Love Is Understanding
2. LOVE IS UNDERSTANDING, UNDERSTANDING IS HAPPINESS
PART ONE
Why people hate some things or some persons? To be sure, a lot of such hates are justified but perhaps even more are not justified. All hates though agree in one thing- they make the hater unhappy. His moods are bitter, his attitude vindictive and if he acts on his hates his acts are dangerous, sometimes catastrophically so. What is terrorism if not hate in action at its worst?
Now some idle, too idealistic and confused philosophers rule that the ideal or perfect person must love everybody, everything and even every event. That, as far as we Sufis as depth Muslims are concerned, this is not the case can be seen from the fact that Allah, the Most Perfect of Beings (or rather He is a meta-being, i.e., beyond all categories of existence), both loves and hates! Read if you wish:
“Those who disbelieve are addressed: Allah’s hatred of you is greater than your own hatred of yourselves when you are called to Islam and keep disbelieving” (40: 10)
We learn not one but two things from this wonderful verse which no other scripture can match in insightfulness. The first is that when a person is called to Islam with good explanations given him and he refuses to listen and to accept he does so because he hates himself too much to regard himself worthy of salvation. He knows that he loves the filth of this world too much, feels too reluctant and powerless to combat the worldly temptations waylaying him and in fact too addicted to and exhausted by his dirty pursuits. His mental and physical energies are so depleted thanks to his impious ambitions and wars that his prospective efforts directed to satisfy his natural if deeper instincts for spiritual presence and attainment look not only daunting but, out of sheer difficulty, even disgusting to him. It is as if he has eaten so much bad food that out of the fullness and discomfort of his belly he could not hate any superb delicacy more. Offer to a man with too full a stomach a bit of some best delicacy and he will look at it with both horror and intense hatred! Yes, hatred!
And remember: What he filled his belly with can be the lowest quality food; despite this lowest quality the best quality food now nauseates him. Such are the hatred of the sinners.
It is a fact that a lot of people are so fully pregnant from their illicit love affairs with this world of material pleasure that their growing pregnancy discomforts topped by severe indigestion keep them hating themselves and cursing the day they were born. What is more, a lot of sinful enjoyments of this world are like addictive drugs; once addicted to they must be had whatever the degree of saturation or intoxication of the body with them. As a result their problem is that they have too much of too many pseudo-good things of this world which condition, curiously enough, makes them suffer from constant indigestion as well as constant pathological appetite for more! This unblessed tension, this being pulled apart by a constant war between their addictions and their any better judgment makes them to hate everybody and everything and we ourselves are, in an ultimate sense the things and events we experience. After all what is consciousness if an not an awareness of things and events we find inside and outside us? Stop experiencing anything and you are an unconscious man!
We constantly more or less judge things and events we experience. In a self-hating, blasphemous man these judgements are often negative, depressing. They accordingly hate themselves and project this hatred to others. After all we can export to others only what we produce inside us. Happy man vents happiness, angry man vents anger.
And Allah hates the self-haters back. What does ‘Allah hates them back’ means? You will remember that we had said that the concept Allah means two things, each applicable in its own context.
Firstly and more universally Allah means the Infinitely Great and Powerful Creator and Sustainer of all existence of which we perceive only a tiny part. He is utterly other than His creatures yet equally utterly intimate with and fully in control of them. This is the ontological meaning of Allah.
But there is also a psychological meaning of Allah. We relate to Him, as far as our mental capacities are concerned, in this psychological sense. We have a more or less adequate image of Him in our hearts and minds and it is to this image that we relate, talk to and sometimes talked by him in an inspirational, instinctive sense. We may feel that we love Him, we fear Him (the two are not incompatible but complementary as all loves between a weak and strong person are) or we, at worst and God forbid, hate Him or at best regard Him only leisurely and occasionally, sometimes with awe and hope, sometimes with indifference and complacency. Or we may altogether deny Him although deep down something keeps gnawing at our heart. Most atheists are like this last said option: They positively declare their intellectual disbelief in Allah; A lot may try to behave especially humanely to prove that one need not believe in Allah to be a moral, a kind person while at the same time they love to point out that a lot of those who emphatically profess their belief in Allah are especially nasty, unlovable characters. All true, but the atheists still miss the point. What we are not talking about a profession of a faith, in our case Islam, but its full and actual internalisation with an accurate and effective image of Allah Whose Loving Mercy underlies and underwrites all events in the entire spectrum of creation- that is exactly the attitude of all true and full Muslims. Although such are quite rare they are enough to inseminate all well-meaning souls while the affairs of the unwary and the reckless are left with their Maker, Allah Who alone knows how to sort them out. Remember, nobody can be entirely written off.
