On Love: In the Muslim Tradition

Hatred and Fear

Hatred and Fear ‘‘Those who hate God’’ are none other than individuals who have taken the signs in the horizons and selves, denied what they are and given them names and meaning beyond their Origin and Purpose . They have adopted phenomena from the horizons and selves as causes and consequences, and they attribute creative properties to them. Thus nonbeing and evil have become a beginning out of which the measurable world is drawn and presented as the only possible one. The feeling that phenomena, projects, and structures are independent is transformed into closedness of both the horizons and the selves. That is choosing a god other than God, and reducing Praise to the closedness of the world and the contingent self as its builder and director, which is nothing other than hatred of Him. From such a perspective, signs are not windows from one level of existence onto another. Through them it is not possible to pass by and beyond the heavens. Arrogance and denial darken them, and they become gods that inhabit the world around the human core, transforming it into closedness and rigidness. No way out of that closedness is possible without the hatred of ‘‘those who hate God,’’ through which they too, in their original potential, include also followers of the Prophet, whereby their hatred is seen as the stiffening of the self to the point of petrification and sickness. 108 / On Love Thinking that sacrifices itself in speech here meets what is for it an insoluble riddle: to hate one’s parents20 and to love one’s enemies,21 and to respond to evil with good,22 to love one’s neighbor as oneself,23 and the Praiser more than oneself,24 one’s children, parents, and all people. The riddle is insoluble as long as all phenomena and changes in the world are separated from true Reality; as long as a man wants anything less than being and the self as the one and only Completeness ; as long as he associates anything with God. And this insolubility means that beauty and love are only illusions and that they are, in essence, hatred, for they transpose fear of God onto fear of phenomena in the horizons and the selves. The cause becomes what gives birth, and the aim, what is born. From such an illusory perspective, liberation is offered as power over the horizons and the selves, and not as the inclusion of the will in Peace as the source and Confluence of all things. The idea of complete fatherhood and ‘‘sonhood’’ fills the closed selves and their world. Since association with God has become the predominant custom, and that means taking nonbeing as the Creator, beauty and goodness are only names for ugliness and evil. In the Teaching it is said of that relationship, ‘‘Think! Who, beside God, can guide the man who makes his lust his god?’’25 and ‘‘Yet there are some who worship idols, bestowing on them the adoration due to God.’’26 The other side of this is Jesus’s invitation to hatred of one’s parents as the illusion of the immediate cause of existence, which is expressed in another way in the Teaching: ‘‘Say: ‘Come, I will tell you what your Lord has made binding on you: that you shall serve no other gods beside Him; that you will show kindness to your parents; that you shall not kill your children because you cannot support them.’’’27 The mention of the killing of children, which is only one of the more explicit statements about general killing, points to the raising up of the contingent self to the level of a god, who gives both life and death. Fear of poverty is nothing other than ignorance about being and the Following / 109 self, the consequence of which is adopting dependence on the world rather than on God. Thus, adopting the world and ruling it is experienced as wealth, and that stimulates and feeds greed: ‘‘Your hearts are taken up with worldly gain from the cradle to the grave. But you shall learn. Then you shall surely learn.’’28 Fear of the world and concern for its adopted part increasingly transform a man, for they distance him from Peace and weaken his will to resist it through a great war in the self.29 His self becomes increasingly stiff and rigid. The outer world appears incomplete...