Quran Reflection -- True Love

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
In the Name of Allah, Most Merciful, Most Compassionate

Allah Most High says in the Quran:

وَمَا خَلَقْتُ الجِنَّ وَالاِنْسَ اِلَّا لِيَعْبُدُوْنِ

And I did not create the jinn and mankind except to worship Me. [Quran, Adh-Dhariyyat 51:56]

This worship (‘ibadah) of Allah is closely tied to the idea of loving (mahabbah) Allah. To worship Him means to love Him, it means to know Him. The acts of obedience that we do in order to worship Him are an expression of our love for Allah.

The purpose of our existence is to worship Allah, and this worship is adoration, and so the purpose of our existence is to love Allah. The slave who worships Allah out of love not only fears the Hellfire, hopes for Paradise and surrenders to His Lord, but he goes beyond all of these because He sees everything in the universe as a manifestation of Allah's kindness, generosity, and love. Everything that happens in the universe, to him, is sweet. He goes beyond what His Lord commands to search out everything that He loves, even if it is not obligatory.

Knowing Allah means to experientially realize that He is the Master of every single atom in the universe, that He created the universe from nothing, and that He needs nothing, and that everything else needs Him. This is not just a conceptual realization in the mind, but a realization in one’s heart that pervades one’s soul. So when one knows Allah as He really is, there’s a beauty to the being of Allah that the heart perceives and falls in love with.

The Sufis have a famous saying:

مَنْ عَرَفَ نَفْسَهُ عَرَفَ رَبَّهُ

Whoever knows himself knows His Lord.

This means that whoever knows that he is a needy, indigent slave, will realize thereby that he has a Lord who doesn’t need anything, is Powerful, and everything that he has comes from His Lord.

May Allah grant us the knowledge and love of Him. Aameen.

Allahumma salli 'ala Muhammad wa 'ala aalihi wa sahbihi wasallam.

And Allah knows best and is Most Wise, and He alone grants success, and to Him is the final return of all.

Wassalaam