The Religion of Love
What follows is an excerpt from Chapter 9 of The Prophet and His Message by Dr. Khalifa Abdul Hakim. We gratefully acknowledge and thank The Institute of Islamic Culture for permission to reproduce this.
ISLAM is essentially a religion of love - God's love for man and man's love for God and man's love for man and the entire creation. Love is the ground as well as the goal of all genuinely spiritual religions.
The Qur'an begins by calling God Rahman and Rahim (generally translated in English as Beneficent and Merciful), but the word Rahmahin Arabic, from which both these words are derived, has a very comprehensive connotation comprising love, mercy, blessing and many another cognate sentiment and attitude.
God is the embodiment of the highest of human ideals. If a man is mean and low-minded, he pulls down his God to his own level. Merely professing to believe in God does not make a man moral or spiritual, maybe a God he professes to believe in is neither wise nor just nor forgiving or loving. Therefore, the opening verses of the Qur'an which repeat God's attribute as Rahman and Rahim twice praise exclusively that Being .whose characteristic is being Rabb, another untranslatable word with a very rich connotation, meaning Lord, as well as Nourisher and Developer of all creatures in every realm of existence (Rabb-ul-'Alamin). God, the Creative Force of life, is no blind elan vital. Creative Activity, which is the essential attribute of God, is a goal-seeking activity directed towards the realisation of ideals and ends. God's love creates existence as a cosmos regulated according to laws. Besides physical laws, love also creates moral laws which become basic at the human level, and men are to be judged by them and their life determined by them.
God, therefore, is also the Lord of Judgment. This second attribute is derived; it is secondary in comparison with God's attribute of Creative Love. He is Rahman and Rahim and Rabb before being a Judge; as His laws originate in Love, so his judgment is informed and imbued with Love. It is only about Love (Rahmah) that it is said in the Qur'an that it comprehends everything and every being (7:156). This does not mean that God loves good and evil alike. If His love is creative and ameliorative, he cannot love any being or anything that negates the ideals of life. To illustrate what God's love really means we quote below a few verses of the Qur'an which would clarify the concept of Divine Love in Islam:
God is the friend of those who have faith. (3:67) Verily God loves, the doer of good. (2:195; 5:13)
Verily God loves those who repent. (2:222)
Verily God loves those who put their trust in Him. (3:158)
Verily God loves the just. (5:42; 49:9)
Verily God loves the pious. (3:75)
God loves those who exercise patience and perseverance. (3:145)
God loves those who love cleanliness. (9:108)
God loves those who fight for His cause. (61:4)
If God loves all these qualities, He could surely not love the negation of these qualities nor the persons who in their conduct repudiate these qualities : "God does not love those who deny Him" (3:31), not because He as a person is insulted or injured by this denial, but because this denial in thought and deed lowers the denier himself in the scale of life:
God does not, love the transgressors. (2:190) God does not love the conceited, boastful man. (4:36)
God does not love the sinful violator of trust (4:107)
God does not love the mischievous disturbers of peace. (28:77).
God does not love the extravagant. (6:142)
God does not love the supercilious [arrogant]. (26:23)
God does not love the unjust. (42:40)
God does not love the ungrateful sinner. (2:276)
The above quotations prove beyond the shadow of doubt that in Islam religion is identified with high moral ideals that stand for the improvement of human life. And God Who creates and sustains life is worshipped as a loving God because He creates all the means whereby creative love can purify and exalt life in all its noble aspects.
Islam is not based on mysteries and miracles, myths or legends, nor does it demand belief in irrational or ultra-rational dogmas towards which reason or moral sense of man does not point. It is a religion of the values of life. God is the source, guarantor and conserver of these values in whose realisation man is asked, to co-operate.
Whether God loves man or man loves God, it is not merely a person-to-person relation of passive sentimentality. It is an active creative force which purifies and exalts man both in belief and in conduct. Islam is both theism and humanism, because, besides concerning itself primarily with the exaltation of human life as it is lived on this planet, it also roots itself in the belief that the intrinsic values of human life are not fortuitous and merely a chance product in an otherwise non-moral or immoral Reality, but are essential and abiding elements in the structure of divinely created Nature.
In the triad of Love, (God's love for man and His creations, man's love for God and His creations and man's love for man ) the entire faith of Islam and its code of life is summed up. Doing anything for the love of God means connecting that act with the realisation of the highest ends of life. Acts unconnected with faith in high ideals become either mechanical or neutral or are done at a merely low biological level.
by Dr. Khalifa Abdul Hakim
