Introduction

Love (maḥabba) is one of God’s primary attributes, and ‘the One Who loves’ is a name of God mentioned by the Quran. Why, then, do modern Muslim thinkers writing on theology tend on the whole to shun the topic? Is it because discussions about love, particularly with regard to God’s love, seem to them for the most part superficial and simplistic, relying on emotion rather than scripture or reason? Is it on account of the fact that the issue of love – of God’s love for His creation and His creation’s love for God – has traditionally been the domain of the Sufis and the mystics, and is therefore somehow already tainted by association and thus not worthy of serious theological consideration? Or is it because love is simply too slippery and elusive a concept upon which to get a firm intellectual grip?

That discussions of love – and especially Divine love – can often appear to be grounded more in emotivism than rationality is undeniable. For example, despite the fact that the New Testament statement ‘God is love’ is the subject of serious theological study, in the context of popular Christianity it can at times appear to be little more than a pious platitude that one finds on coffee mugs or badges, or which is put on a plaque and hung on the wall. But the same cannot be said of Islam, although not because discussions about love among Muslims are not emotive or are never reduced to the merely platitudinous; the same cannot be said of Islam because discussions on love, at least in the context of popular religion, are largely conspicuous by their absence.

While the issue of love in general, and Divine love in particular, has in the context of the Muslim intellectual tradition been largely the domain of mystical discourse, it is not a subject considered taboo by theologians in general. One can find intellectual explorations of the notion of Divine love in the works of the early theologians – the Ash’arites are a particularly salient example – as readily as one can in the works of the philosophers and the mystics. That the trend among theologians in general – and, again, among the Ash’arites in particular – was to treat the idea of a ‘loving God’ Who can be ‘loved’ in return with extreme caution, and at times with outright disdain, is a different issue: they may indeed have dismissed the claims of the Sufis, but they did not consider discussion of the subject outside their theological remit.