Podcast - The Role of Love in the Qur'anic Worldview

When we were thinking about who should be the voice of this first event,

Professor William Chittick's name readily came to mind for a variety of reasons.

I just mentioned Warraqa.

He has been in serious conversation and engagement with Islam and the Muslim tradition for almost half a century.

I am not making any reference to age, because he began when he was very, very young.

Now, how should I introduce William Chittick, who is not in need of any introduction?

Instead, I tell you my connection with him.

I first ran to his name.

When I was reading it,

I was reading one of the major works of contemporary Muslim philosopher,

Al-Namih Muhammad Hussain Tabahi,

who died in 1981, in English.

And I was so amazed to see the name of Professor Sayyid Hussain Anas,

with Professor William Chittick on the cover, as co-translated and annotated.

Who is this person, who is in that group and that caliber of great mind?

To see his name along with those two major contemporary Muslim thinkers impressed me.

So I wanted to know how he looks like.

When I returned to Iran and began to work in the Iranian Academy of Philosophy,

the name of the founder-director of the academy, Sayyid Hussain Anas, came up again and again and again.

And of course people would talk about his very good, sharp, tough students.

And guess whose name was always at the top?

That was William Chittick.

I then discovered that not only he has worked with Professor Nast and the like of Professor Nast,

but also he has worked and studied with great minds

of contemporary Iranian literally figures, such as Bani Uzzawah Al-Furuz Al-Khfa and others,

Jalal al-Humayi and others.

Some of you who are Iranians or know about Iran know that they are all stars.

All these connections created a mental image in my head

that pleasantly proved very fictitious when I met him.

Because when I finally met him, there was not that pompous figure that I was thinking in my head.

Instead, I saw this extremely humble human being down to earth

and enormous amount of modesty.

And of course, when you look at the enormous experience and achievements he has had,

that even is doubly significant.

You may have seen the short bio that we provided for you in the posters,

informing you of the complex issues and areas that he has dealt with.

But we know he has authored more than 30 books and more than 100 articles,

all dealing with complex areas of Muslim mysticism, philosophy, theology, intellectual history,

and the list can go down.

Some of these works include

Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul,

The Pertinence of Islamic Cosmology in the Modern World,

Ibn Arabi, Heir to the Prophet,

The Heart of Islamic Philosophy, The Sufi Path to Knowledge,

The Sufi Path of Law.

He has enriched Colton University with his presence

as one of the religious program's annual Davidson Lecturer.

And also in 2007, as one of the participants of the international conference

that we held here at Colton to celebrate the 800th birth anniversary celebration of Rumi.

And now, we are delighted that he has accepted to become the first lecturer

on the activities of the Colton Center for the Study of Islam.

Please join me in welcoming Professor Chittick to the podium for his lecture on the role of law in Islam.

This is my dear friend.

I'll hang around you in case you're doubting.

We've got more going on between us than he needs.

He's a very, very nice guy, so don't listen to what he says about me.

Anyway, yes.

Well, it's a pleasure to be here at Carleton again,

and I would mention, sorry, I have vacuumed here.

It's all cleaner now.

So the reason I chose this topic is to tell you the truth.

It's because I have an upcoming very large project to write a book on,

which is Law and the Islamic Tradition.

And so I've been thinking about,

I'm going to take a year off beginning next September

to work on this book,

and in the meantime I've been doing research in various sites

of the whole issue of love in the Islamic worldview.

But I thought, the particular issue I thought,

just coming here today at Carleton,

would give me a chance to think about

a statement which

really struck me when I first came across it.

It's one of the sayings of Shams al-Tabrizi.

You know, Shams was the very famous teacher of Rumi.

A few years back I was working on his sayings

and translating them into English,

and in one passage he's talking about the Quran,

and he says that the Quran is the Ishmael man.

Now, Persian means, that means,

probably the best way to translate it,

the love book.

Something like the Shahnameh version of Ferdowsi,

the great book of kings.

Well, what is the Quran?

It's the book of love.

Now, most people who read the Quran,

especially nowadays,

maybe don't get that impression.

So I thought it would be an opportunity to

work through the worldview that Shams lives in,

lived in,

and what kind of notion

allowed him to say something like that

in a context where no one would have been surprised.

