Why My Love for the Prophet ﷺ Has Not Been the Same in the Past 20 Years

It was the summer of 2006 when I became Muslim. I had been reading the Qur'an, but when I finally said my shahada (profession of faith), in all honesty, I didn't love the Prophet ﷺ.

In fact, I didn't feel much of anything toward him.

I knew and believed that he was the Messenger of Allah, as outlined in the shahada. But I could not relate to people who would go on to say they loved him so deeply for many, many years to come.

I simply didn't understand it. And sometimes, depending on how passionately someone spoke about the Prophet ﷺ, it would remind me of the passionate Christians I had encountered before becoming Muslim when they would praise and speak highly of Jesus.

And at 17, I had no idea that this was about to become a twenty-year journey of discovering what it actually means to love the Prophet ﷺ.

But knowing these things intellectually and feeling a bond with someone are two very different experiences.

To me, he was practically a stranger.

I had not grown up hearing stories about him. I had encountered him as a historical and religious figure, but not as someone my heart knew.

So when I heard Muslims speak about their love for the Prophet ﷺ, there was a part of me that quietly wondered:

Will this ever change? Will I ever feel love for him?

I didn't realize then that Allah would spend the next twenty years answering these questions, just like He has always answered my questions even if it has taken years, the answers always come at the right time.

Love grows through experience

We cannot always command ourselves to love someone or something, no matter how much goodness they possess. We can only love to the extent that we have cleared our hearts to appreciate what is Divine and good.

Qur'an 2:216

كُتِبَ عَلَيْكُمُ ٱلْقِتَالُ وَهُوَ كُرْهٌۭ لَّكُمْ ۖ وَعَسَىٰٓ أَن تَكْرَهُوا۟ شَيْـًۭٔا وَهُوَ خَيْرٌۭ لَّكُمْ ۖ وَعَسَىٰٓ أَن تُحِبُّوا۟ شَيْـًۭٔا وَهُوَ شَرٌّۭ لَّكُمْ ۗ وَٱللَّهُ يَعْلَمُ وَأَنتُمْ لَا تَعْلَمُونَ ٢١٦

Fighting has been made obligatory upon you believers, though you dislike it. Perhaps you dislike something which is good for you and like something which is bad for you. Allah knows and you do not know.

There are things we can understand intellectually long before we understand them with our hearts.

At 17, I could read about patience.

Years later, after experiencing situations that demanded patience from me, the word began to feel different.

I could read about grief.

Later, when grief became something I knew personally, stories of the Prophet's ﷺ own grief began to land somewhere deeper.

I could read about mercy...

But it took experiencing my own wounds, limitations and imperfections to begin understanding how extraordinary it is to meet another human being with mercy rather than judgment.

There are teachings we understand with the mind.

And then there are teachings that life slowly translates for us.

Looking back over these 20 years, I sometimes wonder whether some of the most painful chapters of my life also changed my capacity to recognize qualities in the Prophet ﷺ that I could not have recognized before.

Not because suffering is automatically spiritually beneficial, or because Allah necessarily gives us pain simply so that we can learn a particular lesson, but because life has a way of opening room inside us that did not exist before.

And as my own heart became more acquainted with these things, I found myself encountering the Prophet ﷺ differently.

It was as though some of the words I had read years earlier had been waiting for me to become the person who could finally understand them.

A door to love

I like to believe that we all have a door to love.

Love is so vast that it has multiple points of entry. For some, I am sure their love for the Prophet ﷺ may have begun in childhood. For others, perhaps it began on a trip to Medina. For others still, it may have grown through reading and learning about his Seerah (life story).

For me, it was another door. The door of grief.

I did try my best according to my ability to learn about him. I attended multiple Seerah courses. I read so many books about him and his family. I'd listen to so many lectures, I'd recite salawaat (sending peace and blessings upon him) very often, I would read poetry and Hadith. But nothing was making me feel something for him.

I wasn't obsessing about it, I was simply trying to learn more about my new religion and alhamdulillah, I had a very strong thirst for knowledge. But at times, when I would hear someone mention the love for the Prophet ﷺ , I'd felt very, very bad about it for my inability to feel this bond people would describe.

I felt guilty, and I kept wondering whether loving the Prophet ﷺ was actually necessary to be Muslim.

I eventually put this question aside. I remember leaving it with Allah and asking Him to place love for the Prophet ﷺ in my heart if it was necessary, and to place in my heart a love for those whom He loves.

I cannot tell you the particular moment when I realized, I love the Prophet ﷺ now.

However, I first noticed that something inside me had changed when intense tears began to flow, accompanied by a sudden, profound sense of empathy and love. This happened whenever I encountered Quranic verses where Allah comforts the Prophet ﷺ with phrases like, 'Do not grieve,' or 'Do not let their words grieve you,' consoling him against the rejection, mockery, and stubborn disbelief of his people.

These verses still do something to me every time I read them.

They touch something very deep in my soul that I cannot fully explain. I find myself feeling immense pain at the thought of what he endured.

Perhaps this was one of the first ways I recognized that my relationship with the Prophet ﷺ had changed.

I was no longer simply reading about what happened to him. I was feeling it.

