A. Helwa > A.'s Quotes

“Love. It is the reason there is something instead of nothing. It is from the soil of love that all of existence blossoms into being.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“You are a palace of hidden gems and the greatest treasure you could ever find is already within you. Gold will melt, money will burn, but you carry the everlasting and mysterious breath of God inside of you and that can never be taken away.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“Awakening to faith is not a one-time event, but a continuously unfolding reality. The journey of faith is not a race, but a marathon of love that each person walks at a different pace.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“Even if our doubts span an entire ocean, the light of God’s wisdom can rise beyond the furthest horizons and illuminate our hearts with a deep sense of contentment.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“Allah is the forger of time, the molder of space, the weaver of souls, the turner of hearts, the One who creates everything in stages yet is beyond the limits of time. Life is created from His breath, the cosmos forms from the vibration of His speech, and love is birthed from the womb of His mercy. He is the One who said, “Be!” to the vast nothingness, and existence sprouted into being. His words inspire light to break the darkness of nothing into the dawn of life.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“When the world goes to sleep, God is the One who is awake with you. God sees the tears you hide with smiles and He embraces the pain you think no one would understand. “Not even an atom’s weight in the heavens or the earth remains hidden from Him” (34:3).”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“God’s mercy is greater than your sins or circumstances. His compassionate love embraces the cactus parts of you that you swear no one could hug. His grace celebrates the parts of you that nobody claps for. God loved you before you were even created, before you even knew of Him. As the Qur’an says, “It is He who sent down tranquility into the hearts of the believers, that they may add faith to their faith for to Allah belong the forces of the heavens and the Earth and Allah is full of Knowledge and Wisdom” (48:4).”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“The word “Allah” can be seen as the same singular God that is referred to in the Torah in Hebrew as Elohim, or spoken by Jesus in Aramaic as the strikingly similar Allaha. Allah is neither female nor male, for He is beyond anything in creation and transcends all the limits that the human mind can create. Since in Arabic there is not a gender-neutral pronoun such as “it,” Allah uses huwa or “He” in reference to Himself because in Arabic the male gender form is inclusive of the female, not exclusive.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“You do not need cell towers to reach God, you just need to plug into your heart because “He is with you wherever you are” (57:4), from the closest atom to the farthest star.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“We do not worship God because God needs it, we worship God because we need it. Prayer is not you reaching out for God, it is you responding to God, who first reached out to you.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“The hole we carry inside, that we so desperately long to fill, comes from the experience of once being unified with all of existence. After all, how can you long for oneness if you have only ever been a separate body? How can you long for perfection if you have never experienced it? How can you long for an all-encompassing love if you have never tasted it?”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“The Qur’an does not just lead us, it liberates us from the grips of the ego. It does not just guide us; it helps us grow past the shells of our limiting beliefs. It does not just confront us; it consoles us with God’s infinite mercy. It reminds us of our holy purpose, of how incredibly valuable we are in the eyes of God, and inspires us to live a life not simply based on our present limited capacity, but to trust that when we depend on God all things are possible by virtue of His infinite and all-encompassing power. The Qur’an is not meant to only be recited, it is meant to be taken in like the fragrance of a rose, deep within our essence, allowing it to permeate in the deepest recesses of our being. The Qur’an was sent as a pathway of return to God. As the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) said, “This Qur’an is the rope of Allah, and it is the clear light and healing. It is a protection for the one who clings to it and a rescue for the one who follows it. It is not crooked and so it puts things straight.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“As the ninth-century Persian mystic Imam Junaid said, “A Muslim is like the earth; even if impurities are thrown on it, it will blossom into a green pasture.” We are called to be like a date tree, so rooted in the love of God that when people throw stones at you, you reply with fruits that taste sweet. Do not live your life in reaction to what people have done to you, but live your life in gratitude for all that God has done for you.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“Your blessings, your trials and triumphs, your journey of falling and rising, your gifts and talents—they are all connected. Your true calling is held in the arms of your deepest wounds. God only breaks you to remake you, because breakdowns come before breakthroughs. Everything that God has written into your path was meant to prepare you for this exact moment. God wants you to come as you are, not as you think you should be.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“God does not love you just because of who you are; He loves you because love is who He is. So never stop praying. Even when the pain is too much to bear, even when you have broken a thousand promises, even if all that comes out is a silent whisper that only God can hear. No matter what storms you are facing, no matter how bad you mess up, no matter how painful life becomes, the door to prayer is always open for you. After all, as Imam Ali said, “When the world pushes you to your knees, you’re in the perfect position to pray.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“It suddenly became clear to me that the whole purpose of faith is not to be “good enough” before we begin on the path to God, but to come with all our deficiencies to God, knowing that only He can fill in our gaps through His mercy.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“You do not own yourself to dictate what price you are worthy of being sold. Stop pricing Allah’s merchandise.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“God gave every single one of us unique abilities and talents, and based on what He gave to us, He will evaluate us. God does not grade us on a curve, He compares us to ourselves. Our work on Earth is to receive and cultivate the gifts given to us by God for the benefit of the entire creation. As Pablo Picasso said, “The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“When Allah makes us aware of a sin we committed, He is not punishing us, but rather inviting us toward His presence. In this way, the moment we are drawn to sincere repentance, we are in effect unveiling the forgiveness that Allah has already written for us to experience. Someone asked the great eighth-century mystic Rabia Al-Adawiyya, “I have sinned much; if I repent, will Allah forgive me?” She profoundly replied, “It is the opposite; if Allah forgives you, you are capable of repentance.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“It is not our prayer and worship of God that makes God love us; rather, it’s God’s unconditional love for us that results in our worship. We do not pray for the love of God, but from the love of God. God’s power inspires and allows us to pray, and it’s that same divine power that we are calling to in prayer. As Rumi says, “I am a mountain. You call, I echo.”
