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ABSTRACT
This article invites a consideration of more diverse conceptions of love. It proposes as a contribution specific Islamic forms of love, especially those theorized by the medieval Muslim theologian, Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111). The goal is to decolonize the concept of love from dominant Christocentric notions of agape and redemptive forms of love that shape interfaith dialogue. It argues why we need to explore and take account of different conceptions of love. Pope Benedict scandalized the Muslim world with his 2006 Regensberg lecture. The source for many of these misunderstandings is the equation of the ontotheology of love in a particular strand of Christianity with love in Islam. Historically, Islam's ontotheology is centered around incumbent mercy, whereas love is a product within a theological apparatus of experiential relationships of humans with each other as well as with the divine. The article elaborates why Ghazālī's phenomenology of love enriches our understanding of love. Foregrounding knowledge, perception, and obedience, Ghazālī offers a complex experiential conception of love within a Muslim theological ‘apparatus’ and matrix. Proposing that Christianity and Islam have love in common, as some have proposed, does not do justice to the rich, but very different conceptions of love in each tradition.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank the anonymous readers of the Journal of Political Theology for their productive feedback and suggestions. A special thanks to the editors of this special issue Josh Lupo and Eleanor Catherine Craig for their helpful edits and suggestions as well as to Ali A. Mian, and A. Rashied Omar for their feedback, guidance, and support in earlier drafts. All errors are mine alone.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
2 Pope Benedict XVI, "Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections", 706. https://familyofsites.bishopsconference.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2019/07/BXVI-2006-Regensburg-address.pdf
3 Ibid.
4 See Heydarpoor, "Love in Christianity and Islam: A Contribution to Religious Ethics".
5 Foucault and Gordon, "Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings", 194; Giorgio Agamben, "What Is an Apparatus?".
6 Foucault and Gordon, "Power/Knowledge", 194.
7 Talal. In his foreword to the book, the distinguished scholar S H Nasr claims that God loved Himself, when in fact the tradition states God expressed a wish (aḥbabtu) to be worshipped. Everywhere the term mercy occurs the author of the foreword conflates it with love xxiii–xxv. Whereas the most authentic interpreter like Ibn ʿArabī explains that divine benevolence or infinite mercy (raḥmānīya) is the grounds for all existence. Nasr argues that mercy and compassion involves love. If divine attributes are so interchangeable, then the multiplicty of divine attributes are rendered superflous. For a discusson of mercy in the work of Ibn ʿArabī, see Shaikh, Saʿdiyya, Sufi Narratives of Intimacy, 75–81.
8 Ibid., 37. There is a strong resemblance in the language of the Common Word statement and the book by Ghazi b. Muhammad b. Talal, which in itself lacks any discursive heft and is merely a potpourri of citations from various sources.
9 Agamben, "What Is an Apparatus?", 13.
10 Nygren, "Agape and Eros", pt. 1. A study of the Christian idea of love.--pt. 2. The history of the Christian idea of love.
11 Gandolfo, "The Power and Vulnerability of Love a Theological Anthropology", 178, 82.Gandolfo establishes how the theological anthropology of redemption is a product of original sin that creates vulnerability. Original sin as a doctrine is absent in Islam.
12 Quijano, Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America, 533–580; Mignolo, Decoloniality and Phenomenology, 360–387; "Foreword: On Pluriversality and Multipolarity".
13 Jīlī, al-Insān al-Kāmil fī Maʻrifat al-Awāʾil wa al-Awākhir, 184.
14 Wells, The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind, 529.
15 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 584.
16 Hamza, Rizvi, and Mayer, An Anthology of Qur'anic Commentaries, 299–302.
17 Asad, The Message of the Qurʾān, 27.
18 See these various translations from which I have benefited. Ibid; Khalidi, The Qur'an.
19 al-Azmeh, The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity: Allāh and His People, 67, 89. Al-Azmeh observes the universalizing perspectives of monotheism and notes that Rḥmnn was the proper name of the montheistic deity of Christians as well as of henotheistic and monolatric deities.
20 al-Ghazālī, al-Maqṣad al-Asnā fī Sharḥ Maʿānī Asmāʾ Allāh al-Ḥusnā, 63; Burrell, Daher, and Ghazālī, The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God = al-Maqṣad al-Asnā fī S̲Harḥ Asmā' Allāh al-Ḥusnā Translated with Notes, 53.
21 al-Ghazālī, al-Maqṣad al-Asnā, 62; Burrell, Daher, and Ghazālī, The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God, 54.
22 al-Ghazālī, al-Maqṣad al-Asnā, 63.