It would have been not an unusual statement at all.

Now, in order to do this,

I'm going to run through a lot of material,

so I hope you can bear with me.

Now, first of all we have to look back a little bit

at the Quran and the way the Quran presents itself.

The Quran, as you know, in Islamic theology,

in the book itself,

it presents itself as the word of God.

In other words, it is God's own self-expression.

The Quran presents itself,

introduces itself as the manifestation,

as the disclosure of the divine nature.

A book that explains who God is and what God does.

Now, when the Quran does talk about the universe

and human beings,

it does so only in function of God's reality.

In other words, the Quran has no interest

in people in the world on their own level.

Or their own state.

And the reason for this is fairly simple and straightforward

from God's point of view.

Nothing whatsoever exists on its own.

Nothing is independent.

Everything is dependent upon God.

Therefore, from that point of view,

everything needs to be discussed in terms of God.

So, the Quran is a book in which God introduces himself

to human beings.

Now, the next question which quickly arises is,

well, what exactly do you mean by God?

Anyone who has ever thought about this word

has probably realized that no two people

understand the word in the same way.

And the reason for this is fairly straightforward.

No two people are exactly the same.

So, everyone has an individual standpoint

through which perceptions and understandings

are filtered.

Nowadays, it is a commonplace of hermeneutical theory

to say that people look at things

through their own lenses.

But this idea was already playing a prominent role

in Muslim thinking a thousand years ago.

This is what Shabstin Fabrizi is talking about elsewhere

when he explains why so many people

fail to understand that the Quran

is the book of love.

I quote, 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 or something else.

Now, talk about these different gazes.

Shabst has in mind Islamic disciplines,

like jurisprudence, law,

scholastic theology,

hermeneutic philosophy,

each of which follows the rules

of its own specific methodology.

All of these disciplines, however,

were similar in that they put God first

and saw the world and human beings

as contingent upon God.

One of the major obstacles

which people face nowadays

when they try to understand the Quran

is that our worldview

is basically the opposite.

Instead of putting God first,

and by God I mean the ultimate reality,

by whatever name you want to call it,

we put ourselves first,

and then we look upon God

as contingent upon us.

So all scientific and academic disciplines

do this, explicitly or implicitly,

in contrast to disciplines

like Islamic jurisprudence or theology.

Now, to sum this up kind of succinctly,

I can say that pre-modern scholars,

especially in the Islamic context,

took it for granted

that God created man in his own image.

They looked at the human realm

as a derivative of the ultimate reality.

In contrast, modern-day scholarship

takes it for granted

that man created God in his own image.

Now, in other words,

religion is considered a derivative of society,

or psychology, economics, biology.

The working hypothesis is that

there is no reality out there,

only various epiphenomenon

of the human situation.

Now, let's go back to Shem.

According to Shem,

in order to see that the Quran

is the book of love,

we need to look upon God

with the gaze of love,

not the gaze of jurisprudence,

not the gaze of engineering,

not the gaze of neurobiology.

But what exactly is love?

For us nowadays,

it is an emotion,

typically understood through the lens

of biology or psychology.

It is one of the many

epiphenomenon of the human situation again,

a byproduct of biological

processes or social forces.

But this is from the Islamic point of view

to begin at the bottom

rather than at the top.

Rumi contrasts the top view

with the bottom view in this verse.

He says,

For the elect,

love is a tremendous eternal light.

For the common people,

love is form and century.

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

that love must come along with package.

If we can then grasp the reality of love,

we might be able to learn something

about the role of love

in human affairs

in the entire universe.

Now, the fact that love is utterly central

to both the divine

and the human reality

is a central point

that underlies much of Sufi teaching,

for those of you who are familiar with Sufism.

But it is also strongly defended by

the Muslim philosophers,

Ikhwan As-Sifau,

Abbas Sanam,

and Sohar Mardi,

Mullah Sadr.

They all make the same points,

about the centrality of love.

The early Muslim theologians

didn't pay much attention to love.

They were too busy proving that God,

in his absolute transcendence,

must be obeyed.

So they weren't interested in love,

which brings God much too close

for comfort,

as far as the theologians were concerned.

