Ishq ek Mir bhari patthar hai

Kab ye tujh natawaan se uthta hai

(Love, Oh Mir, is arduous work

Not meant for a feeble one like you)

I am somewhat amused and greatly saddened by accusations of love jihad against young Muslim men who are supposedly fooling unsuspecting Hindu girls into converting to Islam. They’re doing this by pretending to be in love with them. Love is compared to a boulder that can’t be lifted, as Mir Taqi Mir’s couplet attests, so how can a true lover pretend to wage love jihad for the purpose of religious conversion?

Love is the greatest and purest form of jihad and can’t be waged for any other purpose than love. The word jihad has been borrowed from Arabic and only one of its meanings is holy war. Its other meanings are related to the word’s three letter root, j-h-d , meaning: struggle, endeavour, exertion, effort, assiduity, earnestness. Farhad, the ill-fated lover of Shirin (in an ancient Persian love story), was ordered to carve out a tunnel in the mountainside to win her love, which he did after much jad-o-jahd , but upon receiving the (fake) news of Shirin’s death, he killed himself with that same axe.

Asadullah Khan Ghalib didn’t approve of Farhad’s use of an axe:

Teshe baghair mar na saka koh-kun Asad

Sargashta-e-khumar-e-rasoom-o-quyud tha

(The rock-carver needed an axe to kill himself

He was bound by rituals and conventions)

A true lover wouldn’t need an axe. His grief would be enough. Jad-o-jahd , or ceaseless toil on the path of love, carries no guarantees of success. Toiling is the essential creed of lovers, even when love’s labour is unrequited.

In Islamic thought there are two forms of jihad: the lesser jihad-e-asghar and the greater jihad-e-akbar . The lesser jihad is conventional warfare or the cares of the world. But the greater jihad is self-transformation through self-reflection. The goal of jihad-e-akbar is to tame the egotistical self. The greatest struggle/jihad is the one you wage with yourself, the most intractable part of the self being the ego or nafs . Love makes the lover arrive at a state of helpless selflessness where the ego cannot be.

Tazkia-e-nafs means taming the ego. Lovers of God and, by extrapolation, lovers of humankind, become true lovers through various paths. In Sufism, fasting, praying, meditating, going on pilgrimage, silent retreats and nightly vigils are all means to surrender the errant and arrogant ego. You might do all this, and yet not succeed in tazkia-e-nafs .

Our times are not times of love jihad. Very few people, regardless of their social class, caste, religion, gender or sexual orientation, engage in jihad-e-akbar . How to renounce one’s egotistical self when selfhood is so difficult to sustain in a time of mounting insecurities? When one barely knows what one’s true self looks, feels, sounds like? When we’re busy projecting our selfie selves on social media without self-reflection? How does one discern one’s real self from the plethora of false selves floating about? And without knowing one’s true self how does one tame, train or renounce the egotistical selves? She who knows herself knows her God. But we don’t live in times that facilitate such self-knowledge. Ours is a post-truth and post-post-truth age. Perhaps in the near future, truth studies will be an academic discipline to analyse, sift, and collect truths from the morass of post-truths. For now what can we do to resist being force-fed falsehoods?

I would like to quote three Muslim men from the subcontinent on love. These three renowned Urdu poets knew a thing or two about love, and, like the fabled lover Farhad, knew that love is life but love is also death. Union with the beloved (earthly or divine) is virtually unattainable, and yet suffering and longing for this unattainable ideal is the raison d’être of a true lover.

In Zikr-e-Mir , Mir Taqi Mir, a poet from the 18th century, declared the cosmos a lover in search of its beloved:

“...always follow the path of love. There can be no order in the universe without love. Life without love is a misfortune. To wager your heart for love is a mark of perfection. Love makes us human. Love transforms human baseness into gold. Whatever exists in this world is a manifestation of love… There’s a class [of Sufis] who believe that the cosmos is a vagrant in search of God’s love.”

Ghalib (19th century) summed up the travails of the lover as unavoidable, recurrent death:

Kahun kis se main ke kya hai, shab-e-gham buri bala hai

Mujhe kya bura tha marna agar aik baar hota

(In separation during those nights of suffering

Who would not choose death if it were to come but once)

In the 20th century, Mohammad Iqbal reiterated silent suffering among the etiquette of lovers:

Khamosh aye dil! bhari mehfil mei chillana nahi achha

Adab pehla qareena hain mohabbat ke qareenon mein

(Silence! O heart, wail not in public of suffering inflicted by love

Decorum is among the foremost principles on the path of love)

To be a poet-lover-jihadi is to suffer. It’s not about making the beloved suffer. It’s not about foisting religion, culture or nationality on the beloved. It is about accepting love’s suffering, and yet, for lovers, no other path is more willingly traversed.

Ghalib again:

Ishq se tabiyat ne zeest ka maza paaya

Dard ki dawa payee, dard-e-bedawa paaya

(Love granted my disposition its true colours

A cure for my suffering, an incurable suffering)

Rabia Basri, the eighth-century lover par excellence, wished to set fire to paradise and douse the fires of hell so she could claim true love of God, a love not driven by rewards of heaven or fear of hell. In our pragmatic, reward-driven times, how many can claim to be true jihadi-lovers?

Nighat Gandhi is the author of Ghalib at Dusk and Other Stories

Related Topics