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 weak-ness 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.