The Ring of the Dove: A Treatise on the Art and Practice of Arab Love by Ibn Hazm
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I read an excerpt of this in college for a class, and then got the book and read it in its entirety. It’s beautifully written, although the language after translation may seem stilted and awkward to some readers who aren’t as used to reading Arabic-to-English books as I am. This book – treatise, whatever you want to call it – has definitely informed my ideas about love and attraction. Ibn Hazm paints a gorgeous picture, for example, of how our souls all come from the same great whole, which is shattered into pieces. When we meet someone, and the pieces of his or her soul match up with ours, we fall in love. That’s why we can fall in love with many different people in a lifetime: our souls can match up in great proportion to more than one person. People with whom we don’t share a significant commonality of shattered soul matter, then, are mere acquaintances or distant friends, or nothing at all. That’s his idea, which I found quite charming.
The book is also pretty funny, even though it reads like a philosophy text. In one section, he talks about lovers finding that spark, but needing some help in getting together. He calls the agent that often helps couples get together the “Helpful Brother,” and then explains with amused self-awareness that the Helpful Brother is usually an old woman, because she has loved in her lifetime in many different ways and is particularly attuned to sensing love between younger people, and also because she doesn’t have much going on. It’s actually quite cute at times.
I’d recommend this if you were interested in an examination of concepts of love, sometimes contradictory, sometimes uncomfortably lofty, sometimes stunningly particular, in the Middle East in the 11th century, and if you don’t mind that it can be a little dense and plodding.
