Love is a Reality to Experience – Abdur Rahman’s Corner

Peace, one and all…

It is recorded that beloved Dhu al-Nun al-Misri said:

‘Learning exists, but acting on learning is lacking. Action exists, but acting in sincerity is lacking. Love exists, but honesty in love is lacking’.

Quoted in Attar, Tazkerat ul-Owliya

It is possible to learn, to acquire vast amounts of knowledge, but am I acting on what I am learning? Am I actually putting it into practice? Is it just for show? Is it real or is it merely ego-inflation? Dhu al-Nun suggests that acting on what we know makes learning real, makes it a part of ourselves. If we don’t put our learning into practice, what do we really know? Is my learning beneficial, to myself and to others? Is it self-serving, or an attempt to serve Allah?

However, as Dhu al-Nun points out, actions themselves require something to make them real. Our actions require sincerity, that pure intention to act only for Allah, to give them life. Otherwise, they remain merely a lifeless form, an idol of our own fashioning.

How then can we purify our niyyah? Dhu al-Nun seems to suggest here that love is what gently removes all of our scattered intentions. In an important sense, sincerity is love put in to practice, love made honest. To be true, our love has to be honest, it has to be an expression of what we really feel deep inside our hearts. That is, love has to be sincere. We are called to love God wholly, and sincerely and to seek ever greater encounter through our learning and our lived practice. Love is not a theory to be proven or disproven, it is a reality to experience

And praise be to God Who maketh it so.