Maḥabba is the Qurʾānic word for love: God loves them and they love him. Sufi manuals treat love as a station or a state, the fruit of knowing God, and its higher degrees shade into ʿishq. Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya is remembered as the first great teacher of the love of God for his own sake.
Maḥabba
Love: the love between God and the soul, the subject of a whole station on the Sufi path.
Also: Mahabba