On Love: In the Muslim Tradition

The Most Beautiful Example

The Most Beautiful Example To follow the Prophet means to love God. As fullness and being, God manifests Himself in His relationship toward emptiness and nonbeing. Thus, His love toward manifestation draws out into existence the duality that embraces the countless multiplicity of phenomena through which the fullness of God’s Treasure is revealed. Everything that is in existence is imbued with that fullness and praises it. But, in order that this should be comprehensible, fullness takes emptiness as its wife or emptiness gives itself to fullness in marriage. Every moment is the child of that relationship. Everything in it springs from that duality and that marriage. The testimony of fullness is the fact that the totality of existence praises it, that is the Praiser, who is manifested as the deepest nature of every person. That nature as complete revelation is testified by the Praiser—God’s slave or God’s Messenger. He is the revelation and confirmation of God’s love. And in order to be what he is, his love of God is the testimony of the fullness that is in everything—in every sign on the horizon and in the self. With his fullness of praise the Prophet makes manifest the possibility of human perfection, which is the revelation of Love, Goodness, and Truth. The Prophet is, thus, the witness of oneness as the inseparable Source and Confluence of all revelation. But he himself is the most complete humility in fulfilling his debt toward God. Those who follow 96 / On Love him are not in debt to him, as may be seen in God’s commandment ‘‘Say: ‘For this I demand of you no recompense. I ask you only to love your kindred. He that does a good deed shall be repaid many times over.’’’53 Thus, to love God and follow the Prophet means to love people as the potential of realizing their original nature, the Creator’s Love of making Himself manifest in His creation.54 Being close is shared human potential. It does not exclude anyone. That is the reason for stressing the debt toward the orphan and the stranger and for the commandment that evil be met with good,55 because ‘‘it may well be that God will put good will between you and those with whom you have hitherto been at odds.’’56 That is the essence, which Jesus expresses like this: ‘‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the laws and the prophets.’’57 God is the Praised. But in His hiddenness He is both the Praised and the Praiser. In the inseparability of His hiddenness there is no praise like the relationship between the Praiser and the Praised. His will or love toward something is revealed as His Word: ‘‘When we decree a thing, We need only say: ‘Be’ and it is.’’58 Thus, ‘‘We’’ is the essence that has desire or love as the reason for the creative word. Given that this essence is the Praiser, and the Praise, and the Praised, its divergence is equal—the essence as the Praised and the word as the Praiser, between which is Praise. When all the levels of being are gathered together in the perfect man, then Praise is revealed in him as the word of the Praised, and then his return, or his desire, is to be the Praiser in whom the word as knowledge and being as the essence have attained unity. The Praiser is, therefore, a beacon, for he receives the light in the totality of descending from the invisible through separation in the worlds to human lowness. The Praiser is the most beautiful example, because he encompasses in himself all that is scattered in the worlds, so that there Toward Peace / 97 are no worlds as the unreal veil on the face of the Real. The Praiser’s desire for the Praised is revealed as his most beautiful harmony. The world in its totality is the Praiser, but that totality is gathered together in man. Man in his original nature is in perfect harmony with the world as Praiser. He is the image of the Merciful in a collected way...