Some time ago, in Sri Vraja-dhama, someone submitted a question to Sriman Mahaprabhu’s confidential associate, Sri Sanatana Gosvami.  Is the word ishqh in the Islamic religious tradition means unadulterated love, or something else.  Sanatana Gosvami was a learned scholar of all the religious scriptures, and his scholarship in the Arabic, and Farsi languages in particular, knew no bounds.  Sri Rupa Gosvami, Sri Jiva Gosvami, and other exalted spiritual preceptors were present in that assembly.  Sri Sanatana Gosvami kindly answered the question as follows:

“Yes, the word ishqh means love.  Adherents of Islam do use the word ishqh in relation to the worship of Krishna, but the word generally means love in the ordinary worldly sense.  Islamic religious teachers have not been able to understand the true conception of the pure spiritual entity.  This is evident from the poetical account of the devoted lovers Laila and Majnun, and from the literary descriptions of ishqh by the great poet Hafiz.  They have referred to ishqh either as physical love pertaining to the gross body, or as emotional love in relation to the subtle body.  Thus, they cannot have had any experience of unadulterated divine love, or prema towards Bhagavan.  I have never seen this type of prema described in any religious texts of the Muslim teachers; I have only seen it in the Vaisnava scriptures.  The same is true of the Muslim word ruh, which means soul or spirit.  It does not seem that Muslim teachers have used the word ruh to mean the liberated soul; rather, they have used the word ruh in the sense of the soul bound by matter. 

I have not seen unadulterated love for Krishna taught in any other religion, whereas descriptions of Krishna-prema, are common throughout the teachings of vaisnava-dharma. 

In the second verse of Srimad-Bhagavatam, Krishna-prema has been lucidly described in the statement,

 ‘This Srimad-Bhagavatam propounds the highest truth from which all pretentious religiosity has been rejected.’

Nonetheless, I have full faith that Sri Krishna Caitanya, was the first to give full instructions on the religion of unalloyed Krishna-prema.  If you have faith in my words, you may accept this conclusion.”

The words “creation” and “formation”, when applied to the jiva, are used in a material context.  The speech of this world functions by drawing from the experience of material phenomena.  The time that we experience is divided into the three phases of past, present, and future.  This is material time, which is connected with the material energy, maya.  In the spiritual domain, there is spiritual time, which eternally exists in the present, with no divisions of past and future.  The jivas and Krishna exist in that spiritual time, so the jiva is eternal and ever existing.  The functions of creation, formation, and conditioning take place under the influence of material time, and they are used to describe the jiva after it is bound in this material world.  However, even though the jiva is infinitesimal, it is an eternal, spiritual entity, and its fundamental constitution, existed before its conditioning,