“Love is a grave mental disease.” At least that’s how Plato
put it. And while anyone who’s ever been ‘in love’ might see some truth to this
statement, there is a critical mistake made here. Love is not a mental disease.
Desire is.
If being ‘in love’ means our lives are in pieces and we are
completely broken, miserable, utterly consumed, hardly able to function, and
willing to sacrifice everything, chances are it’s not love. Despite what we are
taught in popular culture, true love is not supposed to make us like drug
addicts.
And so, contrary to what we’ve grown up watching in movies,
that type of all-consuming obsession is not love. It goes by a different name.
It is hawa—the word used in the Quran to refer to one’s lower, vain desires and
lusts. Allah describes the people who blindly follow these desires as those who
are most astray: “But if they answer you not, then know that they only follow
their own lusts (hawa). And who is more astray than the one who follows his own
lusts, without guidance from Allah?” (28: 50)
By choosing to submit to our hawa over the guidance of
Allah, we are choosing to worship those desires. When our love for what we
crave is stronger than our love for Allah, we have taken that which we crave as
a lord. Allah says: “Yet there are men who take (for worship) others besides
Allah, as equal (with Allah): They love them as they should love Allah. But
those of Faith are overflowing in their love for Allah.” (2:165)
If our ‘love’ for something makes us willing to give up our
family, our dignity, our self-respect, our bodies, our sanity, our peace of
mind, our deen, and even our Lord who created us from nothing, know that we are
not ‘in love’. We are slaves.
Of such a person Allah says: “Do you see such a one as takes
his own vain desires (hawa) as his lord? Allah has, knowing (him as such), left
him astray, and sealed his hearing and his heart, and put a cover on his sight.
(45: 23)
Imagine the severity. To have one’s sight, hearing and heart
all sealed. Hawa is not pleasure. It is a prison. It is a slavery of the mind,
body and soul. It is an addiction and a worship. Beautiful examples of this
reality can be found throughout literature. In Charles Dickens’ Great
Expectations, Pip exemplifies this point. In describing his obsession with
Estella, he says: “I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I
loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against
happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”
Dickens’ Miss Havisham describes this further: “I’ll tell
you…what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation,
utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole
world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter – as I did!”
What Miss Havisham describes here is in fact real. But it is
not real love. It is hawa. Real love, as Allah intended it, is not a sickness
or an addiction. It is affection and mercy. Allah says in His book: “And of His
signs is that He created for you from yourselves mates that you may find
tranquility in them; and He placed between you affection and mercy. Indeed in
that are signs for a people who give thought.” (Qur’an 30: 21)
Real love brings about calm—not inner torment. True love
allows you to be at peace with yourself and with God. That is why Allah says:
“that you may dwell in tranquility.” Hawa is the opposite. Hawa will make you
miserable. And just like a drug, you will crave it always, but never be
satisfied. You will chase it to your own detriment, but never reach it. And
though you submit your whole self to it, it will never bring you happiness.
So while ultimate happiness is everyone’s goal, it is often
difficult to see past the illusions and discern love from hawa. One fail-safe
way, is to ask yourself this question: Does getting closer to this person that
I ‘love’ bring me closer to—or farther from—Allah? In a sense, has this person
replaced Allah in my heart?
True or pure love should never contradict or compete with
one’s love for Allah. It should strengthen it. That is why true love is only
possible within the boundaries of what Allah has made permissible. Outside of
that, it is nothing more than hawa, to which we either submit or reject. We are
either slaves to Allah, or slaves to our hawa. It cannot be both.
Only by struggling against false pleasure, can we attain
true pleasure. They are by definition mutually exclusive. For that reason, the
struggle against our desires is a prerequisite for the attainment of paradise.
Allah says: “But as for he who feared the position of his Lord and prevented
the soul from [unlawful] inclination, then indeed, Paradise will be [his]
refuge.” (Qur’an, 79: 40-41)
-Yasmin Mogahed.
So, once again. Where does this take me? What does this make me? How does this affect me? Who does this bring me to? Guide me.
