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We seem to speak through imagined funerals fairly often. Our love-words stage tiny tragedies; everyday phrases that say we can only claim love when it’s at the brink of loss. It’s a linguistic lineage that runs deep, positioning romantic love as a tradition of wound, wonder, ecstasy, agony, rise, and fated comedown. It’s where Qays lost himself in a desert and his mind for Layla, and gained his epithet Majnun (the mad one), by far eclipsing the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet or any of Shakespeare’s oeuvres. When our hearts broke, did syntax grow larger like a muscle responding to strain? I wonder if language is plastic in that way. To consistently accommodate the new intensities we needed to name, as we would pay with our sanity for life’s most forgivable neurosis: love.
Even in the most ordinary conversations, expressions like تقبرني (“may you bury me”), تكفّنّي (“wrap me in my shroud”), تمشي على قبري (“may you walk on my grave”) translate, in essence, to: let me go first, may you survive me, because I cannot bear a world without you. Even our “lighter” declarations; فداك روحي (“my soul is yours”), بموت عليك (“I’m dying for you”), read like tiny epics through colloquialisms. The sentiment still orbits sacrificial devotion. So much of the intimacy that’s crept its way into our quotidian language is calibrated through the fear of outliving those we’d die for.
It’s no secret that the stretch of geographies speaking Arabic, Persian, Kurdish, Urdu, and Armenian have had their share of upheaval, catastrophe, colonial theft, and violence, and throughout it all, renewal, with many homelands resisting still today. Death and love are absolutes we know far too intimately. Even in the age of ghosting, love still proves itself as a spectral place where presence haunts long after bodies vanish. So did our languages break these vocabularies of martyrdom into existence through an ontological reckoning with our grieving histories?
Many historic love tales from the region end in a broken heart, with tribal rivalries and societal bureaucracies disrupting what would otherwise have been happily ever after. Pre- and post-Islamic poetry interpretation, transmission, and preservation are among the most significant intellectual traditions in Arabic and Persianate literature. One tale that stands out, recited endlessly across prose, theatre, and song by Arabs, Persians, Turks, Kurds, Afghans, Tajiks, Indians, Pakistanis, and Baluchis, and that even gave rise to Eric Clapton’s 1970s hit “Layla,” is the epic of Layla and Majnun.
The 7th-century love story of two real figures of Bedouin tribes from the Najd region, Qays ibn al-Mulawwah and Layla al-‘Amiriyya, is crowned the most passionate in our cultural catalogue. What made this different from other epics was the culmination of madness. In a literary landscape dominated by themes of honour, warfare, and tribal heroism, Qays stood apart. His adoration didn’t wane as years passed; it haunted him. This fidelity would curdle into delirium, a chasm with reality, which became the kernel of this tale and a seed for the poetic and religious traditions that followed.
Qays loved Layla in a way so intensely unmoored from reason that he expressed his love-sick declarations publicly, offensive to the Umayyad social milieu of conservatism. His unrestrained longing risked staining her honour and endangering the social standing of their tribe, Banu Amir. Fearing scandal, her family married Layla to another man. The OG yearner withdrew into the desert, bonded with beasts and wildlife, and continued to write obsessively about Layla during his self-imposed exile, composing verses until his death. His family left food out for him, praying for his return, to no avail.
Their saga became the foundation of ʿudhri poetry, a distinct mode in Arab classical literature premised on the asymmetry between lovers — verses consecrated to an unrequited love that haunts until death. The positionality of the yearner only comes into being when the yearned-for lives in a comparative safehouse of withholding, even against their will, as in Layla’s case. Later, these ideas formed the basis for Sufi Islamic metaphors on fanaa: self-annihilation in pursuit of spiritual enlightenment. Divine, mystical love for the Creator, and the tradition of surrendering to it, is a Sufi tenet mirrored in poetic styles known for a language of abstraction — you could not tell if the poet was referring to a lover or to God.
“If I had two hearts I would live with one,
And devote the other to torment in your love.
Alas I only have one heart, possessed by love.
Neither pleased by living nor that death is near.
Like a tiny bird in the hands of a child, disgracing it,
Suffering the torment of death while the child is at play.
Neither the child is aware of its suffering,
Nor the bird’s wings are free, for it to fly.”
— Qays Ibn al-Mulawwah, translated by Dina Al-Mahdy
When Qays speaks of love, terms of suffering, possession, and torment consistently surface. Described in Nizami’s retelling of the tale as an “ardent lover,” Qays is not deterred by the pain inflicted through love, only by the cessation of it, blaming himself for not having enough hearts.
