One of the supreme weaknesses that Allah has created the human with is embodied in a desire to have love around him. Allah has created us to love, to desire love and to be moved towards the source of love.
The more I see of this world, its days and nights, the more I breathe in this air, I am convinced that there can never be a stronger emotion than love itself.
When I speak so strongly of this emotion it is because, let us be honest, I have like everyone else been moved by it. That was the moment in my life where I realized that despite the fact that this divine emotion was revealing to me a whole different nature of the self that has been so far hidden from my eyes, it wasn’t actually very strengthening.
On the contrary, it was weakening. Not only mentally, but physically too. My limbs and my heart were equally exhausted in the futile attempts to contain myself in what were the limits of haraam and halal.
To say that they were futile would rather be an overstatement. For the mere fact that the strong clutches of this emotion of love weren’t completely impenetrable.
Even though they appeared no less initially.
Why does this divine emotion, if it is divine, take over ones senses in such a way that one forgets to eat, drink, sleep? That one starts to ignore all other needs of his self and be content in only feeding this one corner of the heart that is ever growing.
That when one prays, it prays for it, that when one turns, it turns to see the glimpses of the person who has brought such dreads to the heart. That one is utterly occupied, to say the least, in fulfilling the self-annihilating needs of love.
I ponder over how it changed me for a time. How in some moments my thoughts, my belongings, my everything was approvingly handed over to this one tiny source of love.
Allah brought me to that state for a few number of days to make me re-analyze my sharp claims of being strong enough to outweigh such emotions.
Allah taught me in those few hours how He can bring me down in a matter of seconds in a submissive bow of a servant who has just found a disease in his heart. And though this servant thought himself immune to this particular disease, he now finds him sitting before Him in the most humbled frame, tear-eyed, astonished and equally ashamed.
Ashamed of of falling prey to an uncontrollable emotion.
Ashamed of loving someone from afar.
Ashamed of smiling inwardly at the positive signs that were thrown this way.
It was at this point that I realized that what I had thought was divine wasn’t actually so. It was just a rock on the path of Divine Love. It was a milestone.
It was a servant like me in the palace of Love.
Also waiting to be handed over the keys of secrets. The keys of Love.
And that made me forgot that I had come to see the King.
That was my suffering, that was my state. And that was my lesson.
Every love outside of His love is pain.
Yusra Zainab 