LOVE IS IN THE AIR
Love is in the air!
...Or at least that’s what advertisers want you to think in February. While it’s nice to express your
love often, Valentine’s Day comes once a year, leaving you no choice but to do so or risk seeming
heartless. For the owners of floral boutiques and chocolate shops, Eid comes in February.
Yet, even amidst such commercialized affections, one can hardly keep from thinking about those they
love. And while we do so, we are inevitably faced with some pivotal questions.
I was reminded of some of those questions when I reflected on something a friend of mine had told
me. She described how it felt to be with the person she loved. In her words, the whole world
disappeared when they were together. The more I reflected on her statement, the more it affected me,
and the more it made me wonder.
As humans, we are made to feel love and attachment towards others. This is part of our human nature.
While we can feel this way about another human being, five times a day we enter into a meeting with
our Lord and Creator. I wondered how often we ever felt the whole world disappear while in His
presence. Can we really claim that our love for Allah is greater than our love for anyone and anything
else?
So often we think that Allah only tests us with hardships, but this isn’t true. Allah also tests with ease.
He tests us with na`im (blessings) and with the things we love, and it is often in these tests that so
many of us fail. We fail because when Allah gives us these blessings, we unwittingly turn them into
false idols of the heart.
When Allah blesses us with money, we depend on the money rather than Allah. We forget that the
source of our provision is not and never was the money, but rather it was the giver of that money.
Suddenly we’re willing to sell alcohol to avoid losing money in our business, or we need to take out
loans with interest to feel secure. In so doing we are foolishly—and ironically—disobeying the
Provider in order to protect the provision.
When Allah blesses us with someone that we love, we forget that Allah is the source of that blessing,
and we begin to love that person as we should love Allah. That person becomes the center of our
world—all our concerns, thoughts, plans, fears, and hopes revolve only around them. If they are not
our spouses, we are sometimes even willing to fall into haram just to be with them. And if they were
to leave us, our whole world would crumble. So now, we have shifted our worship from the Source
of the blessing to the blessing itself.
Allah says of such people: “And [yet], among the people are those who take other than Allah as
equals [to Him]. They love them as they [should] love Allah. But those who believe are stronger in
love for Allah.” (Qur’an 2:165)
It is because of this tendency to lose sight after Allah has bestowed His blessings that He warns us in
the Qur’an when He says: “Say, [O Muhammad], ‘If your fathers, your sons, your brothers, your
wives, your relatives, wealth which you have obtained, commerce wherein you fear decline, and
dwellings with which you are pleased are more beloved to you than Allah and His Messenger and
jihad in His cause, then wait until Allah executes His command. And Allah does not guide the