but God and there is none Beloved but God

So that Name which is used in the Quran means that there is no lover
but God and there is none Beloved but God. Briefly, God alone is True
Lover and God alone is Truly worthy of Love. Thats the basic
significance of this Name. Now if we look at God in terms of Himself,
as theology does all the time, to say that God is both Lover and
Beloved, also means that God is identical to Love Itself.

One of the earliest arabic book of Love from theological and sufic
mixed perspective its said, “the root of Love is that God is eternally
described by Love. God Loves Himself, for Himself, in Himself. Here
Lover, Beloved and Love are a Single thing without division for He is
Unity Itself and in Unity things are not distinct.”

So the most basic Quranic teachings about Love is that God is identical
with Love. Given the fact that God is One, that Love is His own Love
for Himself. But the moment we take the universe into existence, we
have a different picture, its more complicated. The Quran refers to
some of the implications, once we have the universe… in a verse which
is quoted more than any other verses about Love. There are lots of
verses about Love but this one is the key to much discussion. This is
the verse that everyone comes back to. The verse says basically, Yu Hubbuhum, wa yuhubbuna Hu.

“He loves them and they love Him.”

Four Issues

If you analyze the statement closely, the way its done in traditional text, we have four basic statements. First, ‘He loves’ – means God is a
lover, ‘He loves them’, means human beings in the context of its
object, are God’s beloved. The third statement, ‘human beings are God’s
lovers’; and the fourth statement is ‘God is the object of their Love’.
There are four issues going on here.

If we look at these four statements, are these referring to the
Creative Command or are they referring the Religious Command or are
they referring to the both Commands? The text maintain that they are
referring to both Commands. Here it says, “He Loves them” and its God’s
eternal Word. Given that God is Eternal and Unchanging,  His love for
human beings are also Eternal and Unchanging.

God loves us long before we were even created. To say this however
doesn’t mean that human love for is eternal, because God’s love for us
precedes our existence. But Love, when we use that word, we have in
mind usually a two way street. So God’s Eternal Love motivated Him to
create the universe so there would be someone to Love Him in return.

In the Quran, God’s love for the universe and human beings, this Creative Love, is most often called the Rahma, Mercy, Compassion.  The basic meaning of this word Rahma, Mercy (derived from RAHM
meaning Womb) is mother’s love for her children. There are number of
sayings of the Prophet which confirm this understanding. For example
the Prophet said, ‘Surely God is more merciful towards His servant than
a mother is for her child.’

Notice here that this saying can be read, should be read and the
reference to God’s love for all things, for all things  in the universe
are God’s servants. The Quran makes this point explicitly by
associating the universal servanthood of all things with the Name All
Merciful, ar Rahman.

The Quran says, “there is no one in the heaven and in the earth that
does not come to the All Merciful as servant.” Commentaries of the
Quran commonly explains that the Name All Merciful, ar Rahman designates in as much as He loves all beings without exception, whereas Ever Merciful (ar Rahim)
refers to specific sort of Love. Mercy is a kind of Love, but Mercy and
Love are not synonymous. The basic distinction between the two is that
Love is Mutual, Mercy only goes one way. God loves human being, human
being can love Him back.

Do human beings have mercy, yes they have. It comes with the Divine
Image, but it should be given others. Mercy is a quality which is due
to other creatures like ourselves.

Beauty, Jamal and Husna

This verse of mutual verse that ‘He loves them’ – God’s Love is directed specifically to human beings. In this discussion of the object of Love, typically brings in the issue
of Beauty, Jamal and Husna.

Beauty like Love is impossible to define, though we all have some idea
of what it means. In Islamic text Beauty is typically explained as that
which attracts Love, that which is Lovable. People love things because
they find them beautiful. But this not an accessory of biology or
psychology but rather of direct consequence of Creative Command.

