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HILM

LOVE 


In the Islamic tradition, love is nothing if it does not have within it a strong dose of forbearance or, in Arabic, hilm (الحلم). It is easy to love someone perfect; it is divine to love someone humanly flawed. We show hilm whenever we cease to give everyone their ‘due’ and give them what they actually need instead. Crucially, Islamic scholars stress that the fastest way to generate hilm is by making an effort to view our wrongdoers as children. We forgive children so readily because we know – and can see – that their ‘badness’ and difficulty are invariably the result of some form of pain, discomfort, hurt or wound. The child is never evil, they become challenging in response to injury, fear or sorrow.  Though the idea sounds provocative, the reason why little children and big people do wrong is – despite the differences in age and size – exactly the same. One category may be no bigger than a chair, the other can be gigantic and able to carry guns, post lengthy screeds online or start and bankrupt companies, but in the end, the psychology of blunder, meanness and anger is always the same: evil is a consequence of injury. The big person did not start off evil, their difficult sides were not hard wired from the start, they grew towards malice on account of some form of wound waiting to be discovered. It is work of extraordinary patience and humanity – it is the work of hilm – to go in search of what these wounds might be. To search is morally frightening because we too easily imagine that it might require us to wind up thinking well of behaviour we know is abhorrent: it doesn’t at all, we can remain appalled while simultaneously tracing a path back to the true catalytic factors at play. We are all, as it were, young offenders, however old we might actually be; in other words, we all need our crimes to be treated with a degree of sympathy and empathetic investigation. It is no particular achievement to be furious with problematic people, it is an exquisite feat of divine hilm to be able to imagine them as always still, at some level, ar-rud' fi al-mahad (الرُضّع في المهد" ): infants in the cradle.


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