Love, Longing Intimacy And Contentment

Love, Longing Intimacy And Contentment 

Kitab al-mahabba wa’l- shawq wa’l-uns wa’l-rida 
Book 36 of The Revival of the Religious Sciences (Ihya Ulum al-Din)

The Book of Love, Longing, Intimacy and Contentment is the thirty-sixth chapter of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali’s Revival of the Religious Sciences. This was the first treatise which established not merely the possibility but the necessity for the love of God. Ghazali argues that all the virtues and spiritual stages that precede love, like repentance, patience and thankfulness, lead to love; and all the spiritual stages that follow on from love are a result of it.

Al-Ghazali on Love, Longing, Intimacy & Contentment is a translation of the thirty-sixth chapter of The Revival of the Religious Sciences (Ihya Ulum al-Din). 

This chapter falls in the last of the four sections of the Ihya, the section dealing with the virtues or what is conducive to salvation. This work was of radical importance to the history of Sufism and the arguments that al-Ghazali sets out in it formed the basis of the development of whole schools of Sufi theory and practice of mystical love, including the extensive Sufi poetry of Rumi and Hafiz. 

The text starts by elucidating the love of God for humanity and the love of man for God, and proceeds to discuss the deepening of this love to include different degrees of longing, intimacy and contentment.