Now,

to see how love fits into the Quranic worldview,

we've got to go back to the Quran's basic teachings.

The most basic of all of these

can be boiled down to two axioms.

First, there's no God but God.

Second, Muhammad is God's messenger.

These two axioms of the Quran,

as you know, when recited along with words

I bear witness not,

is known as the Shahada,

the 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,

take it on its own.

It's called the formula of Tauhid.

Tauhid means asserting the unity of God.

It's the first principle

that Islam is taking.

A typical way of saying it,

a typical way to understand God

as he presents himself in the Quran,

is to place in this formula

any name of God mentioned by the Quran.

For example,

the Quran says that God is living, alive.

What does this mean?

This means that there is nothing alive but God.

There is no true life but God's life,

and the life that we experience

is not in fact true life.

If it were true life,

there would be no death.

Or again,

the Quran says that God is knowing.

This means that no one truly knows but God.

Our knowledge is in fact ignorance,

masquerading as knowledge.

And what little knowledge we may have

is a gift from God.

As the Quran says,

they encompass nothing of his knowledge

save as he was.

Now,

it would be very easy to go on

in this manner,

reciting,

listing the so-called 99 names of God,

putting it in the formula,

and quoting Quranic verses

which make exactly that point.

What is totally clear from all these verses

is that the Quran says that

there is no true reality but God's reality,

and that everything other than God

is derived from the reality of God,

always and forever.

So that's the first axiom.

The second axiom is

that Muhammad is God's messenger,

which also means that the Quran is God's message.

Part of this message,

I remind you,

is that God sent prophets

to all human beings

from the time of Adam

down to Muhammad.

Adam was the first prophet.

The traditional number of prophets

is 124,000,

which leaves plenty to go around.

Now, as the Quran puts it itself,

every community has its messenger,

its prophet.

Now,

so the Quran provides us two basic axioms

about the nature of things.

First, there's no reality but the supreme reality.

Second, human beings

get access to that reality

only by way of prophecy or scripture,

messages.

Now, one of the many ways

the Quran talks about this

dual perspective

is in terms of two sorts of commandment,

divine command issued by God,

.

The first sort is often called

the creative command,

and by means of that command,

God brings the universe into existence.

The second sort is often called

the religious command,

and by means of the second command,

God issues instructions.

The Quran mentions the creative command

in many verses,

and this is typical,

most succinct perhaps is,

I quote,

his command, God's command,

when he desires a thing,

his command,

when he desires a thing,

is to say,

be,

and it comes to be.

This command is eternal,

which means that it is outside of time,

and that God is always

bestowing existence,

because he never changes.

This is a very important theological point,

it explains why Muslim theologians

never were able to understand

God's creative activity

in terms of deism.

Deism is the notion that

grows up in late Christianity,

I suppose,

and certainly is extremely common today.

Deism is the idea that

God created the universe

at the beginning,

let's say at the time of the Big Bang,

if you like,

and then God more or less

ignored the universe.

There was no great interest in

leaving the universe to its own devices.

You know, Benjamin Franklin

and all those people in America

who were deists.

The chronic view is rather that

we exist at this moment,

because God is saying,

be to us right now.

There's none of this way back

in the beginning.

Now, by means of the religious command,

the other kind of command,

God issues instructions.

The Ten Commandments, for example.

God tells people what is right,

what is wrong,

what is good,

what is evil.

He directs them to perform

certain activities,

and he tells them to avoid

other activities.

Now, notice that implicit

in the notion of the religious command

is the idea of free will.

Which is to say that the religious command

is directed at those who have

the capacity to accept it

or reject it.

Those who follow the command

are called the Abbot,

servant,

servant of God.

The most obvious way

in which the creative command

differs from the 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 standpoint of the 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

recreating everything

with the eternal word,

Being.

So, from this point of view,

we have two sorts of servants

in keeping with the two sorts

of command.

The first sort are compulsory servants.

Everything in the universe

fits into the category.

The second sort are voluntary servants

who are also compulsory servants

because they are being created

by God all the time as well.

But, in addition,

they freely choose to follow

the religious command.

Now, ensure,

the creative command

is a direct consequence of tohi.

There is no God but God.

There is no creator but God.

