4 Islamic articles on: Islam and Breakups

Table of contents for the topic Islam and Breakups
  1. Dealing with heartbreak
  2. Dealing with missing someone after a breakup
  3. “He made me fall in love with his words, I crossed my line for him…”
  4. The Islamic way to getting over a breakup

IslamQA: Dealing with heartbreak

Assalamu alaykum. I am dealing with significant heartbreak. I had been dating a Muslim Lebanese American woman for two years. I am Anglo American and converted to Islam. We had discussed spending our lives together and getting married, but her family disapproved as I am not Lebanese. Her mother made her decide between continuing with me and losing her family, or breaking it off with me. She chose to leave me and I am devastated. Any advice to ease the pain or dua’s to heal? Thanks,

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,

I’m so sorry about your loss. May Allah make things easier for you. Heartbreak is similar to losing any other loved one. It takes our minds a great deal of time to get used to going on with our lives without them. There is unfortunately no way to avoid the suffering, this is just the stuff life is made of. I recommend reading the Quran daily for an hour or so, I find it to be the greatest consolation. You do not need any special duas, just speak earnestly with God in any words you wish, or even without words.

The best way to get over a breakup is to find someone new, although I know it can be very hard to make the decision to move on, since it feels like sacrilege toward our former love. If possible, I recommend spending more time around your family. Just their presence in the same room with you can be very comforting.

Best wishes inshaAllah.

IslamQA: Dealing with missing someone after a breakup

Assalamualaikum,what do we do when we miss someone so dearly,It just literally kills us on the inside,I wanted him to make me halal but he rejected me in a kind way

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,

Tragic life events such as breaking up with someone we love will invariably cause us to suffer. There is no way to avoid this suffering. It is a fact of human life that what brings us joy can also bring us great suffering. As believers, when faced with any hardship in life, we seek cures through spiritual or through material means. The best way is to try to combine both. Spiritually, by staying close to God and putting your focus on Him, the concerns of the worldly life will start to feel less important. I recommend dedicating an extra hour every day to worship to those who wish to always stay close to God. Closeness to God is something that requires daily work. Every day the life of this world takes us away from God and every day we must work to go back to Him through our worship. See my essay Mysticism without Sufism on the type of extra worship I recommend.

As for the material side, the best way to get over a breakup (assuming reconciliation is not possible) is to be in a new relationship. Of course this can be very difficult to consider when you are still in love with that person. All of us have an empty place in our hearts that is filled with the person we love, and when that person is taken away from us, we will continue to suffer feelings of loss until that empty place is filled again with something or someone else. A small number of people are able to use their loss to elevate them spiritually so that God starts to fill that place for them. But the majority of people are not able to achieve that and require the love of a new person to fill that place for them.

For that reason, difficult as it may be to consider, I recommend that you seriously consider a new relationship. Humans are designed to fall in love with any reasonably kind and attractive person of the opposite sex that they happen to interact with a lot, so if there are any decent men interested in marrying you then you should consider them. If you are both spiritual and kind to each other then it will be extremely difficult not to fall in love with each other sooner or later. This is what I have seen everywhere in the Middle East. Couples of the older generation often had their marriages arranged for them, yet the spiritual among them are almost all deeply in love with their spouses. And I don’t see how it can be otherwise. Men and women who have open hearts find it very easy to fall in love since their hearts are not blocked by hatred, selfishness or egotism. The purity of their souls makes them assume the best about their spouses and makes them love them for who they are rather than loving them only for how they make them feel, and in this way the constantly fall in love with each over and over again.

To summarize, the spiritual solution is get closer to God, and the material solution is to find someone new to love. If you remain single then it will be very difficult to get over that person. It will not be impossible, but it will require that you exert immense efforts at filling up that empty place with love for God and with focus on other things (such as your family). But a new relationship can make things very easy for you provided that you and the new person are both spiritual and do not set overly high expectations of each other.

Best wishes inshaAllah.

