via http://jalaledin.blogspot.com
Beloveds:
I often wondered, sometimes with anguish, where the place of Love was in Islam. Not finding many references to the word in the Qur’an, it was illuminating to discover the implicit meaning of Love found in al-Fatiha. Here is an excerpt from the literature review in my doctoral dissertation:
“The fifth and final monograph is a mainstream Shia exegesis which includes a tawil approach by Reza Shah-Kazemi, a contemporary scholar at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, England. He devotes considerable attention to al-Fatiha in Spiritual Quest – Reflections on Qur’anic Prayer according to the Teachings of Imam ‘Ali. He describes a number of epithets used for al-Fatiha which “express its crucial status as embodying the quintessence of the Qur’anic Revelation” (2011, p. 15). These epithets include “the Mother of the Book,” “the Healing,” “the Foundation,” “the Prayer,” “the Sufficient,” “the Treasure,” and “the Light.”
By Dr. Jalaledin Ebrahim, more at Al-Fatiha – The Opening to an Integral Psychology of Islam: Finding the Love in Islam.
Related: 3 Questions with Ismailimail
Angst about Aging
Feminine Light in Islam
A psychological Interpretation of Al-Fatiha
Ismailimail 