There is no reality but God.

There is nothing that disposes

being but God.

The statement

of tohi

explains the nature of things

by saying that God alone is truly real

and that 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 chronic world view

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 the people are requested

to employ the free will

that they have,

however little it may be,

the free will that they perceive

in themselves.

They are requested

to employ that free will

in appropriate ways.

Ways appropriate to their servitude,

the act of their servitude.

Now, let me go back to love now

and show how this is,

what the connection is.

In the Quranic world,

love is a single reality

that has different implications

depending on how we look at it.

From the standpoint of Tauhid,

the first statement about being,

the Quran's basic axiom,

love motivates the creative command.

Why did God create the universe?

Out of love.

From the standpoint of prophecy,

the second axiom,

love brings the religious command

into existence.

Why did God send prophets?

Out of love for His creatures.

Now, then what exactly is love?

First, I won't be so foolish

as to try to define love.

I think anyone who has been in love

knows that love is indefinable.

And if this is true about human love,

it is much more true about divine love.

In Islamic texts, almost no one

tries to define love.

It's looked upon as an absurdity.

Because it's too close to being itself.

It's too close to reality itself.

It's beyond our understanding.

Nonetheless, numerous books have been written

describing the symptoms

and the consequences of love.

It's a whole genre.

Now, one of the more common ways

to sum up the implications of love

is to say that love is yearning

for union.

I think the pointer is very clear.

Lovers want to be together.

When you're in love,

you want to get together.

So this is as a working definition

of what love implies.

It's a good word.

It's very often cited in the texts

and very often applied.

Now, if we take into account

both the Greek and then the religious myth,

we can see,

and this of course is subject to revision.

I'm only beginning this book at this stage.

I've got another year and a half of research

before I sit down and make my final

anyway, my final take on this.

I think at the outset,

it seems to me that the Quran makes

ten basic points about love.

Now, the first of these I've already referred to,

and it is simply that

God himself is identical with love.

When the Quran talks about God as love,

the words used,

for those of you that know Arabic,

one is wood,

one is ,

both of which are,

in theology,

they're considered synonyms.

In the usual list of the divine names,

the 99 names,

Al-Wadud is given as the name of God

from wood.

Al-Wadud means,

grammatically,

it means lover,

and it also means beloved.

One of those Arabic forms

which has both an active participle

and a passive participle.

So, that name,

which is used in the Quran,

means that there is no lover but God,

and there is none beloved but God.

So, briefly,

God alone is a true lover,

and God alone is truly worthy of love,

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

with love itself.

Someone called Edelemi,

author of the first,

the earliest Arabic book on love

from a philosophical,

theological,

Sufi perspective,

mixing perspective,

puts it this way,

he says,

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.

This is a book written a thousand years ago,

about love.

And the,

the notion here is very common,

the most,

the earliest,

the clearest I found.

Now,

so the basic,

most basic Quranic teaching about love

is that God is identical with love,

and that 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,

it's more complicated.

The Quran refers to some of the implications.

Once we have a universe,

we say,

okay,

we have God here,

and we have a universe here.

In a verse which is quoted,

this Quranic verse is quoted more than any other verse about love.

There are lots of verses about love,

but this one is the key to much discussion.

It's the one I,

again,

I haven't taken it,

I haven't done a statistical study,

but I,

just from my experience in reading these texts for the last couple of years,

I've really been focusing.

This is the verse that everyone,

this is the verse that everyone comes back to.

And the verse is,

basically,

.

He loves them,

and they love him.

Now,

if you get,

if you analyze this statement closely,

the way it's done in traditional texts,

you see we have four basic statements.

First,

he loves,

means God is a lover.

He loves them means,

human beings,

in the context of this object,

are God's beloved.

The second statement.

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.

And I separate them out,

not because I'm inclined to do so,

but because the text separates them.

Because it's very clear that these issues are,

are addressed.

Each of them,

some often together,

and often independently.

You never turn this thing on.

Hold on.

Anyway,

I think my voice carries.

That's not a problem.

Is that better?

Yeah.

Well, good.

I'm sorry I didn't turn on the music.

They should've moved.

Why didn't you remind me?

Okay.

