October 01, 2026

Follow The Religion Of Love

My heart has become capable of every form: it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks, and a temple for idols and the pilgrim's Kaaba and the tables of the Torah and the book of the Quran. I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love's camel takes, that is my religion and my faith.

Ibn Arabi wrote these lines after a pilgrimage to Mecca around 1201, where he met a wise and beautiful woman named Nizam whose presence stirred him to compose a cycle of love poems. Critics later accused him of writing profane verse, so he wrote a commentary insisting the poems described the soul's love for the Divine, present in every form of worship. Living in a world of Muslims, Christians, and Jews across Andalusia and North Africa, he had watched people fight over whose religion held the truth. This verse still speaks to compassion because it refuses to rank one people's faith or love above another's.