Love has never been an easy thing to grasp. Each culture has its baggage, and for many Muslims, we grow up with a blend of traditional gender roles and religious conservatism. Like many women raised on this diet, I thought marriage would come naturally, as a near-biological fact of life, and I just had to stick around long enough for the wedding and the white dress to follow. My expectations were high: I had my parents’ love as an example, their endless stories of passionate courtship, of early marital fights followed by making up, their constant, playful affection for one another, seeing them pray together before bed. I knew love would look like this, eventually, but what no one taught me was how to get there.

In my 20s, I set out to learn whatever there was to know about love and devoured whatever books I could find on it, from philosophy and sociology to neuroscience.

All around me, the common belief was that love is hard to find, and once it is found and the marriage contract signed, it is hard work to maintain as well.

Between friends telling me not to expect too much, and aunties propagating the idea that a man is rather something to endure, subconsciously, I internalised the assumption that meeting my lofty ideals would not be realistic. As a result, I always went for the compromise, for the smallness, and I mostly experienced love as a shrinking of oneself. A deeper study of Islam showed me that more is possible. 

Loving 

On a rainy evening out in Berlin, sitting on the tram, I’m reading Khaled Abou el Fadl’s The Search for Beauty in Islam, and this bit catches my eye:

You try your best to select a partner who understands the meaning of a partnership with God. I do not mean someone who is simply a practising Muslim, but someone committed to a marriage that can ascend from the mundane to the divine. … We know that if you smile at each other, you earn God’s blessings, if you make love, you earn God’s blessings, if you joke and laugh together, you earn God’s blessings. If there is care, compassion and mercy towards each other, you earn God’s blessings. In other words, you live your lives fully engaged with God in whatever you do. You constantly strive to create beauty in your life – the kind of beauty that deserves the gift of serenity.

I read it, and viscerally, it makes me sad. It is exactly what I envision when I think of love, and these words capture it beautifully. The jokes, the easy banter, the small acts of care, the body beside you in bed: none of these have to be distractions from Allah ﷻ. They can be the place where our relationship with Allah becomes concrete, sacredness freely flowing throughout the mundane. Still, aiming for serenity, for beauty and transcendence in marriage feels depressing, in times when finding a spouse is allegedly a gargantuan task, and statistics would lead me to believe my dating pool consists of 0.73 people at best. I want to pretend that I don’t believe it, set myself a lower standard, not condemn myself to reach for the unreachable—except I do. 

There are some endlessly repeated verses in the context of Islam and love, the “mercy and tranquillity” (Surah Ar-Rum, 30:21) and “We have created you in pairs” (Surah An-Naba, 78:8) bits.

I feel that we have an obligation to believe in love, and love is real, yes, but not only because of that. We have an obligation to believe, because of who God is. Because of what this life can mean, if lived properly.

In the surrender of the self to love, the nafs, our ego, withers. In the fundamental unknowability of another human being, we get a glimpse of the lifelong labour of love required to know God. In the utter joy and delight we find in another person’s body, we see the perfect sacredness of God’s creation, the generosity of God’s provision. And with the right intentions, love becomes ibadah, worship – not of false gods, but of the One through whom the miracle occurs. In loving him, in loving Him, I let go of myself. In knowing this intimately within myself, I also know nothing lesser will do.

Faith Has No Half Measures

To believe in love, I had to pause and rethink my entire conception of God. If God is al-Qadeer, most capable of everything, how is it that subconsciously, many of us are buying into ideologies that make love feel impossible? How can love be where our Creator’s power stops? For me, I have come to realise that I do believe in an Almighty God. But if I’m truthful, for the longest time, I doubted a God of good things. This might be familiar to those who’ve grown up with an image of God as a punishing arbiter of right and wrong, a figure to fear, and there is a legitimate theological view that presents this world as a place of tribulations. The Qur’an too speaks of hardships, of surely being tested “with something of fear and hunger and a loss of wealth and lives and fruits” (Surah Al-Baqarah, 2:155). There was something in me that envisioned God as this restrictive being, one that sees how hard He can push me before my faith breaks. And if I broke, I failed. 

As a result, I spent a lot of my life trying to lay low and not ask too much of God, lest I get tested with the opposite. With love, and in light of my view of God, I could only conceptualise the deen as a path that was hard, arduous, joyless – one of the ascetic, never the lover.

As many khutbas go, hubb-e-dunya, love of this world, is bad, so to me, there was no justification for wanting love here. How could I ask for something as frivolous as joy in love, especially in times of injustice elsewhere, of genocide and suffering? 

Enter husn-e-zann, the idea of harbouring good assumptions of God.

The most obvious signs of God’s nature can be found in the Qur’an, this mercy upon humanity, offering verse upon verse detailing the myriad ways in which we are loved, in which our Creator, in His boundless generosity, provides for us.

There are the clear promises for “those who believe and do good, the Most Compassionate will certainly bless them with genuine love” (Surah Maryam 19:96), but then there are also all the ways in which the Qur’an repeatedly, insistently, lovingly reminds us of the character of our Rabb. My view of a restrictive God clashed with the abundance of sensorial proof all around me revealing the contrary. 