If we look at these four statements,

and then we look and say,

okay,

is these statements,

are these referring to the creative command?

Or are they referring to the religious command?

Or are they referring to both commands?

So I maintain that,

and the text maintains that they're referring to both commands.

There's no reason you cannot read these as statements of the actual situation.

And as statements,

as recommendations,

as it were,

to human beings to act.

Correctly.

Now,

let me go through this.

The verse just recorded says,

He loved them.

Okay?

So,

we learned that God is a lover.

We've already heard it,

at Dalem,

he explained that God loves his self.

But here it says that he loves them.

And this is God's eternal word.

So,

given that God is eternal and unchanging,

his love for human beings

is also eternal.

unchanging. However, so God loves us long before we were ever created. To say this,

however, does not mean that human love for God is eternal, because God's love for us

precedes our existence. But love, when we use that word, we have in mind, usually, typically

and in the text, a two-way street. No one wants to love someone and have no reciprocation,

right? You love, well, you want love in return. So God's eternal love motivated him to create

the universe so that there would be someone to love him in return. Now, in the Quran,

God's love for the universe and for human beings, his creative love, is most often called

the Raqqa.

Mercy. Compassion. Etymologically, Raqqa designates the quality of a raqqa. A raqqa is a woman.

The basic meaning of this word Raqqa, mercy, is a mother's love for her children. Now,

there are a number of sayings of the prophets which confirm this understanding. For example,

the prophet said, surely God is more merciful toward his servant.

than a mother is for her child. Now, notice here that this saying can be read, should be

read, as a 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 servant

in all things with the name of God.

with the name of God.

All-Merciful, or Rahman, from this verse.

The Quran says there is no one in the heavens and the earth

that does not come to the All-Merciful as a servant.

Everything in the heavens and the earth is a servant of the All-Merciful.

That is, the one who has his immediate love for the earth.

The Quran also talks about this name, All-Merciful, Rahman,

as a synonym for the name Allah itself.

Allah is the synonym for God.

It says, among other things, that God's mercy embraces everything.

His love embraces everything.

So, in other words, God is fundamentally merciful and loving.

And this, of course, is present in the form of the consecration.

In the name of God, the All-Merciful, the Ever-Merciful.

Commentaries of the Quran.

It is commonly explained that the name All-Merciful, Rahman,

designates God inasmuch as he loves all beings without exception.

Whereas the name Ever-Merciful refers to a more specific sort of love.

So, mercy is a kind of love.

But mercy and love are not synonyms.

The basic distinction between the two is that love is mutual.

Mercy only goes one way.

God loves human beings.

But people can't have mercy.

They can't have mercy on God.

God has...

So, God loves human beings.

Human beings can love him back.

God has mercy on human beings.

Human beings can't have mercy on God.

So, what do human beings do?

They have mercy.

Yes, they have it.

It comes with the divine image.

It should be given to others.

So, mercy is a quality which is due to other creatures, like ourselves.

Now, this person...

The spiritual love says he loves them.

So, God's love is directed specifically at human beings.

In the discussion of the object of love,

the big discussion typically brings in the issue of beauty.

Jamal and Muslim, both words are used.

Beauty, like love, is impossible to define.

But we all have some idea of what it means.

In Islamic texts,

beauty is typically explained as that which attracts love,

that which is lovable.

People love things because they find them beautiful.

Now, this is not an accident of biology or of psychology,

but rather a direct consequence of the creative commandment.

The Prophet expressed the divine root of love

in a very famous saying,

God is beautiful

and he loves beauty.

So, God himself is beautiful.

He loves beauty.

So, beauty is there to be loved in imitation of God.

Now, if God is beautiful,

the formula of Tuhri teaches that

there is nothing beautiful but God.

When God loves,

he is loving beauty.

And he alone is truly beautiful.

So, he is loving his own beauty.

He loves God.

He loves his own beauty,

first by loving it in himself,

and second by loving it in created things,

as it is reflected in creation.

The Qur'an says that God is described by the most beautiful name.

In addressing mankind,

the Qur'an says,

God formed you,

and he made your form beautiful.

In addressing creation generally,

he said,

the Qur'an says,

he made everything that he created beautiful.

