Every February 14th, many of those we live amongst send valentines to those they love most, but do we ever remember to ?send valentines? to the One we love most, who created love in the first place? Do we send messages of love to the One who fashions, sustains, and nurtures love, who is able to ruin and erode love, yet whose Love keeps this earth absorbing and revolving around the light of the sun? Does this One not love us more than the mother loves her infant child, more than our mates love us, more than we love ourselves?

Did the One not send amongst us to teach us how to love, His beloved, Sayyiduna Muhammad al-Mustafa, sall Allahu `alayhi wa sallam, the Ahl al-Bayt, the Salaf al-Salih, and the Awliya of every time and place? Should we not then love the One more than anybody loves anything? Should we use Valentine?s Day, its problematic origins, or its contemporary hostile takeover by gross consumerists as an excuse not to express love for the One, Habibullah, and all of creation on this day? If Valentine?s Day is a day of love then don?t the people of Muhammad al-Habibullah, sall Allahu `alayhi wa sallam, have more right to it?

If it is said that love for the One should be expressed with what is better than mere flowers and chocolates, cold words written by people paid cash to compose them, only at limited times when the social engineers of our popular culture urge us to do so, I would agree and insist that love for the One be expressed at every moment and place with the best of what we have been given to express it.

And yet I would add to that the following qualification. Remember how Mawlana Rumi clarified for us the way of Habibullah, sall Allahu `alayhi wa sallam, in the story of Nabi Musa `alayhis-salam and the shepherd? We were taught that no offering of love is despised or rejected by the generous and forgiving One who can inspire each and everyone of us to express it in different ways. So why should we who ought to know a better way but constantly fail to follow it look contemptuously on those who do not know a better way and yet do their best when they express love even if it is a few times or only even once a year with things that do not befit the Majesty and Beauty of the One? If we are seduced by contempt for people and what they hold sacred, even if they are mistaken, it seems to me that we allow them to surpass us in approaching proximity to the Divine. Let us rather be like those who believe described by the One in the Qur?an [2:164-65]:

Indeed, in the creation
of the heavens and the earth,
and the alternation of the night and day
and the ships that sail the sea
for the benefit of humanity,
and the water God sends down from the sky,
with which God enlivens the earth after its death,
and distributes all kinds of animals thereupon;
and the coursing of the winds,
and the clouds employed between sky and earth,
surely these are signs
for people who reflect

Yet among the people
are those who take to idols
instead of God,
loving them as God should be loved.
But those who believe
are stronger in love for God.

Elsewhere in the Qur?an [3:31] we are taught how our love ought to be expressed when God commands Nabi Muhammad, sall Allahu `alayhi wa sallam, as follows:

Say, ?If you love God, then follow me;
God will love you and forgive you your sins;
for God is most forgiving, most merciful.?

I think that perhaps Hafiz has left us a commentary on these verses of the Qur?an [translated in Daniel Ladinsky?s The Gift] where he offers us an analogy of how those who love God should be with God?at least in the beginning:

Like
A pair
Of mismatched newlyweds,
One of whom still feels very insecure,
I keep turning to God
Saying,
?Kiss
Me.?