The Prophet expressed the divine root of Love in a very famous saying,
“God is Beautiful and He Loves Beauty.” So Beauty is there to Love in
imitation of God. Now if God is Beautiful, the formula of Tawhid that
there is thing beautiful but God. When God loves, He is loving Beauty.
HE alone is truly Beautiful, so He is Loving His own Beauty. He loves
His own Beauty first by Loving it in Itself and second by Loving it in
created things as its reflected in creation. The Quran says, “God is
described by the Most Beautiful Names (al-asmaul husna) .” In addressing mankind, the Quran says, “God formed you and He made your form beautiful.”

When that verse of mutual love says “God loves them” – it means that
God is Loving His own Beauty, reflected in the forms of human beings.

Islamic anthropology, the Islamic notion of human nature is founded on this two
parallel statements, one is God Loves Beauty, the other is God Loves
them, human being. God Loves human being because they encapsulate and
reflect the totality of the divine beauty – that is all the perfections
designated by God’s Most  Beautiful Names. Human beings alone were
created in God’s all comprehensive Beauty. They alone were taught all
the Names – according to Quran.

The verse of mutual Love says, they Love Him. The human beings Love
Him. If your read this in terms of Creative Command, this means that
human beings were created to be Lovers. They can not avoid being
Lovers. At the same time there is no longer but God, Tawhid. So the
root and source of human love is God’s Love.

Rumi, among others frequently talks about  human love as the reflection
of God’s Love in the world. “They Love Him”, this means not simply that
people love by definition, but also people love God by definition.
They Can not NOT love God and they can not in fact love anything else
because all others are the Signs of God, the Manifestations of God, the
Creations of God. All things are manifestation of His Beauty. They are
the traces and properties of His Most Beautiful Names, so when you love
something, you are loving His beauty in reflected form.

If people don’t recognize that there is no Beloved but God and if they
don’t accept that they are servants of All Merciful by definition -
this is simply because, as the Quran puts it, “Adam forgot”. People
have inherited their father’s forgetfulness.

And this is precisely in Islamic view, why God sent Prophets. So this
brings us to the role of Religious Command. Up until now, Love is built
into the Universe, there is no escape from it. From the stand point of
Creative Command, God said “Be” out of Love for creatoin. From the
stand point of Religious Command, this same Love motivated God to
remind people ‘who they are’ by sending the Prophets. And the role of
the Prophets is to bring guidance so that people can recognize God and
Love Him in return.

Just as God’s Creative Love is identical with the all comprehensive Divine Mercy (ar Rahman), God’s Guiding Love is identical with a specific kind of Mercy (ar Rahim) directed towards those who live upto to the innate Beauty of their soul.

In terms of the Creative Command, God loves human beings unconditional.
In terms of Religious Command, His Love is conditioned. The Quran
refers to the conditionality of Love and this verse which is addressed
to Muhammad, “Say Muhammad, if you Love God, then follow me, and God
will Love you.”  Although God Loves you in any case, if you want God to
Love you even more, then you have to follow Muhammad.

This specific verse provides the rational for Islamic practices for the sunnah (way
of the Prophet) simply because Prophet is embodied with the beautiful
character traits of the divine. So the Quran says, “You have a
beautiful example in God’s Messenger.” The fact that God’s Messenger is
Beautiful, is sufficient proof that God Loves Him. So Muhammad should
be followed because He is God’s beloved (habib Allah). If people do follow him,  they also can become worthy of God’s Love. (From the talk by William C. Chittick, draft  and partial transcription)

William C. Chittick is a leading translator and interpreter of classical Islamic philosophical and mystical texts. He is best known for his
groundbreaking work on Rumi and Ibn ‘Arabi, and has written extensively
on the school of Ibn ‘Arabi, Islamic philosophy, Shi’ism, and Islamic
cosmology.

“[Chittick’s] books will always remain most important milestones in the study of Islamic mystical theology.” -Annemarie Schimmel, author and scholar on Islam and Sufism