For the good and the great are all prentice to love.”
The cause of love, he says, is excessive eagerness either for pleasure or for good; the first is animal love, and is culpable; the second is spiritual love, and is a praiseworthy virtue. (See Thompson’s ed., pp. 227–234.)
The term more generally used in Oriental writings for the passion of love is ʿIshq (عشق), a word which az-Zamak͟hsharī, in his work the Asās (quoted by Lane), says is derived from the word al-ʿashaqah, a species of ivy which twines upon trees and cleaves to them. But it seems not improbable that it is connected with the Hebrew אִשָּׁה “a woman,” or is derived from חָשַׁק “to desire.” (See [Deut. vii. 7]: “The Lord hath set his love upon thee”; and [Ps. xci. 14]: “Because he hath set his love upon me.”) The philosopher Ibn Sīnāʾ (Avicenna), in a treatise on al-ʿIshq (regarding it as the passion of the natural propensities), says it is a passion not merely peculiar to the human species, but that it pervades all existing things, both in heaven and earth, in the animal, the vegetable, and even in the mineral kingdom; and that its meaning is not perceived or known, and is rendered all the more obscure by the explanation thereof. (See Tāju ʾl-ʿArūs, by Saiyid Murtada.)
Mīr Abū ʾl-Baqā, in his work entitled the Kullīyāt, thus defines the various degrees of love, which are supposed to represent not only intensity of natural love between man and woman, but also the Sufiistic or divine love, which is the subject of so many mystic works:—First, hawā, the inclining of the soul or mind to the object of love; then, ʿIlāqah, love cleaving to the heart; then, kalaf, violent and intense love, accompanied by perplexity; then ʿishq, amorous desire, accompanied by melancholy; then, shag͟haf, ardour of love, accompanied by pleasure; then, jawā, inward love, accompanied by amorous desire, or grief and sorrow; then, tatāyum, a state of enslavement; then, tabl, love sickness; then, walah, distraction, accompanied with loss of reason; and, lastly, huyām, overpowering love, with a wandering about at random.
In Professor Palmer’s little work on Oriental mysticism, founded on a Persian MS. by ʿAzīz ibn Muḥammad an-Nafsānī, and entitled the Maksad i Aksā (Maqṣad-i-Aqṣā), or the “Remotest Aim,” we read, “Man sets his face towards this world, and is entangled in the love of wealth and dignity, until the grace of God steps in and turns his heart towards God. The tendency which proceeds from God is called Attraction; that which proceeds from man is called Inclination, Desire, and Love. As the inclination increases its name changes, and it causes the Traveller to renounce everything else but God (who becomes his Qibla), and thus setting his face God-wards, and forgetting everything but God, it is developed into Love.”
This is by no means the last and ultimate stage of the journey, but most men are said to be content to pass their lives therein and to leave the world without making any further progress therein [[SUFIISM]]. Such a person the Ṣūfīs call Majẕūb, or, Attracted. And it is in this state that ʿIshq, or spiritual love, becomes the subject of religious contemplation just as it is in the Song of Solomon. “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine.” But whilst the lover in the Song of Solomon is supposed to represent the Almighty God, and the loved one the Church, in Eastern Ṣūfī poetry the ʿāshiq, or lover, is man, and the mashʿūq, or the Beloved One, is God.
The Ṣūfī poet Jāmī, in his Salaman and Absāl, thus writes of the joy of Divine love; and his prologue to the Deity, as rendered into English, will illustrate the mystic conception of love.
“Time it is
To unfold Thy perfect beauty. I would be
Thy lover, and Thine only—I, mine eyes