Loving in your love of Allah

As a Muslim, the phrase “love for the sake of Allah” is a trope that seems to play on repeat by the scholars and elders of the community. So much so, that it seems to be etched into your eardrums. But quite frankly I’ve never really understood what this meant. It was always taken for granted as if it was embedded in the DNA of a Muslim. But I always felt a shallow surface level quality to this statement, a disconnect from not only the depth of the statement but also the fluidity of how it was used. I felt it was a contrived way of going about to make someone like something or someone that they would otherwise have a disdain towards. It seem uncharacteristic of how Islam should be practised. It lacked the sincerity and genuine feeling that I had grown accustomed to while practising this faith. It was only after I had a discussion with my mentor, Zienab Abdelgany, that I developed a stronger idea of what this meant and was able to contextualise it in the body of Islam.

When examining the issues I had with this statement, there were two: first was the phrasing and the second was the usage. Both of these tampered with what the meaning of this statement was to me. The phrasing was off-putting to me because saying “you love for the sake of Allah” seemed to devalue loving something for its own sake. It gave the impression that the love I held towards something was not appreciated without the relation to the creator. I can see how this could be an important aspect of Islam since the religion revolved around submitting to the one that made you — yet didn’t the religion also preach notions of love and mercy to creation? Loving something for its own sake made it seem as if the love was lesser, even though it would be harder to love the imperfect creation rather than the perfect creator. This is what created a rift between my understanding and the reality of the statement. Moving to the second issue, the over usage of the term. It seemed to apply to everything, from books, relations to people, actions of worship and everything else. It had such a dynamic position, fitting into every crevasse of life without exception. Its omnipresence and permeability worked not as an adhesive but as a divider, It seemed that everything I touched had to be cared about only in the paradigm of loving Allah. As before, it seemed to devalue the love I had for the creation but what is added now is that every aspect of my life fell under this constraint. I felt as if everything I loved had to be for the sake of Allah and now whatever I didn’t love also had to be for the sake of Allah. It fostered a harsh binary where I had to decide between loving for intrinsic value or for external exultation. This seemed uncharacteristic of a religion predicated on mercy and love towards others. Why then was I told to confine my parameters of love in such a small box? These contentions drove deep into my mentality when looking at this for years, but upon reexamination I found a very altered understanding of the phrase, one fitting closer to a truer understanding.

For a long time I let these questions fester inside me with no real solution to the nagging that they brought, besides a disdain for the expression. It was only when I interned at CAIR that these concerns were calmed. I remember sitting with my supervisor Zienab Abdelgany when I brought up my qualms with the phrase, her response was: “In Arabic the you say Uhhibuk fillah”, which literally translates to “I love you in my love of Allah”. This simple translation had a deep impact in my understanding of this phrase. Previously, what I held as only loving something because of its creator and not for its own qualities was replaced with loving something because you loved how it brought you close to the creator. This simple change in rhetoric moved me towards a deeper understanding of the function of this statement. The two contentions I held moved to become reasons for my love of the phrase.

For first contention, its phrasing no longer seemed to limit the way I loved something by focusing the basis for care on an external factor. Now it blended both the external force of Allah and the intrinsic value of what is being loved, making the intrinsic value the driving factor for why I loved it. But this was not due solely to itself since the qualities of the loved were in line with the way I loved the Beloved: the validation came not so much from loving for the sake of the creator but from the love of the creator. This may seem contradictory at first, but from taking a closer look, one can see that because of the inherent qualities that the creation carried was one able to connect it to the creator without any sort of feigned connection. Now I was loving the creation because it brought me closer organically to Allah rather than forcing care for His sake. It bridged the divide in terms of the intention for me caring which leads to the second problem that was now a pillar of understanding for me. The ubiquitous nature of the phrase’s application no longer belittled the love I had for something, but rather served as a means for nearing myself to Allah through all the various avenues He has created. Any and everything could now be loved in my love for Allah as long as it brought me closer to its creator. This sense of freedom liberated me from what I previously viewed as shackles. I did not undo the shackles, but rather turned them into the means of my flight: this newfound understanding didn’t alter the basis of mercy or love found in Islam, but redefined it into a practical and palatable entity.