Thus,

when the verse of mutual love says

that God loves them,

it means that God is loving his own beauty,

reflected in the form of human beings.

And of course, the Prophet said,

reiterating the Bible,

God created Adam in his own form,

and the form of God

is the form of the most beautiful names.

So, as the Qur'an puts it again,

we created human beings

in the most beautiful statures.

Asad.

Here it doesn't mean the best,

it means the most beautiful.

That which incarnates

all of the most beautiful names.

Now, one can say

that Islamic anthropology,

by that I mean,

the Islamic notion of human nature,

is founded on

these two parallel statements.

One is God loves beauty.

The other is

God loves them, human beings.

God loves human beings

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 the form of God's

all comprehensive beauty.

So, they alone were taught

all the names,

according to the Qur'an.

Now, from about the 13th century,

Sufi authors, in particular,

commonly explained

the unique status

of human beings

by a saying which was attributed

to the Prophet,

on shaking ground,

but anyway,

it was quoted all over the place,

and the saying says,

God is talking,

I was a hidden treasure,

and I loved to be recognized,

so I created creatures

that I might recognize.

So, the human role in creation

is epitomized by the word

recognition, matter.

By teaching Adam all the names,

God gave him the ability

to recognize him

in the entirety of his reality

and the fullness

of his created manifestation,

not simply in the traces

and properties

of a limited number of attributes.

So, human beings alone

have the capacity

to recognize God,

and this means

that they alone

have the capacity

to love God

in the full sense of the word.

You can't love something fully

if you don't know it.

The verse of mutual love says,

they love.

Human beings love.

If you read this in terms of

the creative command,

this means that human beings

were created to be lovers.

They cannot avoid being lovers.

At the same time,

there's no lover but God.

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 of the world.

In one of his prose works,

I could quote Rumi

for this whole paper,

but what's really interesting

is you find these things

all over the place.

Anyway, I'll quote Rumi

on this one because

he's so expressive.

It's a prose work.

He says,

What place is man's farm plot

within which grows the crop

of flesh and skin and bones

for these aspirations and desires?

These desires are mine.

Sure.

Actually, God is speaking.

I was a hidden treasure

and I'd love to be recognized.

Our love for God,

in other words,

is God's love for himself.

The first verse of mutual love says

they love him.

This means not simply

that people love by definition,

creative man,

they love.

That's what we do.

But also that people love God

by definition.

They cannot not love God.

And they cannot in fact

love anything else

because,

in the last analysis,

all others are simply

the signs of God,

the manifestations of God,

the creations of God.

All things are manifestations

of his beauty.

They're the traces

of the problems

and the desires

of God.

They're the signs

of God.

They're the signs

of God.

They're the signs

of God.

They're the signs

of God.

They're the signs

of God.

They're the properties

of his most beautiful names.

So when you love something,

you're loving his beauty

in respective form.

Again,

rooming.

Typical.

All of the hopes,

the desires,

loves,

and affections

that people have

for different things.

Father,

mother,

friends,

heavens,

earth,

gardens,

palaces,

knowledge,

activity,

food,

drink.

All these are desires

for God

and these things

are veils.

But there's no beloved

with God.

And if they don't accept

that they are servants

of the All-Merciful

by definition,

this is simply

because

it's across

what said

Adam forgot.

People have inherited

their fathers'

forgetfulness.

And this is precisely

in his love

of you

why God

sent prophets.

So this brings

us to the role

of the religious

commandment.

Up until now,

there's love

for God

and there's love

for God

and there's love

for God

is built

into the universe.

There's no escape.

From the standpoint

of the creative command,

God said

be out of love

for creation.

From the standpoint

of the religious commandment,

this same love

motivated God

to remind people

who they are

by sending

the prophets.

And the role

of the prophets

is to provide guidance

so that people

can recognize God

and love Him

in return.

Now,

just as God's

creative love

is identical

with the all-comprehensive

divine mercy,

God's guiding love

is identical

with a specific

kind of mercy

directed toward

those who

live up

to the innate

beauty

of their souls.

So,

the theologians

talk about

the difference

between the love

or the all-merciful

mercy,

the mercy

associated

with the name

all-merciful,

the mercy

associated

with the name

arachnid,

the ever-merciful.

