Between the Lover and the Beloved: An Inter-Cosmic Love Story

Abstract

In the Sufi tradition, the love story between the Lover and the Beloved, narrated by countless Sufis as a metaphor of the divine love between God and humans,  alludes to a deep ontological structure that the whole creation is based upon known as the Divine Presences (al-ḥaḍarāt al-ilāhiyya) through which God discloses Himself starting from the Muḥammadan (pbuh) Reality to the corporeal world and the perfect human (insān al-kāmil) namely the all-comprehensive entity that unites all the Divine Presences and the realizer of the union with the Beloved. As a result of God's love to be known, He created the creatures as the manifestations of His beautiful names and attributes to worship, recognize, and eventually love Him. This divine love of God leads humans to search for the ways of union with the Eternal Beloved. Prophets (pbuh), scriptures, and the perfect humans following prophets' footsteps are those that God has sent to guide people along the path to the Beloved. According to their understanding of this guidance, some people tend to develop an intimate divine love relationship with God which can be named as the religion of love. In this paper, it's aimed at approaching the inter-cosmic love relationship between the Lover (ʻāshiq) and the Beloved (maʻshūq) as an explanation of the Divine Presences between God and humans, as well as emphasizing the importance of the guidance of God results in living the religion of love, along with the passages from the members of the School of Love throughout the history of Sufism.