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Growing in the Love of Allah: What Draws the Heart Near, and What It Yields
Loving Allah is not a feeling you either have or don't — it is grown by specific acts and known by specific fruit. Six things that build it, and three things it produces in the heart that has it.
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- The Quran Gallery team
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- 7 min read
Every act that pleases Allah is, in some measure, a means of growing closer to Him — but the Qur’an and the Sunnah name specific ones the scholars of the heart returned to again and again. What follows is drawn from those sources rather than assumed: the acts that build this love, and what a heart begins to taste once it has grown.
Reading the Qur’an quickly is not the same act as reading it slowly enough to be addressed by it. Allah describes His own purpose in sending it down this way:
كِتَـٰبٌ أَنزَلْنَـٰهُ إِلَيْكَ مُبَـٰرَكٌ لِّيَدَّبَّرُوٓا۟ ءَايَـٰتِهِۦ وَلِيَتَذَكَّرَ أُو۟لُوا۟ ٱلْأَلْبَـٰبِ
”[This is] a blessed Book which We have sent down to you, so that they may reflect on its verses, and so that people of understanding may take heed.”
Tadabbur — turning a verse over until it opens up — is named here as the very reason the Qur’an was revealed. A heart that spends time in it regularly is spending time, daily, in direct address from the One it is trying to love. Few other acts put a servant that close, that often.
Obligatory worship is the floor, not the ceiling. What lifts a servant beyond it is what the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) described Allah Himself as saying, in one of the most consequential hadiths on this subject:
“Allah has said: Whoever shows enmity to a friend of Mine, I have declared war against him. My servant draws near to Me with nothing more beloved to Me than what I have made obligatory upon him, and My servant continues drawing near to Me with voluntary acts until I love him.”
This is recorded on printed page 5/2384 of , under a chapter on humility. The obligatory acts are what admit a servant to Allah’s love in the first place; the voluntary ones — extra prayer, extra fasting, extra charity, done for no other reason than that they are loved by Him — are what carry that love further than the minimum ever could. Nafl, in this hadith, is not a bonus. It is the mechanism.
Dhikr is not a separate category of worship set apart from the rest — it is meant to run underneath everything else, in the tongue, in the heart, and in what the limbs choose to do. Allah frames it as a reciprocal exchange, not a one-sided act:
فَٱذْكُرُونِىٓ أَذْكُرْكُمْ وَٱشْكُرُوا۟ لِى وَلَا تَكْفُرُونِ
“So remember Me; I will remember you. And be grateful to Me, and do not deny Me.”
How much a servant remembers Allah in the course of an ordinary day is a fair measure of how much that servant loves Him — nobody keeps someone they love out of mind for long stretches without noticing the gap.
Reflecting on Allah’s names and attributes is one route to loving Him more; reflecting on what He has actually given is another, and it is the one within reach of anyone at any moment, regardless of how much theology they have studied.
وَإِن تَعُدُّوا۟ نِعْمَةَ ٱللَّهِ لَا تُحْصُوهَآ ۗ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ لَغَفُورٌ رَّحِيمٌ
“If you tried to count Allah’s favours, you could never number them. Indeed, Allah is Ever-Forgiving, Most Merciful.”
The heart that actually sits with that — that every breath, every meal, every faculty still working is a favour it did nothing to earn and cannot finish counting — has a harder time staying cold toward the One who gave all of it.
Love grows or starves depending on what it is fed, and company is one of the strongest feeds there is. Muʿādh b. Jabal (may Allah be pleased with him) once told a man in the mosque of Damascus what he had heard the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) say Allah declares:
“My love is guaranteed for those who love one another for My sake, who sit together for My sake, who visit one another for My sake, and who give to one another for My sake.”
This is recorded on printed page 2/953 of . Muʿādh had just told a stranger, unprompted, “I love you for Allah’s sake” — and it was that plain statement, not a shared project or a shared background, that the hadith he then quoted turns out to reward. Sitting regularly with people whose company reminds you of Allah, rather than pulling you away from Him, is itself named as a means of earning His love — and staying away from company that does the opposite is named just as plainly.
Solitude with Allah has a particular hour attached to it. Describing believers whose devotion Allah is praising, the Qur’an says:
كَانُوا۟ قَلِيلًا مِّنَ ٱلَّيْلِ مَا يَهْجَعُونَ
وَبِٱلْأَسْحَارِ هُمْ يَسْتَغْفِرُونَ
“They used to sleep but little of the night, and in the hours before dawn they would seek forgiveness.”
There is no crowd at that hour, no performance to keep up, nothing left to perform for. What is said there is said to Allah alone, which is precisely why it is named among the surest ways to grow close to Him — it is worship stripped of every audience but the One it is for.
Love of Allah is not only measured in what a servant does for Him — it changes what that servant feels while doing it. The Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) described the change directly:
“Three things — whoever has them has tasted the sweetness of faith: that Allah and His Messenger are more beloved to him than anything else; that he loves a person for no reason but Allah; and that he hates to return to disbelief as he would hate to be thrown into the Fire.”
This is recorded on printed page 1/14 of , in the Book of Faith. Worship that once felt like an obligation to get through starts to feel, instead, like the thing the heart was actually looking forward to. That shift — from compliance to appetite — is one of the clearest signs that love has taken root, because appetite is not something a person can talk themselves into.
The same hadith on nafl quoted above does not stop at describing how a servant draws near — it goes on to describe what happens once Allah loves that servant back:
“When I love him, I become the hearing with which he hears, the sight with which he sees, the hand with which he strikes, and the foot with which he walks. If he asks Me, I will surely give him; and if he seeks refuge in Me, I will surely protect him.”
This continues on the same printed page, 5/2384 of . A servant loved by Allah in this way finds every faculty guided toward what pleases Him rather than pulled toward what does not — hearing, sight, hand and foot all working in the same direction the heart already wants to go. The hadith closes on a servant Allah loves so much that even the ordinary human fear of death is met with something gentler than indifference: reluctance on Allah’s part to cause him any pain at all. A heart that has come this far no longer needs convincing that nearness to Allah is worth wanting. It already longs for more of it — in this life, and in the meeting that follows it.
None of this is a program to complete once and set aside; it is maintained the way anything living is maintained; fed daily or left to go quiet. The Adhkar collection on Quran Gallery carries the authenticated remembrances for exactly this — dhikr for the morning, the evening, and every ordinary hour between the acts named above, kept in words that are known to be sound.
We ask Allah for what His Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) is reported to have asked for, on the authority of Abū al-Dardāʾ, from the supplication of Dāwūd (peace be upon him):
“O Allah, I ask You for Your love, and the love of those who love You, and for the deeds that will carry me to Your love. O Allah, make Your love dearer to me than myself, my family, and cold water.”
Recorded on printed page 5/472 of , graded ḥasan gharīb by al-Tirmidhī himself. Āmīn.