# 3 God provides us with innumerable favours
“And if you should [try to] count the favours of God, you
could not enumerate them. Indeed mankind is [generally] most unjust and
ungrateful.”._001.jpg)
We should
be eternally grateful to God because we could never thank Him for His blessings.
The heart is an appropriate example to illustrate this point. The human heart
beats around 100,000 times a day, which is approximately 37,000,000 times a
year. If we were to live up to the age of 75, the number of heartbeats would
reach 2,759,400,000. How many of us have even counted that number of
heartbeats? No one ever has. It is actually impossible to count that many
heartbeats. Firstly, for the first few years of your life you cannot count. Already
there’s a few years of backlog. Secondly, you cannot count your heartbeats
while you are sleeping. To be able to count a lifetime’s worth of heartbeats,
you would have had to start counting each heartbeat from the day you were born
and while you were asleep. This would interfere with your ability to live a
normal life, as you would always be counting every time your heart started a
new beat. As a practical matter it is impossible. However, every heartbeat is
precious to us. Anyone of us would sacrifice a mountain of gold to ensure that
our hearts function properly to keep us alive. Yet we forget and deny the One
who created our hearts and enables them to function. This illustration forces
us to conclude that we must be grateful to God, and gratitude is a form of
worship. The above discussion just refers to heartbeats, so imagine the
gratitude we must express for all the other blessings God has given us. From
this perspective anything other than a heartbeat is a bonus. God has given us
favours we cannot enumerate, and if we could count them we would have to thank
Him for the ability to do so.
# 4 If we love ourselves, we must love God
Loving God is a fundamental aspect of worship. There
are many types of love and one of these includes self-love. This occurs due to
the desire to prolong our existence, feel pleasure and avoid pain, as well as
the need to satisfy our human needs and motivations. We all have this natural
love for ourselves because we want to be happy and content. The psychologist
Erich Fromm argued that loving oneself is not a form of arrogance or
egocentricity. Rather, self-love is about caring, taking responsibility and
having respect for ourselves. This type of love is necessary in order to love
others. If we cannot love ourselves, how then can we love other people? There
is nothing closer to us than our own selves; if we cannot care for and respect
ourselves, how then can we care for and respect others? Loving ourselves is a
form of ‘self-empathy’. We connect with our own feelings, thoughts and
aspirations. If we cannot connect with our own selves, how then can we
empathise and connect with others? Eric Fromm echoes this idea by saying that
love “implies that respect for one’s own integrity and uniqueness, love for an
understanding of one’s own self, cannot be separated from respect and love and
understanding for another individual.”[1]
If a person’s love for himself is necessary, this should
lead him to love the One who made him. Why? Because God created the physical
causes and means for human beings to achieve happiness and pleasure, and avoid
pain. God has freely given us every precious moment of our existence, yet we
do not earn or own these moments. The great theologian Al-Ghazali aptly
explains that if we love ourselves we must love God:
“Therefore, if man’s love for himself be necessary, then
his love for Him through whom, first his coming-to-be, and second, his
continuance in his essential being with all his inward and outward traits, his
substance and his accidents, occur must also be necessary. Whoever is so
besotted by his fleshy appetites as to lack this love neglects his Lord and
Creator. He possesses no authentic knowledge of Him; his gaze is limited to
his cravings and to things of sense.”[2]
# 5 God is The-Loving, and His love is the purest form of
love
God is The-Loving. He has the purest form of love. This
should make anyone want to love Him, and loving Him is a key part of worship. Imagine
if I were to tell you that there was this person who was the most loving person
ever, and that no other love could match his love; wouldn’t that instil a
strong desire to get to know this person, and eventually love him too? God’s
love is the purest and most intense form of love; therefore, any sane person
would want to love him too.
Given that the English word for love encompasses a range
of meanings, the best way to elaborate on the Islamic conception of God’s love
is to look into the actual Quranic terms used to describe Divine love: His
mercy (rahmah), His special mercy (raheem) and His special love (muwadda).
By understanding these terms and how they relate to the Divine nature, our
hearts will learn to love God.
Mercy
It is said that another word for love is mercy. One of
God’s names is The-Merciful; the Arabic word used is Ar-Rahmaan. This
English translation does not fully represent the depth and intensity that the
meaning of this word carries. The name Ar-Rahmaan has three
major connotations: the first is that God’s mercy is an intense mercy; the
second is that His mercy is an immediate mercy; and the third is a mercy so
powerful that nothing can stop it. God’s mercy encompasses all things and He
prefers guidance for people. In God’s book, the Quran, He says,
“…but My mercy encompasses all things….” (Quran 7:156)
“It is the
Lord of Mercy who taught the Quran.”In the above verse, God says He is The-Merciful, which
can be understood as the “Lord of Mercy”, and that He taught the Quran. This
is a linguistic indication to highlight that the Quran was revealed as a
manifestation of God’s mercy. In other words, the Quran is like one big
love-letter to humanity. As with true love, the one who loves wants good for
the beloved, and warns them of pitfalls and obstacles, and shows them the way
to happiness. The Quran is no different: it calls out to humanity, and it also
warns and expresses glad tidings.
Footnotes:
[1]
Fromm, E. (1956). The Art of Loving. New York: Harper Row, pp.
58-59.
[2]
Al-Ghazali. (2011) Al-Ghazali on Love, Longing, Intimacy Contentment.
Translated with an introduction and notes by Eric Ormsby. Cambridge: The
Islamic Texts Society, p. 25.