In classical Arabic, love cycles through a spectrum of fourteen states, and there’s no shortage of literature mapping these semantic fields. From hawa (attraction, initial interest) to ʿishq (passion) to tawq (insatiable love that often involves sacrifice or personal struggle) to hayam (a love-sickness akin to a state of extreme thirst) — each term encodes a specific emotional temperature. The language diversifies around its nuances, ascending towards degrees of final and absolute madness: walah and taym. Through Qays’ poetry, we see a man walking gleefully toward his own descent, becoming acquainted with each span of these transformative stages. With each new day he loved Layla, these abstracted states reified. Crucially, his public and scandalous poetry in Layla’s name, written back when she was just his classmate, mirrors the earlier stages, and is not cut from the cloth of torment found in his final verses. By the time he is carving words into desert sand with a stick during his self-imposed exile, we see a Qays-gone-majnun.
In Lissan al-Arab, one of the oldest Arabic dictionaries in existence, the word ʿishq traces back to the ivy plant that feeds on decay, ishqa, which eventually grafts itself onto dying matter. Having known love, I often think about how caging language can be when I try to place what I feel. A lexicon of passion, especially one that slowly annihilates, requires metaphors apt enough to hold its phantom intensities: like the ivy, enmeshed with a dead thing it desires. It clings, as we do, to what it knows it cannot revive.
The emotional codes of the region evolved in a world that doesn’t guarantee continuity, a truth learned again and again through generations of exile, migration, social upheaval, and war. The impulse to speak devotion in terms that can withstand collapse evolved, perhaps, from necessity. Even in the earliest texts of Umayyad poetry, affection is expressed with the knowledge that it will be interrupted, forbidden, or struck by forces far larger than the lovers themselves, but never larger than the feeling between them, often invoking grandiose themes of the cosmos and eternal temporalities. Tales of love from this period likely take on these cosmic proportions because of the intellectual climate of the time. Scholarship in astronomy, alchemy, and philosophy flourished as Islamic thought increasingly linked knowledge-seeking to devotion and closeness to God.
So emotions are these big, grand, volatile things. And they seem to leak all over the place, often exceeding the body, unlike thoughts, which are at the mercy of fading within the solitary cognitive theatre of your own mind. But do they have anything to do with our wider collectives? Our social bodies? Crowds? The emotional identity of an entire nation? In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed pushes back against the idea of the absolute interiority of emotion, and thinks that yes, they do. It’s a treatise on how a crowd grieves, celebrates, or fears, and the emotion that emerges through contact zones between bodies and the impressions they leave on one another.
Etymologically, “emotion” means “to move,” and Umm Kulthum knew this well. The cultural titan synonymised with tarab, she could move millions into states of ecstatic grief with her insatiable performances, even after four hours on stage.
But truthfully, the intensity of love in Umm Kulthum’s repertoire had far less to do with her own feelings than with the feelings she refused, or simply didn’t possess, for the man who wrote half her discography. In real life, she was the voice through which other people’s desires were given form. No one embodied this asymmetry more than Ahmed Rami, who spent nearly five decades loving her with a devotion that, provably, would not empty.
Working six days a week at the National Library, he guarded his lone day off, Mondays, for her alone. On those Mondays, he opened the world to her: the Persian classics he had spent years transliterating in Paris, the labyrinthine brilliance of al-Mutanabbi. She was a young girl from a poor family in the countryside delta, and Rami supported her in an intimidatingly populated Cairo as her career ascended. It was Rami who helped her assemble her first orchestra, the musicians who would later become the only force strong enough to bear the weight of her ageless voice.
He wrote more than a hundred songs for her, among them Ane Fe Intizrak, Zekrayat, and Raq El Habib, my father’s favourites. The singer mocked her best writer for never once accepting payment, but he insisted that “the mad do not charge for their madness, did Qays ever take money from Layla for his poems?”
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This unrequited love would eventually cast its shadow on his own marriage. In Rami, we find the perfect modern echo of ʿudhri love: the lover who adores an unattainable beloved unto, and even beyond, ruin. And still, Umm Kulthum honoured what the Arab audience wanted, his sorrowful, passionate words, yearning at full volume. When Umm Kulthum did not ask about Rami, his whereabouts or wellbeing, after he had stayed home for several days, he wrote Ya Msaharni in 1972 as a plea to know why, and where her heart was. She took that agony to the stage and shared it with her ever-satisfied listeners.
Here lies tarab‘s heartbeat: the charged exchange between performer and crowd. As a classical music tradition of long, operatic musical performance, also conceptualised as a “heightened state of consciousness”, it was about the audience and the one they look to on stage, each feeding on the other’s ache. A sentiment shared and sustained through a crowd in near-ecstatic awareness, applauding the piercing, declaratory love-words born of a man’s private ache, carried in the voice of a woman who was, at heart, simply doing her job.