Now this psychological version of Allah we have been talking about, this only available version for us to relate to, does hate us when we hate Him! Will not a mirror make back the same faces to you that you make to it? Apart from this psychological relationship and correspondence we can never attain the Reality, the ontology of Allah; that is because He is so utterly Other and Unique that there is no room for two in His Space as far as His Essence or Secret, call it what you will, is concerned. Any, repeat, any word about His Ultimate ontology amounts only too pure blasphemy, too dark an ignorance! What do you want? Even the created world hides its ultimate secret from us; ask any scientist worthy of the title whether he can claim to know what the ultimate nature of physical existence is- he will say that he does not know. He will admit that human perceptions can only correspond to some things in the universe he studies but what actually lie beyond these perceptions ‘only God knows’. So, even in the gnosis of the physical universe we have the same dichotomy- an unattainable ontological reality and a psychological reality which are made of our sense impressions. What about our gnosis of God then?
Now, since both love and hatred towards things and events, as far as we are emotionally interpreting them, are inevitable reactions on our part to them we better forget about the pipe-dream of loving everything and begin to put our loves and hates into a realistic frame and perspective. I must make haste to remind my readers that hating any creature is not an absolute hate but a conditional and hopefully temporary one; as Sufis point out what we hate is not the essence of a person but his bad habits, attitudes and acts; let him clear them out and we cannot love him more. If this was not so, why do you think Allah would repeat in His Qur’an a hundred times how He suddenly loves only too much a sinner once he sincerely repents? For example, He chose our father Adam above all His creatures, when Adam sinned despite being forewarned his Lord raged against him but as soon as he mouthed his sincere apologies Allah switched back His love although He did not reverse His decision of turning him and Eve out of the Garden. You see, Allah meant a better future Garden for them more based on earned merit and therefore more deserved and more delicious as a result. What we learn from Allah and His Prophet is that all our loves must be for Allah and all our hates must be for Allah. For our part we should exercise no choice in the matter. Loving and hating for Allah’s Sake means loving things Allah loves and encourages us to love and hating things Allah hates and encourages us to hate.
Examples of what Allah loves and therefore we also should love or should learn to love, among many others, can be:
Loving Allah, loving His messengers, loving His good servants, loving morally good acts, loving all , innocently beneficial, or at least harmless beings and protecting them, loving all human beings, each to the extent that they behave well or we hope will be able to behave better in future if some educational input is given them etc. And most people will behave better if helped by better education. This makes an in-principle over the board love towards all people mandatory for us. In other words, until they appear so evil as to look beyond salvation we must maintain a basic degree of love and charitable intentions towards people. More than this is both unrealistic and patently dangerous and counter-productive. All prophets and good philosophers measured and metered their sympathies towards people on the basis of the amount of good in them as seen from their conduct and did not witheld their condemnation of any who went too much overboard for too long and too unrepentantly. After all, survival and safety are the most basic of biological instincts and if we do not care for ours we at least must care for the survival and safety of others and hate any persons or thinks if and when they pose a threat to them. In this respect we can say that there is a healthy hate, a constructive kind of hate which not only legitimises all rules of social and moral conduct but also helps to maintain welfare of a majority at the expense of a minority of offenders.
For now we are disregarding such devilish persons which form only a small minority and confine our attention and analysis to the reasonable if often ignorant as well as mostly misguided majority whose offences may still be plentiful but never too atrocious like murder or robbery or rape. These deserve and need be loved and helped.
We must leave aside now hateful people or rather more correctly, people when they behave hatefully and turn our attention to lovable, reasonable people (which make the vast majority) as these need our love as the badly behaving need our hate.
We must begin with ourselves though. To be happy, love must prevail over all our other moods. Love is the antidote to all emotional poisons like anger, resentment, grudge, greed and jealousy. Take jealousy for example. A man can be jealous of another man he thinks that other man has been more successful in life than himself. But would the same man be jealous of his own child if the child climbs higher in life? On the contrary the parent can only be too happy with and proud of the child’s success. Why? Because a good parent (and most are naturally good) has real, true love for the child- as simple as that. Why the parent has real, true love for the child? Because the parent sees the child as an extension of himself, he identifies with the child, he understands the child because he himself had been a child and still retains the first hand memory of how it feels to be a child. That is why we adults can play with children as well as with other adults the plays of children if we want to. Because this parent understands himself he can transfer this understanding to the child and feel sympathy, feel love as he can for himself.
