Love as ethical value in Christianity and İslam

Aşağıdakı yazını ingiliscə yazmışam və yazı İslamda və Məsihilikdə sevgi ideyasını ümumi şəkildə müqayisə edir. İngliscə bilməyənlər bağışlasın, tərcüməsini sonra yerləşdirərəm.

Love as Ethical Value in Christianity and in Islam

One of the interesting and enduring religious mysteries is the idea of love that based on nearly universal human feeling expressed and understood differently in different cultures of the world. Sometimes, when these different ways of understanding the same phenomena encounter each other they give birth to great insights that not only enlighten us about love, but also bring awareness of love’s elusiveness. What insights and awareness can a juxtaposition of Islamic understanding of love bring? In order to answer the question, I’ll compare the idea of love as an ethical value in Islam and in Christianity.

However, before comparing these ideas, love and ethical value need to be defined. Love can loosely be defined as human feeling, relationship, and the desire to do good, and feeling pleasure or self-giving to another mostly out of benevolent motifs. The ethical value of love is understood as importance, recognition, and potential of love to generate behaviors among believers toward each other and toward God, and to function as a principle of solving issues in relationships.
Love is important in both Islam and Christianity. There are lots of verses in the Bible and quite a few verses in the Qur’an that speak about love and its role in deeds. The Qur’anic verse 2.177 contrasts outward deed as ritual and a deed with the motive of love as righteousness. It says: “It is not righteousness that ye turn your faces towards East or West; but it is righteousness- to believe in Allah and the Last Day, and the Angels, and the Book, and the Messengers; to spend of your substance, out of love for Him, for your kin, for orphans, for the needy, for the wayfarer, for those who ask, and for the ransom of slaves; to be steadfast in prayer, and practice regular charity; to fulfill the contracts which ye have made; and to be firm and patient, in pain (or suffering) and adversity, and throughout all periods of panic. Such are the people of truth, the Allah-fearing.” In this verse love is seen as the motive for deeds of mercy and the defining principle of Islamic righteousness, which essentially means a pious life due to fear of God.
The Bible recognizes the importance of love as a motive for deeds and is a principle in the Old and New Testaments. Love as the greatest commandment and God as Love, according to the Apostle John’s teaching, can be good examples. Therefore, we can conclude that at least in the written scriptures, both of these religions recognize love as an important value of believers’ ethics.
Another similarity in both of these religions is that love is understood as some kind of sacrifice or it necessarily includes the element of sacrificing. In verse 3:16 of the Gospel according to John it says: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” The Qur’an in verse 3:92 says directly that unless you give or spend that which you love by no means you can attain righteousness. Thus in both of these religions love has a component of sacrificing, giving away, spending, or compromising.
The third similarity, which I think follows from these verses and conclusions, is that love is recognized in both of these religions as an important element of human relationships toward God and toward each other. We need to love God and to love each other because this is what God wants us to do.
But why does God want us to love God-self and each other? Answering this question we enter into differences of love as mystery and ethical value in these religions. In Christianity, love is essential to God and it has metaphysic and ontological reasons. We need to love God, because God first loved us, because God gave his Son for us, and because God is love. However, in Islam we need to love simply because God wants us to love. God did not give anything precious to Him for the sake of human beings and Islam strongly discourages any statements on the essence of God such as whether God is love or not. In addition, the Bible clearly recognizes the centrality of love to the message of the faith and Christ through Ten Commandments and Jesus’ emphasis on love, while for the Qur’an it is monotheism and submission to God that is central. Therefore, love is central to Christianity while it is peripheral to Islam.
This central vs. peripheral focus also brings into light the second difference. Because in the Qur’an love is not central and it is not defined directly as central, it is difficult to make this mystery into a hermeneutical and overarching principle in Islam. Love loses priority to monotheism, submission and fear of God. However, in Christianity love is defined as being at the top of the value hierarchy, which allows Christians to set it as an overarching principle of interpretation and everyday life, sometimes against harsh passages of the Bible. Thus, in the Bible love has more potential to function as a generative principle of ethics than in the Qur’an.
Yet in its intensity, the Qur’anic-Islamic enigma of love overshadows the biblical-Christian mystery of love, which is the third difference of these similar yet different ways of understanding the same phenomena. The Qur’anic concept of love, later developed into passionate and somewhat erotic love toward God, is called ashk – madness-bordering, painful, emotional, longing love. Sufi poetry abounds with passionate longing for God which sometimes borders with madness. However, a Christian understanding of agape is in some ways different – it has more platonic element in it. It is more accepting, more quiet and sacrificial, than passionate and emotional outbursts of Sufi love expressions.
Gathering together all reflections, I can conclude that both the Qur’an and the Bible understand love as an important ethical value. In both of them love is a principle of human – God – human relationships. Yet they also have differences. In the Bible, love is central but in the Qur’an it is peripheral. In Christianity, love has more potential to function as an overarching principle of behavior and interpretation than in Islam. In Islam love is more passionate and emotional than in Christianity.