William C. Chittick, “Divine and Human Love in Islam,” 163-200 in Jeff Levin and Stephen G. Post, eds., Divine Love: Perspectives from the World’s Religious Traditions (West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania: Templeton Press, 2010)
“Islam begins with the two-part Shahada, the “bearing witness,” that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is God’s messenger” (163). The first part is interpreted as linked with “the generative command”: God says, “Be!” and a thing is. The second part is interpreted as linked with “the prescriptive command,” the guidance provided by the prophet.
The Qur’an described God as possessing “the Most Beautiful Names” (al-asmā’ al-husanā) and it calls Him “the Bueatiful-doer” (muhsin). It says, “He made beautiful everything that He created” [32:7]. The Prophet said, “God is beautiful (jamīl), and He loves beauty.” The notion that all love is directed at beauty (jamīl, husn) permeates the tradition. As for man, God “taught him all the names” (Qur’an 2:31) and created him “in the most beautiful stature” [95:4). Among all existent things, man alone was created in the form of Him who is named by the Most Beautiful Names. Other creatures were created by the activities of specific names, so they can be “signs” (āyāt) of God’s life-giving, His gentleness, His might, His beneficence; only human beings can be signs of the Beautiful per se, embracing all of the Most Beautiful names without exception. This is why Rūzbihān Baqlī (d. 1209)—a prolific author of Arabic and Persian books that gave love a high profile—tells us that human beauty is differentiated from every other sort of created beauty because it displays the radiance of the divine Essence, whereas other creatures manifest only the activities of God’s attributes. (166)
The secret of climbing the ladder to God is to empty oneself of self-centeredness and to open oneself up to the divine light, which has appeared most clearly in prophetic guidance. The process is never-ending, for the light is infinite and the human form finite. Teachers have described the steps on the ladder in many ways, often enumerating them in archetypal numbers—7, 40, 100, 1001. They also say that the journey “to God” is only the prelude to the journey “in God.” Many discuss a third journey “from God” back to the world, and a fourth journey “with God” in the world. In the posthumous realms as well, journeying can have no end, for God is endless. (167)
The more theoretical analyses of human transformation focus on “character” (khuluq), not least because the Qur’an says, addressing Muhammad, “Surely you have a tremendous character” [68:4]. The plural of this word, akhlāq, was used by philosophers to translate the Greek notion of “ethics” and “morals.” Using either of these terms to translate the Arabic word back into English, however, obscures khuluq’s shared etymology with khalq, creation.” In the normal, unvoweled script, the two words are written exactly the same way. Their common source indicates that a person’s character is intimately tied to God’s creative act and that character traits (akhlāq) are not so much moral qualities or ethical principles as the modalities of a person’s being. Morals and ethics pertain primarily to objective reality, not to subjectivity. This does not imply, however, that character traits are fixed—far from it. In Islamic theology, calling God “Creator” is tantamount to saying that He is creating the universe always and forever, so everything undergoes constant change and transformation. To climb the ladder to God is to harness the ongoing flow of creation in order to transform “base character traits” (safsāf al- akhlāq)into “noble character traits” (makārim al-akhlāq). Hence Muhammad used to pray, “O God, Thou hast made my creation beautiful, so make my character beautiful too!” He also said, “The most beloved of you to God is the most beautiful of you in character.” (167)
Al-Ghazālī and many others insist that people must strive to be God-like. Abu’l-Hasan al-Daylalmī, (d. ca. 1000), author of the first Arabic treatise on love from a largely Sufi perspective, says that when someone loves God,
God beautifies his character traits, for He bestows upon him a robe of honor from His love and character traits from His character traits. He dresses him in a light from His light, a beauty from His beauty, a splendor from His splendor, a generosity from His generosity, a forbearance from His forbearance, a kindness from His kindness, a munificence from His munificence, and so on with the other attributes. Thus he becomes characterized by God’s character traits. (168)
It is also the case that the goal of philosophy is to become more like God.
