When Love Becomes a Chain
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Now Ibn Taymiyyah speaks about a dangerous kind of love. What the Arabs called, ishq. Passionate, consuming infatuation with another person.
He says the poets described its stages. First attachment. Then longing. Then passion. And its final stage, they called tatayyum. And tatayyum, in Arabic, means enslavement. So the one consumed by such love becomes a slave of the one he loves.
Even the doctors of his time, he notes, described this kind of love as a sickness of the mind. Because it distorts how a person sees. The lover imagines the beloved to be something they are not. If he saw them as they truly are, he would love them, perhaps, but he would not be enslaved.
The Qur’an, he points out, mentions this kind of passion in the story of Yusuf (Joseph). It was the wife of the minister who was consumed by it. And Allah protected Yusuf (Joseph) from it. How? We turned away from him evil and indecency, says Allah. He was one of Our sincere servants.
So the protection was sincerity. Yusuf (Joseph)’s heart belonged to Allah alone. And a heart that is full of Allah has no room for a love that enslaves.
Allah also says about Shaytan, he has no authority over those who believe and rely on their Lord. His authority is only over those who take him as their guardian.
So if you ever feel your heart being pulled into a love that is taking over, that is controlling you, the answer is not only to fight it. It is to fill your heart with a greater love.
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