A Book Review on Love
Secrets of Divine Love by A. Helwa vs. All About Love by Bell Hooks
Building upon love is easy if you have established a healthy foundation, but what does that look like? If you decide to read either or both of these books, I think the order in which you do matters deeply.
I read Secrets of Divine Love first and struggled immensely to get through it. I started it, put it down, and came back to it a couple of months later. This repeated for quite a while. I almost felt guilty for not raving about it in ways those around me did because how come I was struggling to have this fruitful relationship with Allah SWT while others seemed to not?
Secrets of Divine Love focuses on building a relationship with Allah SWT through Islamic text and prophetic stories - deepening an established sense of love. But, how do you build a healthy relationship if you don't have a foundation set? Possibly having trauma tied to the idea of giving or receiving love? Or maybe don't feel like you have ever experienced/given it in the first place? All About Love helps unpack how we perceive, understand, give, and build love.
Human beings associate feelings with things they have experienced before and can only understand or conceptualize what they know. This is why we repeat specific actions because they are what we've always known and are comfortable with. But this also comes to love - because we only know the concept from:
What we've seen growing up (which could be dysfunctional)
What we've been told (spiritual/cultural abuse can come into play)
What we've seen within society (the media we consume)
And most of the time, if our experiences were unhealthy, loving becomes a complicated thing. We aren't scared of new love though, just past pain, which can inhibit us from loving.
So, all these things factor into how we love holistically, whether it be relationships with family, friends, and well - Allah SWT. Because even though we understand that Allah SWT's love and mercy for his creation is far greater than anything human - we only know what we have experienced. So, if we have experienced love in an unpure form, we then will have a hard time disassociating those feelings when it comes to our love and trust in Allah SWT. This doesn't mean we don't love him, it just means we need a little heart work to get there.
If you find yourself having a hard time loving in the first place/don't know what that really looks like, read All About Love first and then read Secrets of Divine Love. Your past experiences will shape how you create a foundation to build off of. We need to fix the way we look at what we think we know before we try and reach for something we haven't seen i.e., divine love.
I could go on a different spiel addressing the importance of teaching Islam through a love-based system rather than a fear-based system as we’ve seen through a lot of experiences with Sunday, Islamic, or Hifz schools. Especially since these are fundamental childhood development years. But that’s another soapbox. This is more to focus on healing your relationship with love from a young adult perspective before expecting a deep connection with Allah SWT.
Divine love is like the Ultra Instinct Saiyan type of love. But we have to work on all the other Saiyan levels internally/externally before we truly can experience that. (At least for me).
I hope this helps, and may Allah SWT accept anything good from it and forgive anything bad, ان شاء الله