Among all divine attributes, mercy is most closely associated with the notion of “God” (Allāh). One of the most often cited proof-texts for this is the verse, “Call upon God, or call upon the All-Merciful—whichever you call upon, to Him belong the Most Beautiful Names” [17:110]. Notice that the formula of consecration, which begins almost every chapter of the Qur’an and should initiate a Muslim’s every action, contains two of the four Qur’anic divine names derived from the word rahma: “in the name of God, the All-Merciful (al-rahmān), the Ever-Merciful (al-rahīm).” Ibn ‘Arabī points out that this formula expresses God’s nature. All divine names refer back to “God” and can be divided into two basic categories: the gentle and the severe (or the beautiful and the majestic, or those that stress immanence and those that stress transcendence). (170)
Al-Ghazālī writes,
Love for God is the furthest goal among the stations and the highest pinnacle of the degrees. After reaching love, later stations, like yearning, familiarity, and contentment, are among its fruits and consequences. And all the stations before love—such as repentance, patience, and abstinence—are introductions to it. (188)
Every beauty in the universe is a loveliness deriving from that beauty. (189)
Among the many authors who stress the importance of recognition and knowledge in loving God is Ibn al-Dabbāgh (d. 1296), author of one of the clearest and most systematic treatises on love in Arabic.
Nothing allows people to reach complete love but recognition of the perfection and beauty of the Beloved. . . . Love is the fruit of recognition, and recognition is the cause and occasion of love. . . . Every lover is a recognizer [‘ārif], but not every recognizer is a lover [muhibb]—I mean, at the beginning of recognition. But, when recognition reaches perfection, and when love becomes continuous through recognition’s continuity, then the lover is the same as the recognizer, and the recognizer is the same as the lover, with no difference. This is because, when recognition is firmly rooted, the attributes of the Beloved disclose themselves to the lover. This self-disclosure becomes constant through the constancy of the love, and love becomes constant through the constancy of the recognition. . . . Through witnessing and self-disclosure, the recognizer’s love and the lover’s recognition are unified, and each of these two stations yields the other in succession. (189)
I can sum up the picture of love drawn by Muslim lovers in these terms: Love is the very Reality of God Himself. It gives rise to the universe and permeates all of creation. God singled out human beings for special love by creating them in His own form and bestowing on them the unique capacity to recognize Him in Himself and to love Him for Himself, not for any specific blessing. The mark of this capacity is that they alone are addressed by the prescriptive command and offered the choice of loving Him or rejecting Him. The engendering command instills them with love, but He cannot force them to recognize who it is that they truly love without depriving them of their humanity. As the Qur’an puts it, “There is no coercion in religion” [2:256], for coerced love is no love at all. Those who accept the call of the prescriptive command should not expect an easy road. Falling in love is the beginning of pain, not its end. Nonetheless, the more intense the pain, the greater the joy. This is why Rūmī tells us that lovers prefer the pain inflicted by the Beloved to anything else.
Marvelous pain You stir up that becomes the cure of my pains!
Marvelous dust You stir up that refreshes my eyes!
Tawhīd [unity], Islam’s founding principle, negates false reality and presents God as the only Lover and the only Beloved. Prophecy, the first corollary of tawhīd, explains that becoming characterized by the divine character traits provides the means to participate fully in God’s love by loving Him and loving others as oneself. Compassion, brotherhood, ethics, morality, and justice can only be actualized if one receives a luminous robe of honor woven from the divine attributes; beautiful character traits, which are nothing but the embodiment of the divine names, are not, and cannot be, human possessions, for there is no beauty but God’s beauty. Over Islamic history, the most popular spokespersons for virtue, goodness, and love have not been theologians and jurists, but rather those saintly souls who lived lives of loving-kindness and compassion. Among them were great poets who sang of love, figures like Ibn al-Fārid in Arabic, Rūmī and Sa‘dī in Persian, and Yunus Emre in Turkish. The intense love and compassion that radiates from their lives and poetry has inspired people for centuries to love “the whole cosmos,” as Sa‘dī put it, and it has helped them to understand that God’s love for man is in fact the heart of the Qur’anic message. (193-94)