On the prohibition of love and adoration in the Arab heritage
The Arab heritage, from which the finest poetry of ghazal is filtered, was full of the opinions of religious scholars who despised love and reached the point of prohibiting it. And if Ibn al-Roumi’s heart did not rest “except to see the two souls mingle”, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah saw in love a “disease of diseases”, and Abu Hamid al-Ghazali considered it “the ultimate in ignorance and transcending in bestiality to the limit of beasts.”
Love is a movement of an empty heart
The most famous of those who forbade love in the Arab heritage are the Hanbali jurists. Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya considered that he distances the lover from God. And in his book, “The Prophet’s Medicine,” he said: “And the love of images afflicts hearts that are empty of the love of God Almighty, that are turned away from Him, and compensated by something else for Him. He refers to the saying of "some of the predecessors" that "love is a movement of an empty heart", that is, empty of everything except its lover, citing the words of God: "And the heart of the mother of Moses became empty, if she was not to express it", that is, empty of everything except from Moses, for excessive Her love for him, and her heart attached to him.
Ibn Qayyim elaborates on this issue in his book Ighaath al-Lahfan from the traps of Satan. He says: “The love of forbidden images is a type of devotion to them. Rather, it is one of the highest forms of devotion, especially if it seizes the heart and is empowered by it. He becomes an orphan. Orphanhood is worship. The lover becomes a worshiper of his Beloved, and his love, remembrance and longing for him, striving for his pleasure, and altruism often prevail. His love for God’s love and remembrance of Him, rather this often goes from the heart of the lover completely, and becomes attached to his lover from images, as it is seen, so the beloved becomes his god besides God Almighty... So he becomes more interested in him than his Lord: love, submission, humiliation, hearing and obedience. .
From here he considers that “love and polytheism go hand in hand”, especially that “the right heart”, in his opinion, “is the one whose concern is all for God, and all of his love for him, and his intention for him, and his body for him, and his sleep for him, and his awakening for him, and his talk and talk about him are more delicious. him from every conversation. Whereas, love enslaves souls to a non-creative person and throws war between it and monotheism.
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Ibn Qayyim says that the lover “moves when his beloved is mentioned from her without anyone else. That is why you find a lover of women and boys, and a lover of the Qur’an of Satan with voices and melodies. He does not move when hearing knowledge and evidence of faith, nor when reciting the Qur’an.” And because love makes the lover deify and glorify his beloved, so he prioritizes his obedience over obedience to God and His Messenger, he sees that in love “what may be more harmful to its owner than just riding immorality.”
Another Hanbali jurist, Al-Hafiz Ibn Al-Jawzi, meets with the opinions of Ibn Qayyim according to his book “Dhaman Al-Hawa”. In it he says: “Know that the absolute desires invite to present pleasure without thinking of a consequence, and urges the attainment of desires soon, even if they cause pain and harm (in the immediate) and prevent pleasures from the future. Regret, and this amount is enough to praise the intellect and disparage desires.”
Love goes with the mind
But the censure of love is not limited to the Hanbali jurists. In his famous book, Ihya Ulum al-Din, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, who is described as a Sufi of the Order, considers that love “is the ultimate in ignorance of what has been established for him, and in bestiality it goes beyond the limit of beasts because the lover is not content to shed the lust of the heart, which is the ugliest and most worthy of desires to be ashamed.” From him until he believed that lust does not end except from one place, and the beast eliminates lust wherever it agrees, so it is satisfied with it.This is not satisfied except with one specific person until he increases humiliation to humiliation and slavery to servitude, and until the mind is harnessed to serve lust, and he was created to be obedient, not to be a servant of lust. And a deceiver for it, and love is nothing but the excess of excessive desire, and it is a disease of an empty heart that has no concern for it.”
For his part, the great jurist and Shafi’i judge Abu al-Hasan al-Mawardi, in his book “Adab al-Dunya wa al-Din,” criticizes passion on the grounds that it goes with reason and that “from goodness is counter to, and reason has an opposite because it results from morals its ugly, and it appears from actions its scandals, and makes the veil of virility broken, and an entrance. Suspicion is behaving." In his comparison between passion and lust, he considers the first worse than the second, and says: “As for the difference between passion and lust with their meeting in cause and effect, and their agreement in signification and meaning, it is that passion is specific to opinions, beliefs, and lust is specific to the attainment of pleasures. And passion is an origin, it is more general.”
In the same book, al-Mawardi mentions some opinions that disdain love. Al-Sha’bi said: “It is called Hawa Hawa because it loves its companion.” And a Bedouin said: “The passion is an insult, but his name was harsh, so the poet took it and said: “The disgrace is the passion at the heart of his name/ If you fall away, you will meet our humiliation.” Some poets: "Do you make the mind a prisoner of whims / but the mind has a prince over it."