IslamQA: “He made me fall in love with his words, I crossed my line for him…”

He made me fall in love with his words, I crossed my line for him. I was a good girl, i prayed 5 times a day and i sinned. When I couldn't do more he left. I feel so heavy, my heart aches so much and i see no forgiveness for me. I left my Lord for someone i loved and now i feel nothing but grief.

Your sin is not greater than God, and the greatest sin of all would be to lose hope in His mercy and forgiveness and to delay repentance thinking that He is incapable of forgiving you. Go back to God, knowing that there is no safety except by His side, and even if you sin a thousand times, know that He is always ready to forgive, if you sincerely seek His forgiveness and work to improve yourself.

IslamQA: The Islamic way to getting over a breakup

I have issues regarding relationship. Well I broke up with my boyfriend few months ago. Usually when this happened lovers will not contact each other. Unfortunately, we have the same group of friends. I am trying so hard not to feel mad or sad every time I see him yet I still cant control my expressions. Do you have any advice on this?. I still want to keep our relationship as good friends. What should I do?

The Islamic solution to that (and to many other relationship-related problems) is to revive your spiritual life so that it feels as important as your material life.

If through worship, supplication, Quran reading and reading of beneficial books we increase our level of spirituality, so that we feel close to God, and so that the afterlife feels as important as the present life to us, then the troubles of this life start to appear small and insignificant, and they lose their power over us.

Most of us have experienced such a state a few times in our lives. Perhaps it was during one Ramadan where we start reading a lot of Quran, attending prayers at the mosque, listening to beneficial lectures and watching beneficial programs on TV, so that we started to feel God’s presence in our lives, and so that we eagerly thought of meeting Him in the afterlife and experiencing the real life that awaits us there. Usually this state passes quickly, because we stop doing the work necessary to maintain such a state.

If you can recreate such a state in yourself, then your past relationship will stop feeling very important to you. Through the work of worship and devotion, your brain will start to realize new priorities in life; ensuring a life that pleases God, and ensuring a good afterlife. When the afterlife feels important to you, when you worry about your record of deeds, wanting to add good deeds to it and erase sins, when you feel as if your real life has not started yet, that your true home is in Paradise, then the troubles of this life will start to appear insignificant.

Maintaining such a state requires continuous daily work. You may be able to achieve it in a few days, so that you start to feel that you are over your broken relationship and so that you feel carefree and unburdened again, but if you stop doing the work necessary to maintain this state, your spiritual feeling will depart, and the importance of the broken relationship and the hurt associated with it will come back.

It is the normal state of humans to be hurt by this world and to suffer. Living in a state of high spirituality is against human nature, which always wants to be attached to the material world. Daily work is needed to escape the human state of suffering so that we achieve peace by being close to God and the afterlife.

Whenever something in this world hurts you greatly, just ask yourself, “How important does the afterlife feel to me?”, if it doesn’t feel very important, if it feels like a faraway concern, then you know what to blame for your suffering. You need to do sufficient work daily to bring the afterlife into your present life, and in this way this world loses the power to hurt you.

Another way to get over a relationship is to be in an equally good or better relationship. But there is no guarantee that one can achieve this, while achieving closeness to God is guaranteed if you put in daily effort. If wonder how much effort exactly, then I mean sufficient effort for the afterlife to feel as important as the present life. You do need to be a saint who dedicates every moment to worship, once you make it a habit to do sufficient work for the afterlife to feel as important as the present life, then you will still have many hours every day to do anything you enjoy doing.

Due to the importance of love relationships in our minds, even though a heightened spirituality will be of great help, it may not be sufficient to help us avoid all the pain associated with the situation. There may be no complete solution except entering a new phase in life, such as a new relationship, a new job or living in a different area.

If you achieve and maintain closeness to God, then pray that He heals you and gives you something better than what you have lost, then He will answer you.

Whosoever fears God, He will create for him a way out. (The Quran, verse 65:2)