AFTER THE FALL OF THE WESTERN ROMAN EMPIRE (in 476 CE) secular love left few written traces in Europe but found oral and written expression across the Mediterranean in North Africa. There, as in ancient Greece and Rome, language linked the heart to love. Arabic bards known as rawis memorized and recited heartfelt love poems, which ranged from risky heterosexual trysts within nomadic tents and “male-male passion” to the chaste adoration of a wellborn married lady. Collected in writing during the eighth and ninth centuries, these poems give us a glimpse of love among nomadic Bedouins before the death of Muhammed in 632. Afterward religion supplanted amorous love as the dominant subject of Arabic poetry.
The pre-Islamic lover’s heart was often sad and filled with longing for a specific woman. Among nomads meetings were often temporary and partings an occasion for sorrow. Thus, one poet, Ka’b Bin Zuhair, cried out, “Su’ad is gone, and today my heart is love-sick.” Another poet, Umar Ibn Abi Rabi’ah, asked his comrades to sympathize with his one-sided love for Zaynab, who had gained total possession of his heart. A third, al-Aswad Bin Yafur, bemoaned his wasted state as an older man and wistfully looked back to a time when he had savored the pleasures of women who could “shoot the hearts of men (with their eyes).”
If some of these themes sound familiar, that’s because the lovesick poet wounded in his heart is by now such a stereotype. We have already seen him in antiquity, and we’ll see him again both in the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century. But what is different about these early Arabic lovers was the truly perilous world they inhabited and the bravado they demonstrated in carrying out their adventures. The lover was constantly on the move, surrounded by vast expanses of desert, battered by winds, beholden to his camel, and relieved by the sight of tents in the distance. The women they loved, with their flowing robes and smell of musk, represented a kind of paradise, though poets often depicted them as capricious, like water in the desert. Many desired women had families or husbands or guardians to be avoided. It took reckless courage to carry out the amorous exploits described by these pre-Islamic Bedouins.
Still, there were always a few audacious women who did not let their husbands and children put an end to their love trysts. Imru’ al-Qays, once a lover of many women, remembered those he had visited at night and one in particular whom he had “diverted from the care of her yearling.” He explicitly described how the mother managed to attend to her infant without putting an end to making love. “When the suckling behind her cried, she turned round to him with half her body, but half of it, pressed beneath my embrace, was not turned from me.”
Whew! These lines are “among the most licentious in classical Arabic poetry,” according to a knowledgeable scholar. Imru’ al-Qays evoked several such conquests as examples of his youthful swagger and ability to please the ladies.
But at the time of writing this poem he was in the midst of an all-encompassing love affair and bemoaned the state of his heart under the sway of one Fatima. No longer free to roam from woman to woman, he complained that his heart had been “wounded” by her eyes, broken to pieces, and could never be restored.
Imru’ al-Qays was one of roughly a hundred poets from the pre-Islamic period whose passionate and vivid love poems allow us to enter into the hearts and minds of Bedouin men living in nomadic tribes, where lovers took pride in their daring exploits, sometimes catching love on the run, sometimes—like any other would-be lover in any era—gripped by melancholy for the one person they could not have.
EVERY CIVILIZATION HAS ITS LEGENDARY LOVERS: ANTHONY and Cleopatra for the Romans, Abélard and Héloïse for the French, Tristan and Isolde for the French and Germans, Lancelot and Guinevere for the English and French, Romeo and Juliet for the English. Whether based on real people or totally fictional, they offer an indelible portrayal of fervent love. Each of these couples experienced the joys of erotic passion rendered more intense by obstacles coming from their families, countries, the Church, husbands, and the like. Most had sad or tragic ends.
Arab culture has its legendary lovers in the figures of Jamil and Buthayna, Majnun and Layla, Kuthayyir and Azza. Created by three different poets, these couples interest us not only because they demonstrate fidelity to an amatory ideal but also because they have been recognized as sowing the seeds for “courtly love”—the kind of love that would assert its sway in Europe during the Middle Ages.
Jamil’s story follows his infatuation with a young woman from his tribe named Buthayna. At first she responded to his overtures and they managed to meet occasionally, far from the eyes of guardians and gossips. But Buthayna was careful to keep Jamil’s attentions limited to conversation and an occasional kiss; any other indiscretion, if discovered, could prove fatal to a Bedouin woman.
It did not take long for Jamil to ask for Buthayna’s hand in marriage. When it was denied him because her family had found a more advantageous match for their daughter, Jamil was despondent. Still, he continued to adore her, even in her married state. As he put it: “I loved single women when Buthayna was single / and when she married, she made me love wives.” Unlike pre-Islamic poets, Jamil held fast to his one, exclusive love, taking comfort from the thought that he would meet her in the afterlife. In this respect Jamil’s vision of love reflected Muslim beliefs: the love denied him on earth would ultimately be attained in paradise. Buthayna became something of a holy figure, the object of Jamil’s daily prayers. He and his fellow poets came to regard love like a religion, with the beloved installed as its reigning deity.
IN THE ELEVENTH CENTURY IBN HAZM, AN ARAB THEOLOGIAN, jurist, and philosopher living in southern Spain, wrote a treatise on love that would become influential not only in the Arabic world but also in France during the following century. In On Love and Lovers Ibn Hazm set out to “describe love, its diverse meanings, its causes, accidents, vicissitudes, and the favorable circumstances that surround it.” He promised to base his work on his personal experiences and on those recounted by trustworthy parties. He started out by invoking religion and law: “Love is not condemned by religion, nor prohibited by law, because hearts are in the hand of Allah.” Hearts, then, are intimately linked to Allah, who insists on “a heart devoted to Him” (Quran 26:89).
For all his adherence to the Quran, Ibn Hazm was no less a Platonist. Like Plato he agreed that love originated in an appreciation of physical beauty but that true love had to involve the soul. He recalled the words of an earlier poet: “When my eyes see a person dressed in red [like his beloved], my heart breaks and bursts with anxiety.” Eye, soul, and, of course, heart are words that reappear in Ibn Hazm’s treatise, like the refrain in a love song.
Sometimes, during only a brief encounter “love attaches itself to the heart with a simple look.” Love at first sight, going straight to the heart, seems to be a stock trope in many cultures. But true love, Ibn Hazm insists, can occur only with time. He himself had never known love in his heart except after a long period of time. Many European writers after him would disagree and stick with the love-at-first-sight moment, which makes for better drama.
But they would follow his lead in insisting that one cannot love two people at the same time. As he put it: “In the heart, there is no place for two loved ones… the heart is one [a unit] and can become enamored of only one person.… Any heart that acts differently is suspect in regard to the laws of love.” The belief that one’s heart can contain only one true love would become a pillar of Western romance.
In the end Ibn Hazm came down on the side of noncarnal relations. After relating numerous stories about erotic love, mainly heterosexual but also a few homosexual, he excoriated the sins of sex, especially fornication, adultery, and sodomy. Passion itself was ultimately seen as “the key to the door of perdition.” His counsel was to abstain from sin and, if possible, follow the path of continence. “He whose heart is led astray, whose spirit is monopolized by love” will end up in Hell. Only the man who comes to Allah “with a pure heart” will be granted an eternal home in Paradise. The heart, as understood by Ibn Hazm, was simultaneously the home of earthly passion—which he condemned—and of religious conscience. Whatever his personal experience of passion in the past, Ibn Hazm made his peace with Allah by promoting the spiritual over the physical and by renouncing mortal love for the love of God.