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Discipline and Attraction: The Two Poles of Love
What actually carries someone forward on this path — discipline, or attraction? At this year’s gathering, Amany Shalaby and Nura Laird are preparing a session built around a simple answer: both, always both, and never really opposites at all.
Two poles, not opposites
Amany reminds us that discipline taken to an extreme becomes a rigidity that is harmful. Attraction taken to an extreme becomes chaos — a false freedom that is also harmful. Neither pole works alone. As Nura put it, they’re not opposites so much as two ends of a single polarity, swinging back and forth, the way Jamal and Jalal alternate — first drawn in by attraction, then needing discipline to keep the love moving and growing, then finding attraction renewed on the other side of that work.
Think of the early stage of any real relationship: attraction brings you together, but discipline — showing up, doing the work — is what lets the relationship mature, and leads to a renewed attraction.
A remedy tailored to you
Discipline doesn’t look the same for everyone, and that’s by design. Amany offered a simple image: two people, one with high blood pressure and one with low blood pressure, need completely different remedies — and each has to stay consistent with their own. The same is true walking this path. Your discipline might not look like your neighbor’s discipline, and that’s not disagreement. That’s just two different remedies for two different people, both walking toward the same Unity.
Loving someone while walking differently
Nura shared something personal: a close friend in her local community with whom she disagrees completely on a difficult political question. They’ve had hard conversations about it. They still don’t see it the same way. And they’ve made an explicit agreement, spoken out loud: love each other anyway, no matter what.
That’s the real test of this teaching — not loving people we already agree with, but staying in real friendship with someone whose views differ sharply from our own, without either pretending the difference away or letting it become the whole relationship.
Choosing love over the nafs
Discipline, at its heart, is choosing love over the pull of the nafs — not once, but again and again, in small unglamorous moments. Nura offered parenting as an example. In those difficult moments when you take a deep breath and you don’t put the kid in the dumpster… that’s not love as attraction. That’s discipline, choosing love in a moment when love doesn’t feel like the easy choice at all.
What to expect in the session with Nura and Amany
Rather than simply a lecture, this session is being built around real-life scenarios and small-group discussions — and a chance to locate where discipline and attraction show up in your own life, not just hear about them in the abstract. Expect questions like:
- Where in your life are you being called to the discipline of love?
- What kind of discipline actually brings you toward greater freedom, rather than away from it?
- What kind of attraction is genuinely leading you toward Allah — versus attraction that only feels like freedom, but is really the ego in disguise?
As Amany put it, the hope is that people leave with something concrete to carry: a discipline they’re ready to take on, because it points toward real freedom — and a clearer eye for the difference between attraction that’s himma, and attraction that’s just the nafs wearing freedom’s clothes.
Come, let’s take a drink of the Deep Love — and let’s find out together where our own walking calls for discipline, and where it calls for trust.
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