Henry Corbin says "of all the Masters of Sufism it is Ibn Arabi who carried furthest the analysis of the phenomena of love"

Arabi says "God can be known to us only in what we experience of Him, so that "We can typify Him and take him as an object of our contemplation, not only in our innermost hearts but also before our eyes and in our imagination, as though we saw Him, or better still, so that we really see Him...it is He who in every beloved being is manifested to the gaze of each lover...and none other than He is adored, for it is impossible to adore a being without conceiving the Godhead in that being...So it is with love: a being does not truly love anyone other than his Creator...what we call 'divine love' (hibb ilahi) has two aspects: Desire (Shawq) of God for the creature...yearning to manifest Himself in beings in order to be revealed for them and by them; in its other aspect, divine love is the Desire of the creature for God, or in actual fact the Sigh of God Himself epiphanized in beings and yearning to return to himself.

Arabi observes that the most perfect of mystic lovers are those who love God for himself and for themselves because this capacity reveals in them the unification of their twofold natures. The conjunction of spiritual love and the natural love it transmutes is the very definition of mystic love.

From: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi by Henry Corbin (1969) Princeton, NJ: Bollingen