On Love: In the Muslim Tradition

Foreword

Foreword David B. Burrell, C.S.C. The author of this inspiring reflection, president of the International Forum ‘‘Bosnia’’and former vice president of the government of Bosnia and Herzogovina, is an intellectual whose entire life has been engaged in matters of life and death and so has been impelled to reflect on what makes our lives human. In doing so he displays a keen philosophical wit, with a sensitivity honed by his people’s suffering as well as his own. Moreover, he realizes that reflections on something so poignantly human must reflect a perspective larger than the human to illuminate it. Issues that could be classified as ‘‘psychological’’ in a western mindset become metaphysical in an Islamic context. So, for example, with trust, a key ingredient to any loving relationship. Taking as his point of departure a passage from the Qur’an, Mahmutćehajic ́ writes: We offered Our trust to the heavens, to the earth, and to the mountains, but they refused the burden and were afraid to receive it. Man undertook to bear it, but he has proved a sinner and a fool (Qur’an 33:72). Refusal of the offered trust is the only reasonable response of the created to the Creator, if it is based on calculation. That xiv / Foreword means accepting being only the recipient of the Almighty, being only His slave. But such a response denies the love whose reasons lie in neither weakness nor power. Neither weakness nor threat can be an obstacle to love. Both the endurance of violence and enterprise, despite their evident madness, remain unknown and despised in relation to the beauty of the Face in which the lover sees himself. No arguments of the reason can participate in that surpassing of duality through the testimony that there is no face other than the Face nor beauty other than Beauty (28). So God-centered a perspective on love can be second nature to Muslims, who are accustomed to praising God for whatever occurs in their lives—events form our perspective, bad as well as good. For the conviction prevails that, however the world unfolds, it is embraced by God’s providential care. Yet this is hardly Panglossian or in any way dismissive of the power of humanity to betray that trust. In fact, human freedom, which makes him a being to whom God as Fullness offers trust, enables him at every moment to revoke every choice of direction. Without the possibility of turning from the Purpose to nothingness, a person is not in trust with God. All that a person has is nothing other than a gift he has received out of Fullness. But, as nothing can be fullness other than fullness itself, a person is essentially a poor man who through his essential emptiness bears witness to his own condition as debtor, for his possibility of stating ‘‘there is no fullness other than Fullness’’ is at the same time his initial orientation towards the resolution of duality in his self (29). The upshot of this view of the world is that the truth of central human realities like love must be revealed to us, for their place in the universe remains unknown to our powers of reasoning, although that reason can be used to elaborate what revelation—in this case, the Holy Qur’an—leads us to realize about it. Yet our fidelity (or not) to that path lies with us, and the realizations attendant on a faithful following Foreword / xv will reveal harmonics in the original revelation unsuspected by ordinary hearers. Mahmutćehajić’s fidelity is displayed in these reflections , composed in a style that may often tax our credulity—unless we realize that they are meant to lead us, as well, into an interior appreciation of a love that ‘‘moves the sun and moon, and all the stars.’’ On Love ...