There is a well-known saying attributed to Jesus Christ: “Love your enemy.” (Matthew) This saying holds highest importance for fostering love. Love includes compassion, as both love and compassion are synonymous with each other. ‘Love your enemy’ means love everyone including your enemy.

The love culture is common to all religions. Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh wrote a book in 1917 with the title, Religion of Love. In this book, he rightly argues that love is the essential spirit of all religions. It can be said that religion is love and love is religion.

The same is true for the religion of Islam. Here, I would like to refer to a verse from the Quran.  “Good and evil deeds are not equal. Repel evil with what is better; then you will see that one who was once your enemy has become your dearest friend.” (41:34)

Maulana Wahiduddin Khan

In this verse, the Quran refers to a law of nature. Everyone is born with the spirit of love and compassion. No one is devoid of this spirit. When everyone is born with love, it means that love is the rule and enmity is an exception. If you experience enmity from a person, you should not take it seriously. Rather, take it as a temporary deviation from his nature, and it would be quite possible to make him return to his original nature based on love.

If you avoid the culture of reaction, you will acquire a new strength ― that of making a friend out of an enemy. According to nature, human society is a society of love. In other words, every enemy is your potential friend.

You have to turn this potential into actual. What is required on our part is simply adherence to one principle: Don’t react, but rather try to live with good behaviour even among those who resort to misbehaviour. If you adopt this attitude, a miracle will occur: your enemy will become your dearest friend.

Love and compassion are not just mere words of the dictionary. Almost every home has a living manifestation of these qualities, that is, persons with whom you have blood relationship. What is a family? Family is a small unit of society.

In society, relationships are established on the basis of neighbourhood. In family, relationships are established on the basis of blood relationship. Blood relation is a very strong factor for love. This is the reason why we see the love culture in every family. A family is a mini society, which gives us a lesson on how to live in the greater society with love.

If in society, people live with others just as they live with blood relatives in their family, then certainly a society will emerge in which values of love and compassion will prevail. Take your family as a teacher and you will certainly be able to become a good member of your society. Love is not a unilateral culture, rather it is a bilateral culture.

When you love others, you create an atmosphere in which the other person will also respond to you with love. Consumer items can be acquired from shopping centres, but there is only one way to get good members for society, and that is, to live by the ethics based on love and compassion.

It is this culture that is called Sufi culture. One Persian Sufi saint has given this definition for Sufi culture: “Ma qissa-e-sikandar wa dara na khanda aim. As ma bajuz hiqayat-e-mehr wa wafa mapurs.”(We don’t know the story of kings and emperors. We know only the story of love and compassion.)

Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, 95, is an Islamic spiritual scholar who has adopted peace as the mission of his life. Author of more than 200 books, he is known for his Gandhian views, and considers non-violence as the only method to achieve success.

(Excerpted from the book, How to Create Miracles in Our Daily Life, edited by Oswald Pereira and published by Vitasta Publishing Private Limited.)