Why not then extend this understanding of and sympathy with ourselves to all other reasonable human beings and even to animals? Yes, animals. Like many other people, I as a child had my pets, mostly cats. Is it not amazing that I, as young as four or five years old, was happy as my cats every time I was watching them eat the food I had given them as if I was the hungrily eating one. With every pleasurable chewing and swallowing sounds they made I was feeling as if I was the hungry them, happily gorging myself. Surely parents feel the same when their children eat. I remember the pink ecstasy of loving mercy in my young mother’s beautiful face while suckling my younger siblings, she looking at their pleasurably if greedily contorting faces. Please have no doubt therefore that all charitable acts reward the charitable person like that.
In fact I dare swear that the happiest experience in life is (if one is a mature, decent, humane soul) watching or otherwise knowing that other people are being happy because what you gave them. Therefore the apparently present champion of charity, namely our fellow Sufi brother Bob Geldof must be one of the happiest persons on earth. Thanks to his incessant, constant, lavish help to the starving and suffering thousands in poor and troubled countries those thousands are filling their starving bellies and enjoying many other humble reliefs thanks to this good man’s insatiable desire for charity and sacrifice. Recently that richest man on earth, namely Bill Gates gave away the greater part of his wealth to charity. Such people deserve the joy of feeling like a kind and caring parent to all those they are benefiting. So what is their secret?
Their secret is no other than the secret of parental love of which almost all of us are capable. This love simply descends from the Most Loving Merciful Creator as the Qur’an descended from Him. The secret of universally happy people is that they are extending this most precious and true of all loves to all weak people they can reach and can find means to help. Just like parents, their selfless love is based on understanding others as they would understand themselves, as parents understand the needs of their children simply because they know how it feels to be hungry or neglected etc. A man or woman who attains the magnificent vista and vision of feeling like a loving, caring and responsible parent to all mankind has attained nothing less than Allah’s Vision as much as that humble creature man is capable of and as such he or she both deserves and enjoys his or her happiness- in fact the most deserved happiness is that caused by doing good to others out of loving mercy towards them. In good parents this is instinctive, in good servants of Allah this is achieved by a thorough and sincere contemplation and service of Allah. Amen.
2. LOVE IS UNDERSTANDING, UNDERSTANDING IS HAPPINESS
PART TWO
We may now expand on the theme of loving for Allah and hating for Allah.
Let us take an enthusiastic Muslim who may or may not also follow the Sufi path. How careful he is with his prayers, his fasting, his other Islamic rituals and traditions. In many cases such a Muslim dresses and grooms himself in a special way and in fact may be one of those rather upsetting types who cannot wait to find fault with other Muslims whenever he thinks they are breaking some rules he is keeping as part of his piety and scruples.
Now suppose you are the guest of this apparently exemplary Muslim and he is driving you to somewhere. On the way you are talking on many subjects big and small. He is all lecturing, criticism, all about blacks and whites and no greys and no graces. You notice however that he will not hesitate to break only too many bones whenever it comes to observe some laws and regulations of the land and even some human decencies as he chats and drives along.
Firstly, he will not hesitate to jump the traffic lights and even scare the pedestrians crossing the road. He may not have a road tax disc or even an insurance and even an MOT (road-worthiness test certificate for his car). If you ask him why he will boast that he is too good a Muslim to pay taxes or obey the orders of a godless secular or non-Muslim regime. For many like him even their apparently Sharia-run governments are not really Islamic- only they know how to make and run a country on Islamic lines.
Be as it may, it never occurs to them that laws like traffic regulations are designed to minimise risks to both the driving and the pedestrian public and are therefore Divinely blessed (beneficial to Allah’s creatures) whatever the regime and religion of the state imposing them. Their idea of Allah is so simplistic, inflexible and even malicious that neither the total innocents like the young children of the ‘non-Islamic’ country nor the perfectly reasonable if not too high possibility of some of the country’s citizens embracing Islam, nor the reality that a lot of Muslims, like themselves, may be living in the country and therefore at least to them he owes a duty of care. As for taxes, do not dare to mention them! He will say that not only he should not pay any taxes to the government as long as he can hide his income and assets but should in fact steal from it if and when possible, and that as an Islamic duty; you see, he must do everything to weaken the non-Islamic government while strengthen himself. What he is forgetting is that oaths and contracts between a Muslim and non-Muslim are as binding as between a Muslim and Muslim and residence in a non-Muslim country being based on a diplomatic and legal basis creates a contractual situation wherein both parties are bound to honour their mutual obligations. Any proper jurist will tell you that. After all, in general terms it goes without question that actually Islamic law prohibits injustice and oppression to all creatures of Allah whatever their status otherwise. A Muslim cannot even hurt a pig or scorpion without a good reason, let alone another human being of whatever race or persuasion. Only in a hot war situation tactical cheating and victory-seeking reasonable violence are permitted. Brutality, wanton killing and maiming are not.
