The Ring of the Dove

A treatise on love written in al-Andalus by Ibn Ḥazm, the Córdoban jurist and theologian, at a friend's request, in thirty chapters mixing prose analysis, his own poems, and stories from his life and the lives of people he knew. He begins with the nature of love, which he describes as a union of souls, and then works through its signs, love at first sight and love that grows slowly, love caused by a description or a dream, hinting and correspondence, messengers and secrets, the helpful friend and the slanderer, faithfulness and betrayal, union and separation, forgetting and death. His observation is precise and frank, and much of it draws on the turmoil of Córdoba in his youth. The last two chapters, on the vileness of sin and the virtue of continence, frame the whole in moral and religious terms. The book survives in a single manuscript.

It is one of the finest descriptions of love in any language, and a vivid picture of a learned Muslim society thinking openly about desire, loyalty and loss.