And they say

the first

all-merciful

extends to all things

without exception,

and ever-merciful

is focused

on the people

who go

to paradise.

Now,

the verse

of mutual love

says

He loves

them.

In light

of the creative command,

this means

that God loves

human beings

because of

the beauty

of their

form.

In light

of the religious

command,

it means

that He instructs

people how

to live up

to their

form,

created

in the image

of the most

beautiful

life,

such as

parents

offer

guidance

to their

children.

In terms

of the creative

command,

God loves

human beings

unconditionally.

In terms

of the creative command,

it is

about condition.

Condition

about their

response to it.

The Quran

refers to

the conditionality

of love.

In this

verse,

it addresses

the Muhammad.

So Muhammad

is being

told to say

this to the

people.

Say,

Muhammad,

if you love

God,

people,

if you love

God,

then follow

me.

Follow

to love you even more, then you have to follow Muhammad and know God will love you even more.

So this specific verse provides the rationale for Islamic practices for the Sunnah. Simply

because in the Prophet is embodied the beautiful character traits of Quran. So the Quran says

you have a beautiful example in God's messenger. The fact that God's messenger, Muhammad, is

beautiful is sufficient proof that God loves him. Well, God loves the beautiful, so Muhammad

should be followed because he is God's beloved. If people do follow him, they also can become

worthy of God's love. Now, the Quran explains how people can become worthy for God's love

in many verses using the word love.

For example, it says that God loves those who do what is beautiful. God loves those

who repent, who have trust, who are just, etc. It also says what God does not love.

God does not love the wrongdoers. He doesn't love the workers of corruption. He doesn't

love the transgressors. Now, as creatures, he loves them because they are the objects

of the Creator's commandment. It's as people who do the work of the Creator's commandment,

that he does not love them. So they're not earning that second kind of love. The first

kind, no one can avoid it. Now, the reference, though, is that all these verses is to the

inner beauty of the soul, not just activity. Al-Ghazali, many others, refer to the achievement

of the inner beauty of the human soul by the expression becoming characterized by God's

character traits. This means that the most beautiful divine names come to be actualized

by the human soul, which is created in the form of those names, but the names remain

entrenched. Now, in a sound Hadith, the Prophet quotes God as saying that when his servant

approaches him through performing good works, that is, by following the Prophet, by following

the Sunnah,

then God says that he will love this servant. Then, in the Hadith, when I love him, God says,

I am the hearing who can hear the eyesight with which he sees, the hand with which he

holds, and the foot with which he moves. Now, this is precisely becoming characterized

by God's character traits. It also points to the final goal of lovers and their love,

which is union. Union, coming together, means gaining nearness to God. Not by moving

from here to there, but by waking up to the actual situation. The Quran says that God

is with you wherever you are. But until people walk in the path of the Prophets to the point

where God begins to love them, they cannot wake up to the manner in which God is with

them right now.

So, God loves those who become characterized by beautiful character traits, and these character

traits are nothing but his own attributes. God himself is love, and as the inscription

on his throne reads, my mercy takes precedence over my wrath. For mercy embraces everything.

Given the prominence of mercy as a divine character trait, it follows that the predominant

character trait is love.

The character trait of those whom God loves is mercy and compassion toward all of us.

This is why God addresses Muhammad, again, the most beautiful example, with the words

we sent you, Muhammad, only as a mercy to all the worlds.

So, from this point of view, from the Quranic point of view, love for one's neighbor is

predicated upon love for God.

I mean, the first commandment precedes the second commandment.

Love for one's neighbor to the ones of God comes first.

And if you encourage people to have mercy and compassion on others without encouraging

them to love God first, you're encouraging what is impossible.

Now, the verse says, they love.

In terms of the creative command, this means love is woven into human nature.

We can't avoid loving.

In terms of the religious command, it means the human awareness of their own loving nature

depends to a large degree upon their free will.

In order to actualize their innate love, to recognize their need for God, they need to

put the religious command into practice.

In the last point, God is beloved.

They love Him.

In the creative command, it means you can't love anything else because there is none beautiful

but God.

In light of the religious command, it means that people need to recognize who it is that

they really love.

