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The Lost Jihad: Love in Islam

The many words and meanings for love in Arabic are reflective of Islam's comprehensiveness and depth

by G. WILLOW WILSON

"At the heart of all things is the germ of their overthrow," wroteEgyptian author Adhaf Soueif in her Booker-nominated novel, The Map ofLove. She was indulging in a very beautifully written digression aboutArabic grammar, comparing words derived from the same root: in thiscase, qalb, "heart"; and enqilab, "overthrow". At this level, where theinterplay of meaning and construction is visible, Arabic becomes anextraordinary language, forcing into cooperation concepts and ideasthat are entirely unrelated in English.

Despite the tremendous conceptual range and utility provided by theroot-and-pattern system of the language, there is a common assumptionamong non-speakers that Arabic-and thus, Islam-lacks an equivalent ofagap, a Greek term used by Christians to mean the boundary-less,self-sacrificing love between believers, or between a believer and God.More passionate than filia, less explicit than eros, agap is lovestripped of expectation, in which the lover is humbled and disciplinedbefore the beloved. Running a Google search for 'agap' and 'Islam'yields literally hundreds of Christian sites claiming there is no suchterm in Arabic, and painting Islam as a cold, dispassionate religion in

its absence.

Over the years, Sufi Muslims have co-opted many of the romantic Arabicwords for love and made them serve an ideal very much like agap: Rumifeels hayam for the absent Shams; al Ghazali explores 'aishq as theunion between a worthy believer and a higher Beloved, Allah. The poetryof 10th and 11th-century Sufis helped inspire the troubadour cultureand ideals of courtly love that flourished in the medieval kingdoms ofsouthern France, Navarre and Aragonne; one of the positive artisticdevelopments to arise from contact between Christian Europe and theMuslim Near East during the Crusades. But many of the greatest Sufithinkers, including al Ghazali, were themselves influenced by Platonic,Neoplatonic and Gnostic Christian ideals of love, kept alive in themedieval Middle East by the translation of Greek, Roman and Byzantinetexts into Arabic and Persian. The question remains: we know theProphet Muhammad meant Muslims to love and serve God, but did he meanthem to be in love with God-and to reflect this love and service amongeach other?

The answer is, simply, yes. Though it has classically been overlookedby Islam's detractors, there is a word for agap in Arabic. It carries

the same non-specific 'boundary-less' connotation as the Greek word,and is used contextually in the same way. Better yet, it is entirelyoriginal; not borrowed, adapted, or modeled on a word from anotherlanguage. The Arabic word for agap is mahubba, and it is fascinatingfor two reasons: one, because it comes from hub-in its feminine form.Two, because of the prefix ma. Adding the letter mim to the beginning

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of a word in Arabic means "one who is/does", "that which is/does", or"in a state of" the word that follows it. Junun is mad, and majnun is"one who is mad" or "in a state of madness"; baraka is a blessing, andmubarak is "one who is blessed" or "in a state of blessedness"; Islamis submission, and Muslim is "one who submits" or "in a state ofsubmission". Thus, mahubba is quite literally 'in love', but it israrely used in an erotic sense. It can describe either love amongpeople or love for the divine, and is used most commonly in a spiritual

context in both cases. Implicit in mahubba is service; the lover putsthe beloved at the center of the discourse, and submits to his/herdemands. Author Fethullah Gulen describes mahubba as "obedience,devotion and unconditional submission" to the beloved, quoting Sufisaint Rabi'a al-Adawiya's couplet, "If you were truthful in your love,you would obey Him/for a lover obeys whom he loves."

While it is, again, primarily Sufis who have propagated the ideal ofmahubba over the centuries, the word and the concept have roots inmainstream Islamic tradition: verse 3:31 of the Qur'an is sometimescalled 'ayat ul'mahubba', and reads "Say: if you do love Allah, follow

me, and Allah will love you." Even ibn Taymiyya, one of the founders ofthe Wahhabi movement, said of this verse, "There can be no clearerrecognition of mahubba than this, and this recognition in itselfincreases love for Allah. And people have discussed (at length) aboutmahubba: its causes, its signs, its fruits, its supports and rulings."A hadith qudsi included in the Muwatta of Imam Malik is even moreexplicit: "God said, 'My love [mahubbati] necessarily belongs to thosewho love one another [mutahubinna] for My sake, sit together for Mysake, visit one another for My sake, and give generously to one anotherfor My sake'."

Mahubba differs from agap in one crucial respect: because serving andapproaching the beloved is a form of ongoing personal struggle, mahubbais a form of jihad. A far cry from the violent and indiscriminate"small jihad" preached by militants, mahubba is a form of al-jihadal-kabir, the greater jihad, or jihad against one's own ego. It isperhaps unsurprising, then, that in an age of lesser jihad mahubba hasfallen out of practice and almost out of memory; it is so universallyneglected that when Islam is accused of lacking a concept of divinebrotherhood, few Muslims have the intellectual wherewithal to protest.But Adhaf Soueif is right: at the heart of all things is the germ oftheir overthrow. The struggle to serve God out of love, and one anotherout of love, is the jihad of human potential against the jihad ofviolent ideology; if resurrected, it has the power to change the world.

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G. WILLOW WILSON is a Cairo-based author and essayist. Her articles about modern Islam and the Middle East haveappeared in publications including the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, and the Canada National Post

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