If one had, in a single word, to designate what distinguishes Sufism from all the other expressions of Islam, it would be this one: love. The Law lays down obligations, theology formulates beliefs, philosophy unfolds arguments — Sufism, for its part, says love. Not as a sentimental supplement to the practices, but as the very reality to which religion bears witness.
Three words for one reality
Arabic disposes of several words to say love. Three are essential in the Sufi vocabulary:
- Maḥabba · مَحَبَّة — measured, durable love, attested by the Quran itself: “He loves them and they love Him” (5:54). It is the most orthodox word, accepted by all.
- ʿIshq · عِشْق — ardent love, love-passion, the love that consumes. More radical, more dangerous, accused at times by the jurists of introducing into the relation to God a term too carnal.
- Shawq · شَوْق — the nostalgia for the Beloved, the desire stretched toward rejoining Him. The very pain of the separated one who weeps for his lost origin.
The founding verse
The whole Sufi doctrine of love takes root in a short verse of the Quran, which marks the reciprocity of love between God and the human being:
O you who have believed, whoever among you renounces his religion, Allah will bring a people whom He loves and who love Him…
Yuḥibbuhum wa yuḥibbūnahu — He loves them and they love Him. Quran 5:54
Three Arabic words — yuḥibbuhum wa yuḥibbūnahu — that have nourished eight centuries of spirituality. And above all, the order of the terms: God loves first, the human being loves second. Human love for God is not a human initiative — it is the response to a divine love that preceded it. “Had You not loved me first, never would I have loved You,” Rābiʿa would later say.
The invention of pure love — Rābiʿa
Before the 2nd/8th century, Muslim asceticism was dominated by the fear (khawf) of the Judgement and by the hope (rajāʾ) of paradise. It is Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya in Basra, around 750, who first — or rather, who first as a woman — shifts the accent. She refuses to worship God out of calculation. She wants to love Him for Himself, without even asking in return anything other than His Presence.
so that these two veils may disappear,
and that it may be seen clearly who worships God out of love,
and not out of fear of hell or hope of paradise.
Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya
This inaugural rupture changes everything. From then on, the great Sufi question will no longer be: “What must I do to be saved?” but: “How to love God purely?” The whole spiritual effort is reoriented. The outward practice remains — but it is henceforth animated by another motor.
Passionate love — al-Ḥallāj
A century and a half after Rābiʿa, Al-Ḥallāj in Baghdad would push the doctrine further still. With him there appears clearly the word ʿishq — love-passion. Where Rābiʿa spoke of a disinterested love, al-Ḥallāj speaks of a burning love, which devours the lover until it leaves nothing of him.
and the One I love has become me.
We are two spirits fused into one single body.
Al-Ḥallāj
This theme of amorous fusion is dangerous: it can be read as a claim to merge with the divine. Al-Ḥallāj would pay with his life for this audacity of language. But after him, the ʿishq would be there for good in the Sufi vocabulary. The jurists could criticise it, they could no longer efface it.
The metaphysics of love — Ibn ʿArabī
In the thirteenth century, Ibn ʿArabī gives love an unequalled metaphysical foundation. For him, love is the first cause of creation. God, before the world, was a Hidden Treasure; He wished to be known — therefore loved. To be loved, there had to be loving beings. It is thus that He created the world — through love, and for love.
I was a Hidden Treasure, and I loved to be known.
So I created the creatures in order to be known by them. Famous ḥadīth qudsī cited by Ibn ʿArabī
All creation, in this perspective, is a love story between the eternal Beloved and the temporal lovers. Each human being is, in his rank, a hearth of potential love — a place where the Hidden Treasure can be known, therefore loved in return. The spiritual way is the progressive awakening of this amorous vocation inscribed in the very nature of the human being.
The love that consumes — Rūmī
But it is Rūmī, in the thirteenth-century Persian world, who gave Sufi love its greatest voice. For him, love is neither a feeling nor a doctrine — it is the very substance that moves the universe. The planets turn through love, the water flows toward the sea through love, the human soul seeks its divine origin through love.
And this love is painful. It is not comfort, it is burning. The lover who truly loves must accept being consumed. Without this consummation, he remains himself — that is to say, separate. Fusion is obtained only at the price of disappearance.
when it becomes possession.
It catches fire, it melts,
it loses itself in the Other —
and it is then only that it is itself.
Rūmī, Mathnawī
This spirituality of painful love is the deep mark of Persian Sufism — which one finds again from ʿAṭṭār to Ḥāfiẓ, by way of Saʿdī, Jāmī, and all the great poets.
The language of human love
A particularity of Sufism — which sometimes shocks the outside gaze — is the abundant use it makes of the language of human love to speak of divine love. The mystical poems abound with mentions of the wine, the tavern-keeper, the beautiful black-haired beloved, the eyes that wound, the lips that soothe.
All this is not, properly speaking, metaphor — it is inverted allegory. For the Sufis, it is not the images of human love that are primary (and that one would abusively extend to God): it is divine love that is first, and human love is only its pale reflection. When a Sufi poet speaks of the “black hair” of the beloved, he does not say “God is like a beautiful woman” — he says that all human beauty is only a theophany, an appearance of divine Beauty.
All that the eye sees as beautiful in the world is a veil —
the Beauty that manifests itself through it. Sufi adage
Love as knowledge
A last dimension, perhaps the most profound: for the Sufis, love is a superior form of knowledge. Not a feeling that would be added to a prior knowing, but a modality of knowledge — the one that knows through union, through identification, through the stripping away of all distance.
Reason knows by distinguishing, by analysing, by keeping a distance between the subject and the object. Love, for its part, knows by making itself what it knows. This is why the loving mystic knows God in a manner inaccessible to the philosopher: not by thinking about Him, but by making himself one with Him, by the grace of amorous union.
Love is knowledge, and knowledge is love —
at a degree where these two words, which seemed distinct, prove to be one. Sufi adage
Thus Sufism — the way of love — is at the same time the way of supreme knowledge. And the great song of Rūmī or the brief aphorism of Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh say the same thing, by different means: where love attains its fullness, the separation between the lover and the Beloved is lifted — and it is this very lifting that is called maʿrifa, direct knowledge.