Unless desperate situations are the case our endangering the safety and welfare of any creature not actually threatening us in the same way is haram. For example, you may kill rats, scorpions or mosquitoes inhabiting the same space as you but you cannot scan and comb all of your country to kill all rats, all scorpions and all mosquitoes you can find. Away from the living space of men all animals have a Divinely ordained ecological place to occupy and a role to play. If rats eat the roots of plants then foxes eat the rats while eagles can eat both rats and foxes. What we call harmful creatures are so only when they occupy the same space as us and cause harm to our interests, like our property and health. Self-protection is so important and has such unquestionable legitimacy that our law allow us to kill even another Muslim is he is posing a real danger to us or to people we care about or have a duty to protect. For example an Islamic government will and must kill any Muslim bandits who raid villages whether Muslim or not, for plunder or waylay caravans or ships in which case the bandits are called pirates. When they are within our power all non-Muslims are entitled to our protection and just and kind treatment. A Muslim can give ‘aman’, i.e., declare his protection of a non-Muslim who happens to visit the Muslim society and Islamic law requires that all Muslims honour the aman given by their Muslim fellow. The Prophet had given a pledge to Abu Sufyan once he had embraced Islam at the outskirts of Mecca when Mecca was about to be invaded; any of the idolaters who would take refuge in Abu Sufyan’s house would be secure from all harassment. But not even such dramatic a situation was necessary to show kindness to idolaters. Read if you wish:
“If one of the idolaters seek asylum from thee (o Prophet), then grant it to him until he hears Allah’s Word and (even if he does not embrace Islam as a result) escort out him to safety. That (their inability to embrace Islam) is because they are an ignorant people (9: 6).
That is to say, just listening to the Qur’an will often not be enough to win over an unbeliever not the least because his intellectual capacity or the strong bad habits that are inhibiting him can block his way; he needs time, more time while we need patience and more patience. Man is too precious a commodity to be felled like insects; their education and guidance may take ages but will be every inch and ounce worth it. Look at ourselves- despite being long-standing Muslims how many of us can say we are even half perfect? Had we been perfect no resentments, fights and other wrongs would occur among us. In fact nowadays we are amongst the least peaceful and civilised of nations although our mosques are bursting to capacity and are proliferating like mushrooms!
What we need is more Sufi understanding which translates into Sufi love. We must love everything which is conducive to more human safety, human contentment, to peace, to mutual accommodation- and rules, regulations, laws, traditions, etiquette… all help that aim- given the perennial fact that not all are made for Islam- even amongst Muslims; many Muslims are only too superficial and fickle. Read if you wish:
“Few among My servants will ever be thankful enough” (34: 13)
“Had thy Lord willed He could make all mankind a single nation (ummah of Muslims). Instead they shall never cease to be in difference and discord, except whom thy Lord showed mercy to; (in fact) for that very purpose (of being in constant discord) He created them. In fact the Word of thy Lord ‘I will indeed fill the Hell with men and demons all” has been fulfilled (11: 118- 119).
Incidentally, this verse, being so explicit, categorical and infallible proves that Islam or anything else will never be the common culture of all mankind but many religions, cultures and ideologies will rage among them pitting each group or person against other groups or persons until the Day of Judgment when Allah will have to fill the Hell to full capacity! In fact is not the hell that is already on earth filled with people who don’t know how to get along well with each other and are erupting into violence hitting out or otherwise hurting each other? Are not us who are making a hell out of this earth simply because we are too selfish, too psychologically immature and intellectually too proud out of being mentally shallow?
Given this inevitable fact any sensible Muslim should really mind his own business and through learning and worship, high morality and graceful manners should try his best to negotiate his way through life with as little friction and collision with others as possible until Allah sends for him or her and he or she having assumed a shining enough face to face his or her Lord will be only too happy to go. Amen.