This is why Rumi, for example, wrote this great text, the distinction between true love

and metaphorical love.

True love recognizes God is the object.

Metaphorical love gets tripped up by the appearances.

It's not to say that metaphorical love is false love.

It's simply immature love.

This lack of inner vision prevents it from seeing the point made by the Arabic proverb

that the metaphor is the bridge to the reality.

So, I've just given you nine ways.

Okay?

Now, the tenth way is simply to say that the final goal of love is toki, in its deepest

sense of the word.

This means to reestablish the unity that existed before creation.

It is what happens when lovers re-communiate with their beloved, whether this happens

in this world or in the next world.

So, let me simplify or take it from a slightly different point of view, these ten ways of

talking about love.

Sorry, I'm going over, I suppose.

Let me just say that love has four basic stages.

It's not thought generally, and then the chronicles is all implicit.

The first stage is God in himself, without regard to the universe.

When God himself is loved, in love with his beloved.

The second stage, we take the universe into account.

Here God is viewed as the origin of the universe, the creator of the universe, that which brings

the universe into existence.

Love motivates God to create the universe, so that the divine beauty, the beauty of the

universe, may be recognized by others and loved by others.

Love is the governing force of the universe.

It drives everything towards its own perfection and its own completion.

And eventually, love takes everyone back where it came from.

Mahatma, the third principle of Islam.

Faith, the return to God.

Everything goes back to God, by necessity.

There's no escape from going back to God.

This, in fact, the text calls the compulsory return.

Everyone's compelled to go back to God, just as everyone is a compulsory servant.

Now, in the third stage of love, human, the tree will is at issue.

Human beings are called upon to return to God, voluntarily.

All things are, in any case, going back.

But God, out of love and mercy, sends guidance so that people will understand.

That the return is the fulfillment of their loves and their desires.

They should be striving to go back with the enthusiasm of lovers going home to their beloved.

That's the third.

In the fourth and final stage, the ultimate goal has been achieved.

The two lovers have been united.

The people enjoy the embrace of their beloved.

Now, notice that the last stage, the fourth stage,

is the re-establishment of the first stage.

At the beginning, there was only God.

At the end, there's only God.

The difference is, at the beginning, people had no awareness of God or themselves.

They didn't exist.

At the end, they're fully aware of God and themselves.

They have now awakened to the fact that God is the hearing of what they hear,

and the eyesight of what they see,

and the hand with which they grasp,

the feet with which they walk,

and the eyes with which they look.

So now, although only God is there,

human beings are also there as implicit realities in the unity of God.

Now, let me conclude, last but not least,

by coming back to Shams al-Tabrizi,

his statement that the Quran is the book of love.

I alluded to the fact that he was not alone.

I should at least give you one other example.

Let me cite a short passage from a commentary on the Quran

called Kashf al-Astara,

the unveiling of the history.

It's the longest pre-modern commentary on the Quran in the Persian language.

As far as I know, I don't think it's nearly as long as this.

It's ten volumes, and it's part of the edition.

It was written by a man called Rashid al-Din Maibudi.

Completed in the year 1126,

a hundred years before Shams.

And the book is full of discussions of the mutual love

between God and man.

And the ten points I mentioned are all there,

either explicitly or implicitly.

Now, in one passage,

which is typical of the tone of the book,

you'll get it's intensive,

and this is discussions on love,

because now we're talking about

the issue of love, other issues,

and other tones are appropriate.

But the author wants to explain the meaning of this verse,

a very simple Quranic verse.

The beginning of the Quran, 289,

it's not very important.

When there came to them a book from God.

Here's his Persian explanation of what that verse means.

That's just, of course, the first stage.

Just the intro to his explanation of what's going on.

A book came to them.

And what a book.

For it was the Lord's reminder to his lovers.

It was a book whose title was

The Eternal Love.

A book whose purport is the story of love and lovers.

It was a book that provides security from being cut off,

a remedy for unsettled stresses,

the health of ailing hearts,

and ease for grieving spirits,

as a mercy from God,

the Lord of the Worlds.

So, thank you.

If there are questions, I can...

Leave the heads, please.

All right.

I have a question,

a question for the beloved.

All right.

I can't read it.

I have a question.

All right.

Can you read it?