Rabi'a the mystic and unconditional love

I have never quite been able to convince myself that unconditional love exists. Sure I love my friends and family, but I love them for who they are not for what they are, and that is always conditional. What if someone you love turns out to be a liar, a murderer, or a republican? (Kidding people, it’s a joke, please don’t send me mean comments about how republicans are people too, I know, and I even like a few of them)

Reading about Rabi’a the Sufi mystic of the eighth century in Margaret Smith’s book Muslim Women Mystics: The Life and Work of Rabi’a and Other Women Mystics in Islam I reconsidered my skepticism. Rabi’a was a prominent woman mystic, an impressive feat for the time period in which she lived. She was one of the first people to introduce the idea of passionate love for God into Islam. She made two main contributions to the idea of love for the divine. First she advocated a love for the divine that left room for nothing else. She claimed, “love to God has so possessed me that no place remains for loving or hating any save him” (For those interested this quote can be found in Smith’s book, page 124). It is even reported that she would close her windows to spring flowers and rather than let them distract her, become lost in contemplation of God. Here I do not entirely condone her sentiment. It seems to me that another possible consequence of this type of love for God could be that love would extend to his supposed creation. I have always been slightly weary of any religious expression that denies the value of this world. I think of Pascal’s wager and turn it around. Pascal pragmatically maintained that there are two possibilities, God or nothing. If you get punished for not believing when it turns out that there is a God, while nothing at all happens to those who have belief if there is not, why not believe in God? It’s safer. In the same way I find it dangerous not to affirm this life. If there is no God, and we spend our lives pining for some idyllic afterlife, think of how much we lose if there is no afterlife. If Rabi’a can’t love any save God and it turns out that there is no God, I can think of no bigger tragedy.

With this idea in mind, I am very much impressed by Rabi’a’s second big contribution. There is a story that she would run around with fire in one hand and water in the other. When asked what she was doing she replied “I want to throw fire into Paradise and pour water into Hell so that these two veils disappear, and it becomes clear who worships God out of love, not out of fear of Hell or hope for Paradise” (As quoted in Mystical Dimensions of Islam by Annemarie Schimmel). She advocated a love for God that was not contingent upon any reward, or inspired by fear of any punishment. She loved God because she could not do anything else. How many of us can give of ourselves, not just to God, but to anything this way? I know I can’t. Our actions are almost always motivated by desire for the reward or fear of the punishment. Why did I go to grad school? Because I love studying religion yes, but I could have done that without paying forty grand a year. (What is it that Matt Damon tells the Harvard student in Good Will Hunting? I believe its that he “dropped a hundred grand on an education he could have gotten for a dollar fifty and late charges at the public library.”) Pure love of learning, to learn for learning’s sake, can be counted out as far as my motivation goes. Mostly I didn’t know what else to do and there was no way I was getting a job I wanted with BA’s in psychology and Religious Studies, thus desire for a reward. If I analyze my every action in this way I have the sneaking suspicion that I will encounter the same result; motivation through fear or reward. I know I stay under the speed limit because I don’t want a ticket, I pay my taxes because I don’t want to get audited and as a child I ate my vegetables only so I could have desert. The Behavioral School of Psychology maintains that there is nothing we do that cannot be reduced to reward and punishment. I do not consider myself a behaviorist, but they may be onto something here. If only we could find one thing in life to love the way Rabi’a loved God, I think most of us would be happier people. But like most seemingly simple ideas this will prove to be easier said than done.

Returning to my unconditional love dilemma, can we in fact call Rabi’a’s type of love unconditional? I remain unconvinced because when asked to defend her love of God Rabi’a maintained that she loved him because he was worthy of her love. For me the true test of unconditional love is the unworthiness of the recipient, like both Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. These two such unlikable characters are almost unrivaled in their awfulness, and yet they manage to love each other. Still, being fiction this novel doesn’t convince me. And the idea that unconditional love might only exist for two awful people isn’t too appetizing either. Maybe its ok that I will likely never be convinced by the concept of unconditional love, if only I could learn to practice love like Rabi’a’s. A love that while not entirely unconditional is certainly selfless. How much better a place would the world be if we could all learn to practice, in any small way, love that wasn’t motivated by any fear, didn’t ask for a reward and didn’t demand to be loved in return?