Love in Islamic Thought

Abstract

Abstract Love occupied the attention of numerous Muslim scholars from early times. Taking inspiration from the Qur'an, the Hadith, pre‐Islamic poetry, and the Hellenistic legacy, they explained love's nature in order to bring out the existential import of Islam's fundamental teaching, the assertion of divine unity ( taw īd ). The 5th–6th/11th–12th centuries witnessed an upsurge in the literature of love, especially in Persian. Theoreticians and poets explained it as the energizing power that brings all things into existence and drives everything to its final goal. They held that God created human beings precisely because of His beginningless love for them, and that people are innately endowed with love because they were created in His image. The varieties of human love were taken as metaphors ( majāz ) for love's reality ( aqīqa ), which is God's love for beauty. Authors of such works directed their efforts not at instructing people in right conduct, which is the role of the jurists, nor at clarifying right belief, which is the job of the Kalam experts, but at helping them recognize that all pain and suffering are signs of separation from the One Beloved, and that the only truly human goal is to surrender to love's demands.

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