ʿIshq

ʿIshq is the Arabic and Persian word for passionate, overwhelming love. In ordinary use it means love between human beings; the Sufis made it the name of the love between the soul and God, a love that consumes the lover and is stronger than reason.

The early Sufi woman Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya is remembered for teaching that God should be loved for God’s own sake, not from fear of hell or hope of paradise. Later writers, among them Aḥmad Ghazālī, ʿAṭṭār, Rūmī and ʿIrāqī, made love the heart of the path: the lover must pass away in the beloved, and the beloved is, in the end, the lover’s own true being. Persian poetry gave this love its language of wine, the tavern, the moth and the candle, and the nightingale and the rose.

The Sufis often contrast love with reason or intellect (ʿaql). The intellect calculates and holds back; love risks everything, and so goes where reason cannot. The philosophers answered that love and knowledge are one at their summit.