Is this Love that I’m Feeling?

In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

Image: love

By Yasmin Mogahed.
“Love is a serious mental disease.” At least that’s how Plato put it. And while anyone who’s

ever been Love’ might see some truth to this statement, there is a crucial mistake made

here. Love is not a mental disease. Desire is.

If being ‘in Love’ means our lives are in pieces and we are completely broken, miserable, utterly consumed, hardly able to function, and willing to sacrifice everything, chances are it’s not love. Despite what we are taught in popular culture, true love is not supposed to make us like drug addicts.

And so, contrary to what we’ve grown up watching in movies, that type of all-consuming obsession is not love. It goes by a different name. It is hawa- the word in the Holy Qur’an to refer to one’s lower, vain desires and lusts. Allah describes the people who blindly follow these desires as those who are most astray: “But if they answer you not, then know that only follow his own lusts (hawa). And who is more astray than the one who follows his own lusts, without guidance from Allah?” (The Holy Qur’an, 28:50)

By choosing to submit to our hawa over the guidance of Allah, we are choosing to worship those desires. When our love for what we crave is stronger than our love for Allah, we have taken that which we crave as a lord. Allah says: “Yet there are men who take (for worship) others besides Allah, as equal (with Allah): They love them as they should love Allah. But those of Faith are overflowing in their love for Allah.” (The Holy Qur’an 2:165)

If our ‘Love’ for something makes us willing to give up our family, our dignity, our self-respect, our bodies, our sanity, our peace of mind, our deen and our even our Lord who created us from nothing, know that we are not ‘in Love’. We are slaves.

Of such a person Allah says: “Do you see such a one as takes his own vain desires (hawa) as his lord? Allah has, knowing (him as much), left him astray, and sealed his hearing and his heart, and put a cover on his sight. (The Holy Qur’an, 45:23)

Real love brings about calm- not inner torment. True love allows you to be at peace with yourself and with God. That is why Allah says: “that you may dwell in tranquility.” Hawa is the opposite. Hawa will make you miserable. And just like a drug, you will crave it always, but never be satisfied. You will chase it to your own retirement, but never reach it. And though you submit your whole self to it, it will never bring you happiness.

True or pure love should never contradict or complete with one’s love for Allah. It should strengthen it. That is why true love is only possible within the boundaries of what Allah has made permissible. Outside of that, it is nothing more then hawa, to which we either submit or reject. We are either slaves to Allah, or slaves to our hawa. It cannot be both.

Only by struggling against false pleasure, can we attain true pleasure. They are by definition mutually exclusive. For that reason, the struggle against our desires is a prerequisite for the attainment of paradise. Allah says: “But as for he who feared the position of his Lord and prevented the soul from (unlawful) inclination, then indeed, Paradise will be (his) refuge.” (The Holy Qur’an 79:40-4)

Continue on next article: "This is Love."