Love and Sufism: A Pedagogical Tool for Transcendence

Love and Sufism:

A PEDAGOGICAL TOOL FOR TRANSCENDENCE

UREEBA REHAN

One of the great conundrums of our time is the question of what defines the human race as the human race—what quality subscribes who we are? Is it our intellect? Our ability to turn our thoughts and ideas into capital? Is it our speech? Is it the selfish zeal which drives our bodies into action? Is it the vivacity in our very movements as we stumble through this life? Or is it something else entirely? In his Fuquhat, Ibn Arabi looks past these attributes and instead makes another connection between the human race. He states, and I quote,

BY GOD, I FEEL SO MUCH LOVE THAT IT SEEMS AS THOUGH THE SKIES WOULD BE RENT ASUNDER, THE STARS FALL AND THE MOUNTAINS MOVE AWAY AS IF I BURDENED THEM WITH IT: SUCH IS MY EXPERIENCE OF LOVE.

And there it is, the whole package. The answer to the universe and all that we know in it. If it can be said: the reversal to entropy.

In 1946, Austrian writer Viktor Frankl wove love into a story about survival so beautifully that it seemed like any genocide could thereon be overcome. Plato wrote about platonic love. The Greeks drank Eros like a glass of wine. Saints threw themselves onto the doorsteps of fidelity. And yet, the western world does not recall these figures when love weaves itself into their everyday interactions; they think of figures from the East.

There is a concept in Sufism called ibn-al-waqt, which, for the sake of brevity, means to surrender yourself to the present moment. To grasp ibn-alwaqt you would have to first grasp wujud, which, in Sufi metaphysics, is not just the recognition of God’s existence but also our duty as humans to find Him. For Arabi, wujud is our fundamental reality. It is the Real. To know wujud would mean to be real, and to be real would mean to know yourself to your full capacity. If we look at the backdrop of our everyday lives it is apparent that our thirst to find out who we are is parallel to finding out how we are what we are. As we try to question and construct and make sense of the boundaries of our creation, we are, in essence, in a state of transcendence. What are we acting for? Who runs our states? To whom do we owe the furor of our discourse?

To know God you must love God; and to love God you must first know Him. And to launch yourself into this momentum you must first know yourself.

One of the overarching themes in Imam Ghazali’s Ihya’Ulumuddin is the idea that love for God is the highest form of love towards which humans can aspire. Love (mahabbah), holds hands with knowing (ma’rifah). To visualize, your brain holds hands with your heart.

And so how do we come to know ourselves? How do we reach that state of enlightenment where we transcend the boundaries that keep us rooted to this worldly life? The first step is to recognize that there is nothing self-empowering about transcendence. It does not lead to a sudden fondness of the self, or towards autonomy, or towards human supremacy. Instead, it makes us break away from all the pride and privilege that we hold about ourselves; it demolishes the ego; it makes us realize the role we play in this Anthropocene. To transcend means to lay victim to the virtue of humility.

Arabi says,

IF IT HAD NOT BEEN FOR THIS LOVE, THE UNIVERSE WOULD NOT HAVE APPEARED IN ITS SOURCE.

This dunya is a splinter; the camouflage to our suffering. Think of all the times you taught somebzody else in your life to love who they are. We do not realize this, but deep down, at the root of things, each and every one of us has adopted love as our pedagogy. That is where we all began. Maybe transcendence is synonymous with loving. I’d like to think that, despite all of the ugliness, we can overcome the quiet ways vice travels through the humdrum of this dunya. Maybe we can’t reverse entropy but can make it somewhat bearable. Maybe love is the salve which will do it.