“Ugly fellow,” they asked, “wouldst thou love
A pretty girl, access to whom dusky slaves will stymie?”
“Am I not a literary man?” I replied.
“Never could I let such a ‘contrast’ get by me!”181
(“They asked”—or I do on their behalf.)182
1.10.5
Young love can be big, too, just as grown-up love can be little. A young person, being still without the emotional and intellectual maturity that might inhibit him from the unaffected and extreme expression of his affections, may be led by such unaffectedness to a wildness of passion that knows no restraint. Have you not observed how, when a child becomes infatuated with some toy or game, he may become intemperate in its pursuit and abandon himself to it entirely? How much more so, then, if he inclines to that thing that is stronger than anything else to which temper may incline or for which soul may yearn? True, the adult calculates the benefits of what he wants from his lover more carefully than the child and is therefore more solicitous of him and demands more from him; however, self-esteem, strength of character, and the instinct for self-preservation may prevent him from surrendering the reins of his will to love; thus on the road of his longing and desire he takes one step forward, one back. The child, having once abandoned himself to his natural spontaneity, believes that everything will be easy.
1.10.6
To return to our topic: I committed myself to writing a book that would be a repository for every idea that appealed to me, relevant or irrelevant, for it seemed to me that what was irrelevant to me might be relevant to someone else, and vice versa. If you’re of a mind, submit — if not, so be it: this is no time for quibbling and quarreling. The long and the short of it is that the Fāriyāq continued to tutor his young mistress, making a habit of gaining her affection by forbearing to correct her mistakes. In fact, he couldn’t see how anyone so beautiful could be refused anything, as a result of which she fell behind in her education while he progressed in his obsession. One poem he wrote about her went as follows:
My soul I’d give, and heart, for him I teach!
The prisoner of his love ne’er can patience know.
Passion makes me jealous of every letter
He mouths and that kisses his lips as he does so.
Thank God the Arabic language lacks the Persian p and Frankish v,183 or our friend’s jealousy would have been even greater and might have driven him insane: jealousy and madness issue from the same place, as learned scholars familiar with marriage tell us.
1.10.7
This brings us to a nice point, to wit, that certain of the people known as ʿatāwil (plural of ʿitwal and meaning “men who can see no good in women”) find it irksome to use the feminine gender in amorous and erotic poetry and so turn it into the masculine instead, and others invoke it only implicitly. The words of the Fāriyāq “for him I teach” conform to this practice.184 It seems likely that the implicit referent of such masculine pronouns is the word shakhṣ (person). Would that the word referred to in our language by the pronoun were feminine, as it is in French and Italian, so that the erotic poet would find no impediment to using that gender!185
1.10.8
On the question of whether the women of our country should be taught reading and writing, in my opinion, it’s a good idea, provided it be according to certain conditions, namely that reading be confined to the perusal of books that refine their moral conduct and improve their writing skills, for if women are kept busy learning, they will find no time to work up schemes and concoct stratagems, as we shall see below. There would be nothing wrong with married women reading this book of mine or its like, for, just as certain sorts of food are reserved for married people only, so it is with ideas. It seems that the Arabic language is a snare for love, for it contains words of passion and amorousness found in no other.
1.10.9
Any woman who reads, in Ibn Mālik’s Sharḥ al-mashāriq,186 for example, that the stages of love are eight — the lowest of which is liking, which has its starting point in seeing and hearing and is then strengthened through cogitation, which turns into friendly regard, which is an inclination toward the beloved person (meaning the beloved woman), which in turn becomes stronger and turns into affection, which is the congenial intercourse of spirits, which grows stronger and turns into intimate companionship, which is affection’s taking control within the heart to the point at which the couple start to share secrets, and then grows stronger until it turns into full-blown love unmixed with shifts of mood and not subject to change, which then grows stronger until it turns into passion, which is an affection so extreme that the passionate lover’s mind is never empty of thoughts of the passionately loved person (meaning the passionately loved woman), which then grows stronger until it turns into lovesickness, in which condition the only thing that can satisfy the lover’s soul is the image of the person whom he passionately loves (by whom I mean, of course, the woman he passionately loves), which then grows stronger until it turns into love-crazed distractedness, which is when he goes so far over the edge that he no longer knows what he’s saying or where he’s going, at which point the doctors are powerless to treat him — and noting in addition, as I do, that there are also different varieties of love, such as ṣabābah, which is love and longing in their most delicate form; gharām, which is love as surrender; huyām, which is insanity born of passion; jawā, which is the love one holds inside oneself; shawq, which is the struggle with the self; tawaqān, which means the same; wajd, which is the affection that the lover receives from the beloved person (by which I mean, again, of course, the beloved woman); kalaf, which is craving; shaghaf, which is what happens when love reaches the pericardium, which is to say the tissue that enwraps the heart or the fat that surrounds it or the kernel or core of it; shaʿaf, which is when love coats the shaʿafah of the heart, which is the top of it, where the aorta is attached, or shaʿf, which means the same; and tadlīh, which is when one loses one’s mind from love — will be able to refrain from experiencing all these sublime stages one condition after the other. This contrasts with the languages of the non-Arabs, in which there is only one word meaning love, which they apply to Creator and created alike.