23 Jīlī, al-Insān al-Kāmil fī Ma'rifat al-Awāʾil wa al-Awākhir, 1:88.
24 Ibn ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkīya, 7:294–295, bāb 558-maʿrifat al-asmāʾ al-ḥusnā.
25 Shehadi, Ghazali's Unique and Unknowable God, 33.
26 Ibid. (Franz Rosenzweig in The Star of Redemption (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1985), 238–239 and adherents of immanentism in dominant modes of Jewish thought, often critique Muslim theology for the aloofness of the Muslim God. Rosenzweig, for example, found it unthinkable that God did not have a “need” for humans in Islam).
27 Ibid., 61.
28 See my Moosa, Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination.
29 Shehadi, Ghazali's Unique and Unknowable God, 62.
30 al-Ghazālī, Mīzān al-'amal, 164.
31 Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad b. Muḥammad al-Ghazālī, "Kitāb Sharḥ ʿajāʾib Al-Qalb", 3:14 esp. fn 4.
32 Moosa, Allegory of the Rule (Hukm): Law as Simulacrum in Islam?.
33 al-Ghazālī, "Kitāb al-Maḥabba wa al-Shawq wa al-Uns wa al-Riḍā", 1.
34 al-Ghazālī and Ormsby, Love, Longing, Intimacy and Contentment, 1.
35 Ibid.
36 al-Ghazālī Kitāb al-Maḥabba, 4:259.
37 Ibid., 4:257.
38 Ibid., 4:258.
39 Ibid., 4:259.
40 Ibid.
41 al-Ghazālī and Ormsby Love, Longing, Intimacy and Contentment 12–13.I have also used Ormsby's translation with some amendment.
42 al-Ghazālī, Kitāb Al-Maḥabba, 4:260; al-Ghazālī and Ormsby Love, Longing, Intimacy and Contentment, 13.
43 Lingis, Subjectification, 11; Agamben, What Is an Apparatus?
44 al-Ghazālī, Kitāb al-Maḥabba, 4:265; al-Ghazālī and Ormsby Love, Longing, Intimacy and Contentment, 30.
45 al-Ghazālī, Kitāb al-Maḥabba, 4:261; al-Ghazālī and Ormsby Love, Longing, Intimacy and Contentment, 16.
46 Agamben, What Is an Apparatus?, 9–10.
47 al-Ghazālī, Kitāb al-Maḥabba, 4:295; al-Ghazālī and Ormsby Love, Longing, Intimacy and Contentment, 130.
48 al-Ghazālī, Kitāb al-Maḥabba, 4:257; al-Ghazālī and Ormsby Love, Longing, Intimacy and Contentment, 2.
49 al-Ghazālī, Kitāb al-Maḥabba, 4:259; al-Ghazālī and Ormsby Love, Longing, Intimacy and Contentment, 10.
50 al-Ghazālī, al-Mustaṣfā min ʿIlm al-Uṣūl, 1:167–178.
51 al-Ghazālī, Kitāb al-Maḥabba, 4:259; al-Ghazālī and Ormsby Love, Longing, Intimacy and Contentment, 10.
52 al-Ghazālī, Kitāb al-Maḥabba, 4:263.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid., 4:265.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid., 4:266.
57 Ibid., 4:265.
58 Eagleton, The Event of Literature. Eagleton wrestles with essentialism, a concept that philosophers treat in ontological terms, “as a question about the nature of a thing’s being.” Love is what comes to his mind as an ontological category, but then proposes to approach an essence like say love ethically. “What is the “essence” of a human being were whatever it is one loves about them?” (17–18) “To love others is not in the first place to feel a certain way about them, but to behave in a certain way towards them.” (61) Here Eagleton is pushing love from an ontology of being to an ethics of conduct. But the next line slips into a different ontological mode. “This is why the paradigm of charity is the love of strangers, not of friends. In trying to love strangers, we are less likely to confuse love with a warm glow in the pit of one’s stomach.” (61–62) Ghazālī would think that a warm glow in the pit of one’s stomach is indeed love, a love that can include both friends and strangers. What causes pleasure is loved. To love someone can be both, to feel a certain way about them as well as to behave in a certain way towards them, Ghazālī would argue. Eagleton is clearly grappling with love as an ontology, not a phenomenology, hence the separation between feeling and behaving.
59 al-Ghazālī, Kitāb al-Maḥabba, 4:268; al-Ghazālī and Ormsby Love, Longing, Intimacy and Contentment, 39.
61 Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, (London:Verso, 1992), 190. As Ahmad put it: “What has been at issue in orthodox Islam is not the status of Jesus but that of Christianity, and of the way Jesus surfaces in Christian belief. For if orthodox Christianity regards Islam as a heresy, orthodox Islam has historically regarded some of the main tenets of Christianity as altogether blasphemous: the idea of the Trinity, the idea of Jesus as a Son of God”.
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Ebrahim Moosa
Ebrahim Moosa, Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought & Muslim Societies, Keough School of Global Affairs and History Department, University of Notre Dame.