|
submit
articles |
| Mahabbah
(Love) Fethullah Gülen Mahabbah (love) means fondness, tender and
kind feelings, and inclination. When love affects and invades all feelings
of man, it is called passion and when it gets so deep and irresistible as
to burn with the desire of union, it is called fervor and enthusiasm. Love
has been defined by the sufis as the relation of the heart with the
Truly Beloved One or the irresistible desire felt for Him, or
trying to comply with His desires or Commandments in all one’s acts and
thoughts, or being enraptured and intoxicated without ‘sobriety’ until
the time of union. All these definitions can be summed up as
‘standing’ in the Presence of God and being freed from all transient
relationships and worries. True love means that a lover is set wholly
on the Beloved and is always and inwardly with Him, and that he always
feels Him and is freed from all other kinds of desires and wishes. The
heart of him who has such a degree of love always beats with a new
consideration for the Beloved at every moment, his imagination
always travels in His mysterious climate, his feelings receive new
messages from Him at every moment and his will takes wings with these
messages and he passionately desires to meet Him. While a lover who transcends his self with
the wings of love and reaches his Lord at the points of passion and
enthusiasm carries out his responsibilities toward the King of his heart,
his heart is set on His vision. His nature is ‘burned’ with the lights
of Divine Grandeur and lost in wonder and amazement. With the cup of love
on his lips, while the veils of the Unseen are lifted before him one after
the other, he is intoxicated with study of the meanings coming in rays
from behind those veils and enraptured with the pleasure of watching the scenes behind them. He
walks by the command of God, the Truth, and stops likewise by His command.
When he speaks he does so by the inspirations coming from Him, and when he
keeps silent, he does so in His name. Sometimes he is on a journeying
toward Him, sometimes is in ‘His company,’ and sometimes is occupied
with communicating His messages to others. Some have defined love as doing good and
favor when it is used as God’s love of His distinguished servants, and
as obedience, devotion and unconditional submission when it is used as a
servant’s love of God. The following couplets of Rabi‘a al-‘Adawiya
are significant in expressing this meaning: You talk about loving God while you disobey
Him; Love is based on two important pillars: The first is that which is manifested by the lover’s acts. A lover tries to comply with the Beloved’s desires. The second relates to the inner world of
the lover, who should inwardly be closed to everything else unrelated to
Him. True men of God mean this when they talk about love. According to
them, emotional concern with or love of any kind of pleasure including
spiritual ones or interest cannot be called love in its true sense. It can
only be figurative love. Every lover cannot feel the same degree of
love for the Beloved. Love varies according to the spiritual and emotional
depth of the lover and the degree of his consciousness of and care in his
obedience to the Beloved. 1. The love felt by those who are yet at
the beginning of the way is not established and constant. They dream of
being able to acquire the rank of Perfect Goodness and can at times
receive some signs of Knowledge of God. There are times when they thrill
at the twinkle of the ‘lights’ appearing on their horizon and vaguely
feel amazement and wonder. 2. Those who have taken a long way fly in
the heaven of love toward the highest point. They live in the bright
climate of the Qur’an as embodiments and examples of the good morals of
the Prophet Muhammad, upon him be peace and blessings. While trying to
represent the good morals of the Prophet, they are never in expectation of
any reward material or spiritual
and demand no pleasure. Even at the summit of this holy representation,
like fruit-bearing trees whose branches bend with the weight of their
fruits, they lower their wings of humility and always mention the Beloved.
If they are shaken with a fault or error, they severely criticize their
selves and fight with them. 3. Those who are the most advanced in love
of God are like rain clouds in the ‘heaven’ of Islam. They feel
existence by Him and live with Him, seeing and breathing by Him. In a
never-ending, never-stopping cycle, they are filled with the pangs of
separation (from Him) and the desire of meeting with Him, and when
relieved or emptied, they mount on a light and descend to earth to
embrace the whole existence animate or inanimate. In whatever degree of love, one who turns
to Him with heart-felt desires and sincere enthusiasm gets his reward
according to the depth of his feelings and concern with Him. The first of
those three groups mentioned above receive special favor and mercy, while
those of the second group reach the horizon of perceiving the Attributes of Grace and Majesty, being freed from defects of character. Those
of the third group are illumined by the lights of His Being and awakened
to the reality of things, getting in touch with the dimension of existence
behind veils. That is, the Almighty manifests the lights of His Grandeur
to burn up the attributes of those whom He loves coming from their
corporeality and ‘elevate’ them to the realm of Divine Attributes such
as the All-Seeing and All-Hearing. He makes them fully awakened to the
fact that they are poor and helpless before Him by themselves and fills
their hearts with the lights of the existence of the Divine Being. A lover with such degree of love, and who is rewarded with so much Divine favor, attains to an eternal life which cannot be described in terms of either existence or non-existence. Like a bar of iron put into fire and therefore seen as if a bar of fire, he may not be able to distinguish the Divine Being and His manifestations and therefore expresses his feelings and experiences in the terms associated with such false beliefs as incarnation and union (with God). Whereas in such circumstances, what must be taken into consideration is the established criteria of the Sunnah. The expressions uttered by men of profound spirituality lost in love of God while they are intoxicated with love cannot be taken as criteria to judge them. Otherwise we may be feeling enmity toward such friends of God who are favoured with continuous ‘company’ of God according to the Prophetic Tradition, A man is with him whom he loves, and, as declared in the hadith qudsi, Whoever becomes an enemy of My friends has waged war on Me, we have waged war on God the Almighty. |