What finally did it for me one day, in the middle of a particularly difficult test, was a flower. I had been hospitalised for weeks, unsure if I would be able to live a normal life going forward, unsure also if the possibilities of love were closed for good. I was sitting on the grass in the hospital yard that day, begrudgingly trying to come to grips with the rest of my life, when I discovered, hidden under a large leaf, a tiny flower. Its petals were half yellow, half purple; the bright, contrasting colours blended into each other seamlessly. The perfection of this sign, the exuberance of beauty, imbued into something so small, so insignificant and easily overlooked, took my breath away. “Who does that?,” I thought. What kind of essence can a God have who thinks of placing this amount of beauty into something so mundane and fleeting; who, in creating this world, thinks of details like this, knowing that seeing this flower on this day, in the midst of all things bleak, will soothe me? And how blind could I then be to not see God for who He is? I realised then and there that, while there are all these statements in the Qur’an and texts telling us what God is like, at the end of the day, the leap has to come from within your heart. As the Hadith Qudsi goes, “I am as My servant thinks of Me.”

The World is Full of Good People

If your belief in God is fundamentally positive, then what of God’s creation? I venture to believe that the world is full of good people. The world is full of those who will look at you wide-eyed and tender. This may seem naive in our contemporary world, where the language of marketplace capitalism has seeped into love, where supply and demand and scarcity shape our thinking, and where there is a temptation to reduce finding a spouse to a probabilistic function of age, race, class, or physical endowments. Similarly, experiences of past hurt subtly reshape our expectations of the future, leading us to believe that resignation is the only way forward. As a friend put it to me once, in discussing a courtship in which he seemed frequently unhappy and misunderstood, “there’s been good marriages built on less than this.” This made me sad; I got the logic, but I desperately wanted him to aspire to more. 

To believe in love, you also have to trust in the fitrah of God’s creation, trust that there is truthfulness and goodness in our hearts. I catch glimpses of it all around me, and it moves me. I see intentionality. I see people trying. I see shyness and sweet restraint and courage. I see the kindness in how we part ways. I see the generosity to assume good intentions on each other’s part, the respect. I see people, fellow seekers, walking shakily or nimbly on the same path. To be a believer defies statistics, and the existence of goodness shows us glimpses of what can be.

You have to believe that there is something inherently dignified and worthy in all of us, that each connection, each failed talking stage, each long, arid, empty stretch of time can teach you something.

It’s hard, but in seeing the best in others, we also commit to giving the best of ourselves.

The Least and the Best of Them is You

Which brings me to the last bit: you. Perhaps you too have felt you are undeserving of love. Perhaps you’ve taken a good hard look at your body and found it lacking; or it might be your soul, the bits of your heart you deem too flawed to reveal. I’m not here to tell you to love yourself, but I will tell you to stop making it about yourself to begin with, assuming that you have to be a certain way before you can aspire to love. We are nothing by ourselves: whatever beauty, intellect, wit we have to offer is a short-lived fire, soon to turn to dust. At the same time, we are everything by the grace of God. The question, then, is less whether we are worthy of love than what we do with the capacities entrusted to us.

The Qur’an teaches us that a believer is a vicegerent/khalīfah of God on Earth, a holder of moral agency over this world; love too can be an amanah placed in our hands, and the horizon of possibility widens by the trust invested in us. The Islamic philosopher and poet Allama Muhammad Iqbal highlighted a conception of human nature that endows us with creative agency, with yearning, and an aspiration, making individuation not an obstacle but a path toward closeness with God. He writes in Asrar-i-Khudi (The Secrets of the Self), “Though I am but a mote, the radiant sun is mine. Within my bosom are a hundred dawns.” Yes, we are frail, restless beings, and yet – what unspeakable potential for beauty lies within. 

For Iqbal, this potential does not depend on overcoming our imperfection. In the Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, he writes that “the acceptance of selfhood … involves the acceptance of all the imperfections that flow from the finitude of selfhood;” what matters is that we continue to “evolve the inner richness of being,” remaining what he calls “a creative activity, an ascending spirit.” It is precisely in this state of conscious flux, where self-acceptance and the cultivation of all that is beautiful within meet, that the work of becoming begins.

Iqbal also argues that the boundary between the spiritual and the profane is fluid; an act becomes spiritual through the attitude with which we approach the complexity of life. It seems evident to me that this should apply all the more to our emotional lives, which are so deeply shaped by the kind of attention we bring to them.

To love another person while remaining conscious of their complexity, their dignity, their createdness, and our responsibility toward them is already to refuse the division between the sacred and the ordinary.

Love is, above all, a commitment to ihsaan. And so, no matter how (un)deserving of love you personally feel, to ask for it is also to ask for a way to serve, to transcend: a duty to the potential of your soul.

To sign up to this with no guarantees of success feels insane at times. On some weary days, my faith falters, while on others, I am shown glimpses of what is possible. The future feels inscrutable, and still, sometimes, a thought comes to my mind that, despite it all, I believe. You should, too.