sarah’s Reviews > Divine Love in Islamic Mysticism > Status Update

[...] my beloved
lives in my heart and I have not ceased to come close to him,
My beloved is part of me, in me and with me
why thus should I ask what is the matter with me and what happens with me?

and if you strip the beauty of a shadow coming close to it
you will perceive beauty in yourself rising in the horizon of the soul.

[...] Al Ghazali’s speaking on two levels: on the first, the divine level, everything is decreed by God, so from this point of view we cannot ascribe any act to man. But at the second, the human level, man can know what his motives are, and from this point of view all man’s acts are selfish.

What Al Gazali is actually saying is that if a man devotes himself to his desires, he will not be able to realize his real interest, namely his own existence

This is probably related to the myth appearing in Plato’s Symposium according to which love is explained as the longing og one half of the human beings to the other

Elsewhere Al Ghazali discusses affinity – according to him a mysterious matter – stressing the impossibility of finding its foundation. He quotes one of the scholars as saying that God created the spirits and split some of them and made them circulate around the Throne. If 2 halves of a split spirit meet and know one another in the upper world, they will be friends in this world.

The fifth cause of love is the hidden affinity between lover and the beloved. Sometimes love exists between 2 persons which stems not from beauty of benefit, but from an affinity of their souls.