[Sūrah xxix. 24]: “Verily, ye take idols beside God through mutual friendship in the affairs of this world.”
[Sūrah xxx. 20]: “He has caused between you affection and pity.”
[Sūrah xli. 22]: “Say! I do not ask for it hire, only the affection of my kinsfolk.”
[Sūrah lx. 1]: “O ye who believe! take not my enemy and your enemy for patrons encountering them with affection.”
[Sūrah lx. 7]: “Mayhap God will place affection between you.”
From the above quotations, it will be seen that in the Qurʾān, the word mawaddah is used for friendship and affection only, but that the other terms are synonymous, and are used for both divine and human love.
In the traditions, ḥubb is also used for both kinds of love (see Mishkāt, book xxii. ch. xvi.), and a section of the Ḥadīs̤ is devoted to the consideration of “Brotherly love for God’s pleasure.”
ʿĀyishah relates that the Prophet said, “Souls were at the first collected together (in the spirit-world) like assembled armies, and then they were dispersed and sent into bodies; and that consequently those who had been acquainted with each other in the spirit world, became so in this, and those who had been strangers there would be strangers here.”
The author of the Ak͟hlāq-i-Jalālī distinguishes between animal love and spiritual love. Animal love, he says, takes its rise from excess of appetite. But spiritual love, which arises from harmony of souls, is not to be reckoned a vice, but, on the contrary, a species of virtue:—
“Let love be thy master, all masters above,