Maḥabba

Maḥabba is love, and in the classical sources it means one thing above all: the love of God. Nicholson devotes a whole chapter of The Mystics of Islam to it and calls it “the supreme principle in Sūfī ethics.” Al-Hujwīrī gives a precise definition of what the word names:

“Man’s love of God,” says Hujwīrī, “is a quality which manifests itself, in the heart of the pious believer, in the form of veneration and magnification, so that he seeks to satisfy his Beloved and becomes impatient and restless in his desire for vision of Him, and cannot rest with any one except Him, and grows familiar with the recollection of Him, and abjures the recollection of everything besides.”

— Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam, Chapter IV

A gift, not an achievement

On one point the sources are unanimous, and it separates this tradition sharply from a morality of effort:

Love, like gnosis, is in its essence a divine gift, not anything that can be acquired. “If the whole world wished to attract love, they could not; and if they made the utmost efforts to repel it, they could not.” Those who love God are those whom God loves. “I fancied that I loved Him,” said Bāyazīd, “but on consideration I saw that His love preceded mine.”

— Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam, Chapter IV

Rūmī makes the same point in a story Nicholson retells. A devotee who has called “Allah” all night is told by Satan to be quiet, since he will get no answer. The prophet Khiḍr then appears, and says God has sent him with this message: “Thy calling ‘Allah!’ was My ‘Here am I,’ Thy yearning pain My messenger to thee.” (Chapter IV) Al-Ghazālī takes a different road to a related conclusion: the first cause of the love of God, he writes, is that man loves himself and the perfection of his own nature, “This leads him directly to the love of God,” because all of it is God’s gift. (Alchemy of Happiness, Chapter VIII)

Junayd’s definition

Nicholson reports the most compact of the classical definitions:

Junayd defined love as the substitution of the qualities of the Beloved for the qualities of the lover. In other words, love signifies the passing-away of the individual self; it is an uncontrollable rapture, a God-sent grace which must be sought by ardent prayer and aspiration.

— Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam, Chapter IV

He also tells how Sarī al-Saqaṭī asked Junayd for the nature of love. Junayd listed the answers others give, and Sarī, taking hold of the skin of his forearm, said: “I swear by the glory of God, were I to say that this skin hath shrivelled on this bone for love of Him, I should be telling the truth.” Then, in Nicholson’s words, “he fainted away, and his face became like a shining moon.” (Chapter IV)

Love for its own sake

The prayers attributed to Rābiʿa are the best-known statement of disinterested love in the tradition. Nicholson gives two:

“O God! if I worship Thee in fear of Hell, burn me in Hell; and if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, withhold not Thine everlasting beauty!”

— Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam, Chapter IV

Al-Ghazālī, in the same spirit, quotes God as saying to David: “That servant is dearest to Me who does not seek Me from fear of punishment or hope of reward, but to pay the debt due to My Deity.” For the fuller tradition on Rābiʿa and her prayers, see Rabia the Mystic.

The paradox of love

Al-Hujwīrī, writing in a more guarded register, observes that love has a limit as well as a power. He quotes Abū Yazīd, “Paradise hath no value in the eyes of lovers, and lovers are veiled (from God) by their love,” and explains:

Lovers are veiled by love, because the existence of love involves duality, which is incompatible with unification (tawḥíd). The way of lovers is from oneness to oneness, but there is in love this defect, that it needs a desirer (muríd) and an object of desire (murád).

— Kashf al-Maḥjūb, Chapter XI

So the lover must finally pass out of love too: “the annihilation of the lover in the everlastingness of love is more perfect than his subsistence through the everlastingness of love.” This is the point at which the vocabulary of love gives way to Fanā and Baqā. Al-Hujwīrī also records why love is so often hidden behind other words. The master Sumnūn, he says, taught that “love is the foundation and principle of the way to God, that all ‘states’ and ‘stations’ are stages of love,” and the Shaykhs, wishing the doctrine to remain hidden, called it “purity” (ṣafwat) or “poverty” (faqr) instead (Chapter XIX; see Ṣūfī and Taṣawwuf and Faqr).