Mahabba

Via Feministe, this excellent essay on agape love in Islam. I'm going to go ahead and give away the punchline, but please do read the whole thing:

Mahabba differs from agape in one crucial respect: because serving and approaching the beloved is a form of ongoing personal struggle, mahabba is a form of jihad. A far cry from the violent and indiscriminate ‘small jihad’ preached by militants, mahabba is a form of el jihad el kebir, the greater jihad, or jihad against one’s own ego. [emphasis added] It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that in an age of lesser jihad mahabba has fallen out of practice and almost out of memory; so universally neglected that when Islam is accused of lacking a concept of divine brotherhood, few Muslims have the intellectual wherewithal to protest. But Adhaf Soueif is right: at the heart of all things is the germ of their overthrow. The struggle to serve God out of love, and one another out of love, is the jihad of human potential against the jihad of violent ideology; if resurrected, it has the power to change the world.

Notice how jihad means a lot more than 'holy war'? Me too - I have been told many times that, properly translated, it means 'struggle', of which struggle against others is merely a small part. The biggest struggle is always internal, against and with one's own self.

Also, I think Adhaf Soueif is exactly right as well, in both a deconstructionist way and the way in which every idea, properly understood, includes its limits and opposition.