That of course is the extreme situation. True believers need not be that lonely. We will always have enough of them to work together as a group. We can have a group program for action. For true believers such social action will never be at the expense of their personal piety or at the expense of social peace and harmony- at least not as a result of their fault. They will just call, preach and set the best example. Read if you wish:
“Whose word is more beautiful than the one who invites to Allah and says ‘I indeed am a Muslim’. Good and evil are not the same. Repel evil with good and then you will see that the one between whom and you is animosity becomes like a warm friend. None can attain this (enlightenment and ennoblement of soul) except the patient, none can attain it except that with a great share (of spiritual desire) (41: 35)
Is anybody talking of taking up the sword or the throwing of a bomb? That is government business and not the business of self-styled civilian fighters masquerading as armies. What is more, even a fully established and powerful government should think twice before it embarks on warfare and instead it should explore all routes of diplomacy to exhaustion before it takes the hard decision of endangering the lives and welfare of its citizens and others through war.
In view of all above, Sufi love comes out as the best outlook and attitude to life’s duties and problems. We must love everything that promotes the safety, well-being and peace of mind of all servants of Allah whatever their persuasion. Among these lovable things are the laws and regulations, including traffic and environmental protection laws, the sensibilities and sensitivities of any society we happen to be a citizen or guest of. Without participating in any of their according to Islam sinful habits and acts we must negotiate our way through their ranks and files, echelons and groupings leaving along our path a heavenly perfume of gracefulness and goodwill. For example, we must pay all our taxes, dues and any fines honestly and promptly, we must act gracefully, graciously and honourably at all times and under all circumstances so much so that any investigation will clear us of all wrongdoing and instead prove our extraordinary goodwill and charity of soul.
We must bear in mind that any society we live in is a functional organism in which we must live like a healthy, cooperative, contributing cell of it and not as a parasite or malignant cell out to exploit and destroy it. All the laws, regulations, taxes and dues, obligations and taboos of the host society are ours to observe and obey and lovingly so, seeing that such attitude and conduct is conducive to those most precious of Allah’s gifts, namely social peace and harmony which all of us need only too much and may one day regret only too much if we discover that they have been only a sham, we committed offences and at the critical moment we or others are left exposed and facing disaster. Nothing harms the good name of Islam than a Muslim who scandalised himself.
I end up with a current example. Recently there has been little rainfall and too much environmental pollution in this county as at many other places. The government advice or directives are that we use water responsibly and with thrift lest we eventually end up with barren landscapes and dry taps at home. We should put on our universal loving mercy spectacles and see that we ourselves must do our best to avoid wasting water. Similarly, to reduce atmospheric pollution and global warming we should drive our cars in ways which reduce toxic emissions- that is cruising at middle speeds, not speeding madly with the gas pedal on the floor. We must also use more public transport, walk more etc. Going back to saving of water, few other things were emphasised more by the Messenger of Allah who said “Even when you are making ablutions (wudu) at a spring still use as little water as possible”. The Prophet could make wudu with as little water as half a litre and wash himself fully with a mere gallon (about 4 litres) of water. Of course such economy is also dictated by a water-poor desert climate and may be too little in a better watered country. Still our habit of using a gallon of water for each feet in wudu and half a tonne for ghusl (body wash) is excessive by any standards. As for such a full wash (ghusl) God help the water company. Add to this waste copious use of soaps, shampoos and conditioners; seeing that modern detergents are almost entirely petroleum based we find in lavish bathings another source of waste of our natural resources.
Now imagine yourself as the most responsible, caring man or woman in the world and avoid all such wanton waste by making do with the minimum possible in each usage of things and contribute your infinitesimal help to the protection of our precious global environment, to the using of fuels sparingly, to the preservation of our ever-diminishing natural resources. Aren’t you being graciously responsible? Again consider: by paying all your taxes you will contribute to a more generous provision of health services, a fuller law enforcement, a more successful education of the young generations etc. Yes, perhaps many others will do the opposite, perhaps some part of your efforts will be wasted on the beneficiaries while some will be embezzled but the fact remains that you are a man or a woman of God now; does not it also look that a lot of God’s Own Efforts look wasted on unscrupulous, abusive and wasteful people? Does God mind? Sure, He sometimes does and may punish his servants as He is nowadays punishing them with global warming and environmental deterioration for example but since we have no such control over the world let alone the universe our duty is only to be charitable and honourable in our humble citizenly capacity and if all else fail we know that Allah is the real recipient and judge of all our goodwill and good conduct and He will reward us a mighty reward whatever happens in this world to us, to others and to our efforts. We are just emulating Him in universal loving mercy and we know that mirroring and shadowing Allah in His Gracefulness it is the noblest career and greatest possible success in life- and who cares what happens otherwise? Amen.