Rawdat al-Qulub wa-Nuzhat al-Muhibb wal-Mahbub.

• Position: Book review

Rawdat al-Qulub wa-Nuzhat al-Muhibb wal-Mahbub, by 'Abd al-Rahman ibn Nasr al-Shayzari. By DAVID SEMAH and GEORGE J. KANAZI. Codices Arabici Antiqui. vol. 8. Wiesbaden: HARRASSO-WITZ VERLAG. 2003. Pp. xxv + 382.

In 1971 Lois Anita Giffen published her Theory of Profane Love among the Arabs (New York: New York University Press), in which she surveyed and analyzed some twenty Arabic texts on "love theory," ranging from the ninth century C.E. to the seventeenth. Since then further research on this major genre of classical Arabic literature has been sporadic, although at least a fair number of important but previously unpublished texts have now appeared in print. Among these one of the more interesting (although not included in Giffen's survey) is the Rawdat al-qulub by the rather obscure late sixth/ twelfth-century Syrian author al-Shayzari, to which the late David Semah (he passed away in 1997) devoted considerable attention, and whose edition-in-progress of the text has now been completed and published by his colleague George Kanazi. (1)

Despite significant antecedents (notably, several works by al-Jahiz). the tradition of composing monographs on the nature and progress of romantic love was unambiguously initiated by Muhammad b. Dawud al-Zahiri (d. 297/910). whose Kitdb al-Zahra (or, to be precise, its first half) was simultaneously an exposition of love as it should be experienced and a rich anthology of Arabic poetry in illustration thereof. (Fifty chapters, each including precisely one hundred lines of verse, are devoted to love; the other fifty anthologize verses on a variety of other themes.) Enormously influential, this work had by al-Shayzari's time spawned at least a dozen imitations, emulations, and variations, of which al-Shayzari probably had access to more than the five or six that have come down to us.

That al-Shayzari was in fact quite heavily dependent on his predecessors is quite evident in a number of ways. Like most of them, and Ibn Dawud in particular, he gives his chapters rhyming titles. The chapters themselves are devoted to the principal traditional themes: terminology for the degrees of love passion, the dangers of the first glance at a beautiful person, the "martyrs of love" who died of unfulfilled longing, and the like. The material itself, virtually all of it poetry and anecdotes, is lifted directly from some of the most obvious sources, although al-Shayzari has a tendency to suppress specific information about precisely where he got it. He also includes some new material, however, both from his own...