Arabic: Love As a Consuming Illness

Arabic has a graded vocabulary for love that runs across many named stages, from the first inclination through to a consuming state that destroys the person holding it. Hubb is the general word. Ishq is the overwhelming kind.

A graded vocabulary does something a categorical one cannot. It lets a speaker place a feeling on a scale rather than assert a category. Saying which stage you have reached is a different speech act from saying whether or not you are in love, because one admits of degree and the other forces a verdict, and the verdict is what makes the English question so difficult to answer honestly.

The tradition built on that vocabulary is called Udhri love, named for the Banu Udhra tribe and flourishing in the Umayyad period, in the seventh and eighth centuries.

Its structure is strange and entirely consistent. The beloved is unattainable. The love is chaste and lasts until death and past it. Separation is not an obstacle to be overcome by the plot; it is the permanent condition, and the poems are written from inside it. The lover's credential is his suffering, and fulfilment, if it arrived, would end the thing the poetry is about.

Its central story is Qays ibn al-Mulawwah, who loved Layla and was refused her.

He went into the desert and wrote poems about her for the rest of his life, and he is not remembered as Qays. He is remembered as Majnun, which means possessed, maddened, driven out of his mind. The tradition took a man and renamed him after what love did to him.

That naming is the most important thing in this chapter, because it embeds a theory. Love here is not something a person does. It is something that happens to a person, with a course, symptoms, stages and a fatal outcome, described in the vocabulary of affliction. Whatever else is true of that model, it is closer to how the condition is actually reported by people in it than most modern writing manages. Nobody in the grip of it describes themselves as making a series of decisions.

The resemblance to European courtly love, which opens the next book of this course, is close enough that scholars have argued about transmission through Andalusia for a century without settling it.

The honest position is that the evidence is suggestive and not conclusive, and that independent invention is not implausible. Frustrated love has always made better poetry than satisfied love, because writing needs resistance and fulfilment removes it. Two traditions could reach the same structure without contact, simply by both discovering what works on a page.

What can be said without settling the question is that the structure is not natural. It is not obvious that the highest love should be the one that never arrives, or that the qualification for a lover should be how much he suffers. That two traditions arrived there, whether together or separately, suggests the arrangement is answering to something more durable than fashion. The last book of this course would call it passion without intimacy or commitment, sustained indefinitely, and would note that it is the component that requires the least of anybody.