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7 The Koran as the Lover’s Mirror It is well-known that Sufism places a premium on love, but Western observers rarely associate love with Islam itself. This helps to explain the tendency to see Sufism as somehow tangential to the tradition. I would argue that love for God is every bit as central to the Islamic perspective as it is to a tradition like Christianity , although the rhetorical stress is by no means the same. In the present context, one piece of evidence will suffice: Islamic praxis is based on following the Sunnah of Muhammad—that is, imitating his conduct, his customs, and his character traits. The Koran is utterly basic to Islamic ways of seeing and doing things, but the Koran is known and interpreted first of all through the manner in which it was embodied and acted out by Muhammad. Following the Prophet provides the parameters for the Muslim understanding of the Koran and of all things. But what exactly is the rationale for following the Prophet? A most succinct expression is found in the verse, Say [O Muhammad!]: “If you love God, follow me, and God will love you” (3:31). If one does not love God, there is no reason to follow the Prophet. This has hardly been lost on practicing Muslims. If it is not obvious to outsiders that Muslims have been motivated by love for God, this has something to do with the many directions in which Islamic civilization developed—literature, law, art, philosophy, theology, political institutions . Modern scholarship has been much more interested in these observable aspects of culture than in psychological or spiritual motives. Nonetheless, most scholars recognize that Islamic civilization has always been concerned with unpacking the teachings of the Koran and applying them to diverse realms of human endeavor. In other words, expressions of Islamic civilization and culture flesh out the ways in which people imitate the Prophet, who embodied the Koran. And Muslims in turn are motivated to imitate the Prophet by love for God and the desire to call down God’s love upon themselves. Although Muslims have followed Muhammad in order to attract God’s love, they have also recognized that God loves human beings in any case. Sufi authors commonly highlight the notion that the divine motivation for creating 57 58 / In Search of the Lost Heart the universe is love. What makes human beings special, among all God’s creatures , is that they have the capacity to love God freely in response to His love for them. All other things simply serve God as they were created to serve Him, with no free choice on their part.1 As R¨m¥ puts it: Choice is the salt of worship— the spheres turn, but not because they want to. Their turning is neither rewarded nor punished, for, at the time of reckoning, choice bestows excellence.2 To say that God created the universe out of love means that the divine love brings into existence the ugly along with the beautiful, the bad along with the good. Only within the context of such an apparently mixed-up universe can free choice have any meaning. And only those who choose freely to love can love God with worthy love. If love were to be coerced, it would not be love. This is one reason why the Koran says There is no compulsion in the religion (2:256). “The religion”—the right path taught by the Koran and the Prophet—is precisely to live up to the requirements of love for God and to do so by putting the Sunnah into practice. In short, although God loves human beings and created them to love Him, they are free not to love Him. Thus, a second sort of divine love responds to the choice to love God, which itself demands following the divine guidance as embodied in the prophets. And, as God says in the famous ḥad¥th quds¥, “When I love My servant, I am the hearing with which he hears, the eyesight with which he sees, the hand with which he grasps, and the foot upon which he walks.”3 When love reaches its culmination, the Lover is none other than those He loves, and the human lovers are none other than the Beloved. This is one of the meanings that Sufis see in the verse, He loves them, and they love Him (5:54). Love and Interpretation I chose to write about the Koran as...

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