As for Abu Ali al-Qali, he considers in the “Kitab al-Amali” that “passion is a sacredness that a man finds with pleasure in his heart.” Abdullah bin Al-Muqaffa’, in his book “Al Adab Al Kabeer”, gives the following advice: “Know that whoever causes matters to fall into religion, wears them out to the body, damages them to money, harms the mind, makes them less virtuous, and the quickest in the departure of majesty and dignity, is love for women.”
Treating "Love Disease"
“Because it is a disease,” Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya says in his book “The Prophet’s Medicine,” love “was curable.” This is how some viewed love as a disease that a cure should be sought before the lover's condition worsened. But how is love treated? For example, Ibn Qayyim quotes Sunan Ibn Majah on the authority of the Prophet that he said: “We have not seen for those who love one another the same thing as marriage.” But what if there is no way for the lover to reach his lover. Here it is considered that "from his cure: to notice himself despairing of it." In order to help the lover to seek medicine from his beloved, Ibn Qayyim advises him to “remember the ugliness of the beloved, which leads him to resent him.”
In order to make things a little easier for the lover, Ibn Qayyim, however, calls in his book “Ighaath al-Lahfan from the traps of Satan” to “beneficial love.” Beneficial love is “love of the wife and what the oath of the man possesses, for it is specific to what God Almighty has legislated of marriage and the possession of the oath, of chastity of the man himself and his family, so that his soul does not aspire to anything other than that which is forbidden.” What is more beneficial to him than loving God and His Messenger.”
As for Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali, in his book “The Revival of Religious Sciences,” he advises caution from the beginning, meaning that he prefers prevention over treatment. He says: “It is necessary to guard against it from the beginning by not reconsidering and thinking, otherwise if it becomes difficult to repel it,” and accordingly, “Let the precaution be taken at the beginning of matters, as for the latter, do not accept treatment except by hard effort that almost leads to the removal of the soul.”
Love is not forbidden in Sharia
But in return for these prohibitions of love and affection, the tradition conveys to us voices that are more compassionate towards lovers and lovers. Imam Mahmoud bin Omar Al-Zamakhshari narrates in his book “Rabee Al-Abrar wa Nass Al-Akhbar” on the authority of Yahya bin Muadh Al-Razi, who is a prominent Sunni Sufism, as saying: “If God commanded me to divide the torment among the creatures, I would not have divided the two lovers.”
As in all problematic issues in heritage, we find poems that are arbitrarily attributed to fatwas by some religious scholars. For example, Jami’ bin Markhiya al-Kilabi, one of the Hejaz poets, said: “I asked Saeed bin al-Musayyab, the mufti of the city, is there a burden on the demise of the people?” Said bin al-Musayyab said, “We are blamed for what we can.” Said bin Al-Musayyib is one of the first scholars of Islam. Here, al-Zamakhshari narrates in his previously mentioned book that Saeed said: “By God, no one asked me about this, and if he asked me, I would not answer without it.” While Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani narrates in his book “Al-Aghani” that Saeed said: “By God, he lied. He did not ask me and I did not issue a fatwa for what he said.”
But one of the most important books written about love in the heritage is what Ibn Hazm al-Andalusi, one of the greatest scholars of Andalusia and the author of many jurisprudential and philosophical literature, wrote in his famous book “The Dove’s Collar on Intimacy and Thousand,” a book he wrote for one of the princes. Ibn Hazm says that love “at the beginning is jocular and at the end of it is serious, its meanings are too short for her majesty to be described, so she does not realize its truth except through suffering. It is not forbidden in religion or prohibited in Sharia, because hearts are in the hands of God Almighty.” This is the summary of his opinion, as he believes that “the approval of goodness and the empowerment of love is a nature that is neither commanded nor forbidden, since hearts are in the hands of their alter… As for love, it is a creation, and man only possesses the movements of his acquired limbs.”
Among the most important things he said in the aforementioned book is his description of the effects of love on souls, so he wrote: “Love has a past judgment on souls, a ruling authority, an order that does not contradict, a limit that cannot be disobeyed, a king that does not transgress, obedience that does not act, and enforcement that does not respond, and that it undoes bitterness.” And it dissolves the obligatory, and it dissolves the rigid, and the fixed, and the endovenous, and the forbidden is permitted.”
But despite this, what is striking in the book “The Dove’s Collar” is the way in which its author begins his speech, where he says, describing the subject he is discussing: “This is nonsense, and it is better for us, with our short lifespan, not to spend it except in what we hope for, welcome the return and the good future tomorrow.” As for the end of the book, it is only possible to stop at the following conclusion: “And I ask God Almighty’s forgiveness for what the two angels write and which the watchers count on this and its like. He who knows that his words are from his actions, but if it is not from the idle talk for which one is not held accountable, God willing, it is from Forgiveable blame, otherwise it is not from the evil deeds and immoralities for which torment is expected, and in any case, it is not from the major sins for which the text is mentioned.”
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