Qur'an 16:127

وَٱصْبِرْ وَمَا صَبْرُكَ إِلَّا بِٱللَّهِ ۚ وَلَا تَحْزَنْ عَلَيْهِمْ وَلَا تَكُ فِى ضَيْقٍۢ مِّمَّا يَمْكُرُونَ ١٢٧

Be patient O Prophet, for your patience is only with Allah’s help. Do not grieve over those who disbelieve, nor be distressed by their schemes.

Qur'an 35:8

أَفَمَن زُيِّنَ لَهُۥ سُوٓءُ عَمَلِهِۦ فَرَءَاهُ حَسَنًۭا ۖ فَإِنَّ ٱللَّهَ يُضِلُّ مَن يَشَآءُ وَيَهْدِى مَن يَشَآءُ ۖ فَلَا تَذْهَبْ نَفْسُكَ عَلَيْهِمْ حَسَرَٰتٍ ۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ عَلِيمٌۢ بِمَا يَصْنَعُونَ ٨

Are those whose evil-doing is made so appealing to them that they deem it good like those who are rightly guided? It is certainly Allah Who leaves to stray whoever He wills, and guides whoever He wills. So do not grieve yourself to death over them O Prophet. Surely Allah is All-Knowing of what they do.

Qur'an 10:65

وَلَا يَحْزُنكَ قَوْلُهُمْ ۘ إِنَّ ٱلْعِزَّةَ لِلَّهِ جَمِيعًا ۚ هُوَ ٱلسَّمِيعُ ٱلْعَلِيمُ ٦٥

Do not let their words grieve you O Prophet. Surely all honour and power belongs to Allah. He is the All-Hearing, All-Knowing.

I think another reason I find myself grieving so deeply today is that I cannot separate my love for the Prophet ﷺ from what I see happening in the world and within our own communities.

I grieve deeply whenever I come across yet another story of a Muslim committing something horrific or outrageous, such as killing innocent people, their spouses, or their families.

Or I see so many people in our communities unable to find contentment within themselves or within their marriages, instead chasing illusions of what they believe will make them happy, rather than turning toward the incredible medicine Islam offers for healing the self.

Perhaps I am naturally more affected when I hear of such things being committed by Muslims because Islam and the Prophet ﷺ are so deeply meaningful to me. But it still hurts me when I see the same kind of violence committed by anyone else.

We have been given such extraordinary treasures: the Qur'an, the example of the Prophet ﷺ, and a path that calls us toward the freedom of the soul. And yet I sometimes find it heartbreaking to witness how easily these treasures can become overshadowed by the ego—by the pursuit of status, wealth, recognition, power, or simply the need to be right.

I look at our communities and sometimes wonder what the world would look like if those of us who claim to follow the Prophet ﷺ were truly committed to embodying the qualities he embodied.

But unfortunately, I have also come across members of our Ummah (community) who have visited the Prophet ﷺ in Medina and speak deeply about their love for him, yet are cheating on their spouses, deceiving others, or struggling to be honest with themselves and the people around them.

I don't say this to judge what is in anyone's heart. But I cannot deny that I find these contradictions and the lack of self accountability in our communities deeply painful. Not because I expect anyone who loves the Prophet ﷺ to be perfect, but because I believe that love should gradually begin to transform the way we treat the people around us.

Personally, I would feel afraid to make a loud claim that I love the Prophet ﷺ while knowing that my own behavior still needs much alignment with the truth he embodied.

And I wonder the same about humanity more broadly: what would happen if people of every faith sought to move beyond merely defending the correctness of their tradition and instead allowed its deepest truths to transform them?

Perhaps one of the greatest obstacles is that the ego does not like to question itself.

It wants to be right.
It wants certainty.

It wants to believe that because I am following the right religion, or the right interpretation, or the right teacher, I must therefore be right in the way I am living.

But genuine spiritual transformation requires enough humility to ask: What if there is still something in me that I cannot see? What if I am using my religion to protect my ego rather than to free my soul?

I think this is part of what has made my love for the Prophet ﷺ so painful as well as beautiful. The more I love him, the more difficult it becomes to separate love of him from the qualities he embodied. His life becomes a mirror—and mirrors do not always show us what we want to see.

This has been one of the deepest things I have discovered through my own spiritual journey.

Sometimes we think that if we simply learn enough, practice enough, read enough or force ourselves to feel enough, the heart will change.

But the heart has its own timing.

And sometimes what prevents us from experiencing love is not the absence of something. It is the presence of too much noise:

Fear.

Defensiveness.

Pride.

Unprocessed grief.

Resentment.

The need to protect ourselves.

The stories we have built around who we are and what the world is.

Over the years, my journey into Islam became increasingly inseparable from a journey inward. I began to understand why the Sufis speak so much about the purification of the self—the tazkiyah al-nafs.

And I think this changed my relationship with the Prophet ﷺ profoundly.

I began to wonder whether my inability to connect with him in the past was not necessarily a problem that needed to be solved right away.

I simply needed time.

Love is not performance

The older I get, the less interested I am in treating love as something we are supposed to perform.

Real love seems to have a way of changing us from the inside. When we love someone, their qualities begin to matter to us. Their way of seeing the world begins to affect our own. We begin to notice things we didn't notice before.

And perhaps this is part of what makes our relationship with the Prophet ﷺ so profound.

The question gradually becomes less about whether I can say that I love the Prophet ﷺ and more about what that love is doing inside me.

If this reflection resonated with you, I think you may find something meaningful in this podcast I put out yesterday, in case you haven't listened 👇

Thank you for reading. May Allah bless you.