Love, Peace, and Submission

From this piece at the Huffington Post, we learn that Islam is the religion of love. The article, by William Chittick, is quite misleading. If you think this is supposed to mean that we are to love one another, in fact throughout the article the only being explicitly mentioned whom we are required to love is God.

Anyway, Chittick’s evidence for this is the musings of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, who died in 1350. By 1350, Islam had been in existence for over seven hundred years, so surely Chittick could find something a little closer in time to Muhammad than this to show what the essence of Islam is.

Furthermore, the usual misinterpretation is that Islam is the religion not of love, but of peace. As Daniel Pipes has pointed out (here), while the Arabic word for “peace” (salaam) is related grammatically to the word “Islam” in that they have the same trilateral root (that is, the consonants s, l, and m), this doesn’t mean anything with respect to their meanings, for there are lots of other words that have this root that have nothing to do with peace (like sullam, “ladder”). The meaning for “Islam” listed in my Arabic dictionary (see here) is “submission.”

Islam, then, is a religion that demands that we submit to God, and for those of us who are cynics, it means that we must submit not to God, but to those who believe in that God.