Love Between the Arabs and the Franks

Love was not the discovery of the Middle Ages, though those ages gave birth to true love in its many meanings, with its violent and deadly passions. Those storms of the body, known to us and setting before us every day frightening examples, began to inflame poetry and the books of literature, as they burned men's breath, in the last years of the eleventh century. The reason for this is that man began to attend to woman and to pursue her secrets. Until then woman had not been one of nature's secrets; she belonged to man and man belonged to her, without the sons of Adam perceiving the truth of the treasures woman possessed or their worth, because love from ancient times had been nothing but a kind of carnal passion.

The Arabs came to know the books of Plato, and especially the "Banquet," and his views through the translations made by order of the caliphs in the eighth and ninth centuries, carried out by certain Syrian Christians. The refinement of love began when Ibn Dawud wrote in Baghdad, in the year 910, the book "The Orange Blossom," to instruct the reader in the secrets of possessing woman. After him came Ibn Hazm in the year 1022, who published the book "The Necklace of the Dove," enumerating the ways of seduction in the manner of Ovid; its author drew most of his information from the springs of his own experience.

But before those books were written, the Arabs had already come to know the strongest force in the world that had existed from the beginning — a force that created the world anew and taught it the principles of humanity, the principles of feeling and sentiment and the worth of love; for what is Christianity but a violent and unceasing divine love? The Arabs knew this and the West had forgotten it, until the conquests of Islam came, which produced in Europe a social upheaval that changed the course of Western thought and raised Christian civilization from its ashes eleven centuries after the appearance of Christ.

And while the ancients considered love — which was a name without a thing named, since they knew only the reality of carnal passion — a danger to social and individual balance, men, once their minds had opened upon the delights of woman, and there had appeared to their eyes flowers of gentle sheen, fragrant of scent, refreshing of fruit, and the storm had played with their hearts before touching their bodies — men began to expend the utmost effort to win a glance from a woman. Love had been a pleasure; then came the Arabs and woke the West from its swoon, and love became a long meditation, holding pain and violence, before being bodily happiness. And whereas it had belonged to pleasures and to the forbidden things of the senses, it came nearer to modesty and more faithful to chastity. And wherever love enters, manners improve and the feeling of the soul aspires to perfection, for love is the reflection of divine rays that bring love close to the Creator. And the converse: divine love leads to amorous beauty and to the sense of existence.

The West learned this by way of the invasions of the eighth century and the wars of the Emperor Charlemagne, and the campaigns of the Crusaders in Asia and Africa (1096–1270), which compelled the lands of the Franks to deal with the Arabs or to come into contact with them through the exchange of prisoners, women, pilgrims, and goods. The mingling of Arabs and Franks became familiar to each of them, and this is what helped the rise of the zajal poets in France, who were made for deadly, exalted love and for poetry alone; and by virtue of these two qualities they surpassed the poets of Andalusia, who filled the zajal and the muwashshahat with unchaste matters, at times of indecent depiction. And if the sentiment in French zajal differs from the sentiment of Andalusian zajal, the meters remained what they were, and the meanings stayed as they had been; only the construction of the sentences changed. Yet the closeness in sentiment and meaning exists between the zajal poets of France and the Arab poets of the classical tongue.

Had the Franks, then, not come to know Arabic poetry, the mentality of the West would not have changed, and we would not have seen Udhri love pass to Europe and become the most prominent of the principal strains in French poetry and zajal. The Banu Udhra (as is well known) were a people who, when they loved, died; in their women was beauty and in their young men chastity;

they counted death in love a merit, without this coming from weakness of constitution or feebleness of judgment, as they said. The Banu Udhra said of themselves to a man who was a stranger to them: If you saw the bright eye-sockets shooting glances from great dark eyes, above them the arched brows and beneath them the smiles of parted teeth, and the dusky lips disclosing lustrous front teeth like pearls newly polished — you would take them for al-Lat and al-Uzza and cast Islam behind your backs!

The Udhri lover is tender of heart, much given to wasting and pallor, intensely chaste, preferring death to defiling his love with any bodily touch. A love of Udhri attachment is enough to make the lover forget food and drink, and the malady storms in his breast from the abundance of his love — until Udhri passion became another meaning of death, and the arrival at death was accounted the perfection of Udhri love.

Love unto death, and death as the end of love — an idea Arab in origin, French in spirit, standing forth in the most famous poem of the Middle Ages: Tristan and Iseult. Did not al-Mas'udi say: "Love is a drop from the ocean of death"? It may be said that love did not bring the Frankish poets to the point of expiring, but their poetry went on repeating that strain, and there rose from their souls sighs like those a man breathes on his deathbed — sighs that took the form of delicate verses, soft and sweet to the ear. The zajal poets of France did not, in their private lives, reach those degrees of death which the sons of the tribe of Udhra attained with ease; but they immortalized those attitudes until they became more like legends than like reality.

And just as Udhri passion reached the West by way of the Arab invasions, so the Christian Middle Ages came to know, through the Islamic conquests, divine love in its literary form, which had again become widespread in the eighth century among the Sufis. Is not the love of God the oldest of things and the best of them? For its source is beauty, and God is beautiful and loves beauty.