― A. Helwa

“Just as it takes a baby nine months in the belly of its mother to develop, the moon many nights to become full, and a caterpillar weeks in a cocoon to become a butterfly, through entering the womb of Ramadan and fasting the entire month, our faith transforms.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“Words have power, which is why Imam Ali says, “Speak only when your words are more beautiful than the silence.” After all, everything in existence sprouted from the vibration of the divinely uttered word “Be! And it is” (36:82). So remember, your tongue is like a knife; it can either kill like the sword of a samurai or save like the scalpel of a surgeon.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“Just as a stone that is dropped anywhere in a lake creates ripples that reach across the entire body of water, when one of us is suffering, that pain ripples through all of existence. As Rumi said, “The differences are just illusion and vanity. Sunlight looks slightly different on this wall than it does on that wall and a lot different on this other one but it is still one light.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“In my early twenties, I was traveling through a small town in Turkey called Cappadocia, when the divine spark of faith reignited within me like lightning. All it took was my eyes to fall upon a woman who was drowned in her worship of God. I watched her pray in an old seventeenth-century animal barn, as if nothing in the world existed but her divine Lover. She did not robotically repeat words of prayer like a formula; rather, every word she uttered came with a silent “I love you, my beloved Lord.” Her words were like synchronized dancers swimming in unison in the ocean of love that poured out of her. She was the first person I had ever seen in my life that not only prayed but she herself became the prayer.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“The principles of Islam teach us to be messengers of peace—to be like water, gentle enough to wash away tears and strong enough to drown hatred. To be Muslim is to protect the weak, the orphan, the beggar, the disabled of all races and cultures. To be Muslim is not to be color-blind, but to see the differences between people and to celebrate that diversity as a product of the free will that God chose to give us. As the Qur’an says, “And of His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth and the diversity of your languages and your colors. Indeed, in that are signs for those of knowledge” (30:22)”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“The eternal destination of others has no effect on how Muslims are called to treat the creation of God. Our love, respect, and honor toward others should not be contingent on someone’s faith or belief system, but on our faith. Since we believe every single person was created by God and is continuously sustained by Him, the life of every human being is infinitely priceless, regardless of what they believe or seek in this life and the next.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“Allah's mercy accepts us as we are, but He loves us too much to let us stay the same.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“Although it is true that what we sow in this life we reap in the next, if we reduce the existence of the Afterlife to just punishment and reward, we will miss the soul of the message. Heaven and Hell are not only physical manifestations, they are also states of being that reflect what it feels like for the spirit to be close to or distant from the Divine. In essence, Heaven and Hell are like mirrors that reflect back to us our soul’s relationship with God.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“We are called not to just read the Qur’an—but to become a manifestation of its message. We are called to be a mercy to all the creations of God, by bringing light where there is darkness, feeding the hungry, forgiving those who wrong us, taking care of the orphans, being generous to the needy, being kind to our parents, and through sincere worship becoming a vessel of God’s unconditional love for the entire world.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“Death begs us to anchor our happiness not on what is fleeting, but rather on Allah, whose love is eternal and unchanging. Death reminds us that the only thing that is real and unchanging is God. Everything else in existence, whether it be good or bad, will eventually perish. As the great Tibetan master Jetsun Milarepa poetically said, “The sound of thunder, although deafening, is harmless; the rainbow, despite its brilliant colors does not last; this world, though it appears pleasant, is like a dream; the pleasures of the senses, though agreeable, ultimately lead to disillusionment.”
― A. Helwa