Na to butkade ki talab mujhe na Haram ke dar ki talash hai,Jahan lut gaya hai sukoon e dil usi rahguzar ki talash hai My soul seeks neither the Temple nor the Kaaba;Only the path where I lost the solace of my heartThis qawwali was the brainchild of Sufi poet Ameer Bakhsh Sabri and was recited first by Ustad Fateh Ali and Ustad Mubarak Ali – Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s father and uncle, respectively. An adapted version of it was later turned into the famous song from the 1960s movie Barsaat ki Raat, ‘Na to karvaan ki talash hai na hamsafar ki talash hai’.The song recently found its way into the popular imagination thanks to the movie Dhurandhar. But it is the original qawwali that I would like to draw your attention to – an ocean of ecstasy that invites endless exploration. On the face of it, it is a qawwali of romantic love between mortal beings. In truth, however, it is simultaneously a kalaam of the highest form of love – between the soul and the divine – both of which are immortal. Deeply subversive in its spirituality, it rejects both the butkada (temple) and the haram (kaaba) and focuses on sukoon e dil (solace of the heart), as the true yearning of faith. It is a rejection of prescriptive, ritualistic religion and a call towards understanding faith as love. The qawwali in Barsaat ki Raat and the original by Ameer Sabri reflect each other in the same way as earthly love is a reflection of spiritual love. It would, however, be a travesty to disparage earthly love, and only celebrate the divine, for they are inseparable from each other. In recent times, there has been criticism of Gen Z youngsters using Rumi’s poems for their partners. The criticism is valid in the sense that the poetry of Rumi or Rabia or other mystics is not about human heartbreak alone, but rises to a much higher and transcendental level. Nevertheless, such a criticism fails to see something very simple, something that Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Iranian-American philosopher and theologist, and Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University, writes in his book The Garden of Truth: earthly love, or romantic love, is a zariya (channel), to understanding divine love. Just as one who has not seen the magnificent sun can only understand light through a tiny candle, so too can mere mortals only know divine love after they have known true love in either the romantic earthly sense, or the familial sense. It is either through the love of one’s family or friends, but most intensely through the romantic love of another human being, that such a great, crushing love transforms to ibaadat (worship). One glimpse of your earthly beloved becomes akin to a glimpse of the divine, for in that single glimpse you experience what it is to completely lose yourself into another, to know what it means to cease to exist and be annihilated in the presence of the beloved.Only those who have experienced such divinely ordained romantic love, can actually know what it is to experience divine love and not just perceive divinity or faith through the prism of prescriptive rituals and laws and punishment. Sadly, in our times there is a constant attempt to distance romantic love from faith, turning religion into a monstrosity devoid of tenderness and poetry; hyper-focused on rituals and laws, and even more so on punishment. It creates the greatest inability in the hearts of people to truly, deeply comprehend the tenderness and poetry of divine love. Youngsters are not wrong, therefore, when using Rumi’s quotes for their lovers. It is merely that they are still on the first rung of the ladder of love and the ultimate divine love constitutes the point even beyond the last rung of the ladder. The point beyond Sidratul Muntaha – the Lote Tree – to use a Quranic reference for the meeting point of lover and beloved – in this case Mohammad and Allah on the occasion of Me’raj. In the narrations of Me’raj, when Mohammad rode the winged steed, Buraq, to rise to the Heavens to meet Allah, it was the angel Jibraeel who escorted him there. Yet, even Jibraeel could not venture beyond Sidratul Muntaha, the sacred Lote Tree, for his wings would have been burnt to ash. But Mohammad, the lover, was permitted beyond that point, for a deed, a jhalak, a glimpse of the beloved. That is what lies beyond the last rung of the ladder – but it is very important that we stop discouraging youngsters from climbing that ladder by holding their first step in contempt. These are baby steps; they should be permitted to take them. It is much better for them, in the end, to relate to love and intimacy through Rumi rather than through objectification and pornography.This brings us to something else that is concerning. The dichotomy between earthly love and divine love is also an attempt by orthodox forces to control and distort the experience of sexual intimacy by presenting intimacy as ‘filthy’ or ‘impure’ as opposed to love of a nonsexual nature, which is touted as ‘pure’.However, when one delves deep into what the Sufis have taught, into the verses of Rabia and Rumi, one understands that there is no dichotomy between sexual and spiritual love, provided that the sexual intimacy is based on deep, true, faithful connection – for that is how one learns also to be deep, true and faithful in other forms of ibaadat. Divine sexuality is accompanied by intense connection – as opposed to superficial attraction focused only on the body – and enables both partners to experience not just devastating desire but a manifestation of shoonyata – nothingness – through which the lover and beloved are annihilated and dissolved in each other. A state wherein they offer themselves in both reverence and passion, where they learn to hold the body’s desires and the soul’s desires in the same receptacle, drink both sorts of mey (wine) from a single jaam (chalice).Seyyed Hossein Nasr, in The Garden of Truth, highlights how the very first relationship that was created by the divine essence was not that of parent and child, but that of romantic love between two partners. The very first lesson learnt by the very first humans was to love each other deeply. Near Mecca, in the plain of Arafat, there is a place called Jabal al Rahmat, Mount of Mercy, high upon a hilltop. To reach it, pilgrims must climb hundreds of steps. Islamic lore says that Adam and Eve, when they were banished from Eden and sent down to earth, were sent to separate continents. They were miserable in their separation from each other and repented and searched for each other, until they finally met at the Jabal al Rahmat, where they were pardoned and reunited. Romantic love, then, is neither impure nor a distraction but is indeed one of the most primeval, most primordial manifestations of faith. Mujhe sab qubool hai falak magar Gham e dost mujhse talab na kar Isey kaise dil se judaa karun Meri umr bhar ki talaash hai Fate! Though I accept all your decreesI shall not be parted from my beloved’s griefOh, how could I ever rip it out of meFor it is the culmination of my entire life’s journeyOnce again, this stanza underlines the precious agony and ecstasy of love, even in grief – erasing the dichotomy between the earthly beloved and the divine beloved. They are interwoven and intertwined, one being inextricable from the other. To come back to the beginning, then, the qawwali blurs boundaries and breaks divisions, challenging the trappings of shallow, narrow religious interpretations and demarcations. Tu haram mein jisko hai dhundta mujhe butkade mein woh mil gayaTujhe kya malal hai zahida ye nazar nazar ki talash hai The one that you look for in the Kaaba revealed itself to me in the TempleWhy are you jealous, oh priest, the vision resides in the eye that seeks! The eye that seeks, the heart that longs, the aatma that desires oneness with the parmaatma: those are the subjects that the mystics dwelt on – both the Sufi and the Bhakti mystics. Earthly love, then, is always a channel towards transcendental love, not divorced from it. The path of god is the path of truth – and unless one has learnt to be true and honest, especially in love, one has not really learnt the path of truth. Zehra Naqvi is an independent journalist and author of The Reluctant Mother: A Story No One Wants to Tell.