Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition

In the mail, today, a gift and a sweet responsibility—a new book for me to review that attempts to clear the good name of a much-misunderstood and maligned faith, Islam. Muslims make up 25% of the global population, or around 2 billion souls and, yet, as the opening line of "Radical Love's'' press release suggests (and the news seems to confirm) Islam is associated with violence in the public imagination.

This book, then, is intended as a peace offering. Radical, to be published later this year, is a collection of Sufi love poetry, translated by a leading scholar of Islam, Omid Safi. What is Sufism to Islam, a friend asked me just earlier, today? The short answer is that it is its mystical branch. Books, of course, can be written on this subject - and they have. But, I think, it's safe to say that Sufism is at very the heart of Islam.

It is both the husk and flower of Islam, as I understand it. But, mysticism, of course, is not for everyone. One must crawl, first, before they can fly—hence the suspicion ecstatics provokes, in those who do not soar. Sufism, in turn, is the (open) secret of Islam, the poetry and beauty, when you've boiled everything else away (dogma, etc..)

For the millions who appreciate Rumi's poetry, this book offers an opportunity to better understand the Arabic/Persian traditions that produced him, and the Quran that his art and being are rooted in. Excerpts from the holy book are featured, here, alongside sayings of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ (below), as a counterbalance, one hopes, to the ugliness and ignorance that blaspheme in the name of Faith:

The ink from a scholar is worth more than the blood of a martyr.

The most excellent Jihad is that for the conquest of self.

Kindness is a mark of faith, and whoever is not kind has no faith.

Who are the learned? Those who practice what they know.

One hour of contemplation is better that one year of worship.

Trust in God – but tie your camel first.

If the Hour [the day of Resurrection] is about to be established and one of you was holding a palm shoot, let him take advantage of even one second before the Hour is established to plant it.'

Also, featured in this fine book are mystical utterances and teachings of Divine love by celebrated Sufi poets, such as Attar, Hafez and other key Muslim mystics:

“Even after all this time
The Sun has never told the Earth
“You owe me,”
look what happens
with a love like that,
it lights the whole sky.”

“When all your desires are distilled
You will cast just two votes
To love more
And be happy”

—Hafez

In less than exemplary times like ours, it is difficult not to become radicalized... by pity. May this book help heal and illuminate broken hearts and soften hardened ones. I leave you with one of the opening statements in this book by one of the pioneering teachers of love in the Islamic tradition, Ahmad Al Ghazali:

I will write you a book on Radical Love
provided you do not bifurcate it
into Divine Love
and Human Love