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Two decades later, Fairuz sang Indi Thika Fik, written by her late son Ziad Rahbani for his 15-year situationship, Carmen Lebbos. In those years of partnership there was frustration, distance, and even departure. As Rahbani’s words suggest, devotion sometimes isn’t enough, the only remaining offering might be your life, which he unhesitatingly puts on the table. With its mention of walah, a dire condition in the fourteen stages of love in classical Arabic, the song speaks of a kind of love where the self starts to fray at its edges.
عندي وَلَع فيك، بيكفيك
شو بدك إنه يعني موت فيك؟
والله رح موت فيك
صدق إذا فيك، بيكفيك
شو بدك مني إذا متت فيك؟
“Indi Thika Fik” — sung by Fairuz, written by Ziad Rahbani
A song in the Aleppian folk tradition, Wa Mn Al Shabbak, goes even further, drawing the image of throwing yourself out of a window for love. It’s a reckless devotion, but one anchored in a lineage that has treated longing with metaphysical seriousness for over a millennium. This isn’t “I’d catch a grenade for you” or some other saccharine exaggeration crafted for late-capitalist, unforgivably American radio play. It’s a sincerity with actual teeth, because it comes from a tradition where hyperbole is not gimmicky or self-insisting, we actually talk like this.
When you look at contemporary love songs, you can still hear the same pressure points: the fear of disappearance, the desire to anchor oneself in another person. We were raised on these songs, and by their music videos, by the yearners that came before us, at a time when Rotana, Mazzika, Melody Hits, Dream, and Nagham programmed a far more unified Y2K Arab pop universe. This encoded choreography of social behaviour was something I could sense but never yet inhabit when I was so young, attitudes and gestures of glamour, autonomy, seduction, defiance. Visually and sonically, even to my subconscious small brain, it was through indexing these images that I could catch onto the idea that desire had its own semiotics, especially in a culture where flirting is comparatively clandestine and implied. I think it even mapped out an early, if a little exaggerated, sense of what a relationship should look like, who reaches, who retreats, who suffers while looking gorgeous, who apologises late.
Songs of profound longing and heartbreak have also morphed into modern anthems that celebrate possessiveness, control, and patriarchal ideals of love as ownership. While we’ve developed neologisms around toxic behaviours in romantic relationships — and TikToks excavating narcissistic tendencies and attachment styles are among the most popular — a lot of these behaviours are also glamourised. Songs like Ahmed Mattar’s Nari (“my fire”), which declares: “if I dare smell your perfume on another, I’ll burn him and his clothes,” and Hussam Al Rassam’s Mtkabra (“arrogant”), which sings: “why are you so arrogant, why are you cold with me? If I desire you, I’ll break that high nose of yours.” It’s difficult to sing along to lyrics that are too extreme when their viral circulation unfolds amid persistent realities of male entitlement — realities that make the song’s devotion feel less romantic. But being Iraqi, like Mattar and Al Rassam, I won’t ignore that this dialectal tendency for hyperbole would have coursed on from aeons of talking crazy. Our music-scape is now littered with descendant majnuns.
Of course, we’ve pathologised yearning as “simping” and dislocated treating romance with reverence from its moral home. Many now survive in a romance economy that drags insipidly along with those who imagine that a cursory story-like is somehow labour in the name of love. Meanwhile, “self-love”, filtered through late-capitalism’s newest machine, self-optimisation culture; looksmaxxing and productivity worship, has eclipsed relational love altogether. The sovereign self must remain polished, detached, and, crucially, unneedy.
But I’d prefer not to cower before neocolonial modernity’s obsession with self-containment, with stoicism, the sanitisation of feeling, acting like you care the least, and the “coolness” that ostensibly emerges from that. The foremost poet of my country and one of the most important historical figures to ever hold a pen, al-Mutanabbi, said it better than I ever could:
My soul is sickened, my body debilitated
Why should I conceal a love that has consumed my body?
If language flexes and fractures around political, technological, and social pressures, love absorbs those shocks and bends with them. A word can be a rose, but it can also outlast the petals. Love is not as fragile as the ecology around it. It can persist in spite of the pop culture trends, the controversies, the state, the border, the revolution, or the tribal rejection, in Qays’ case. I come from a to2borne family and I will continue a b’moot alek lineage. It’s not for everyone, this degree of emotionality, they might say it’s too much. But love is coded into the communicative schemas through which we measure and assign semantic value, and in those schemas, the plasticity of language arcs across our histories of celebration, of sorrow, and, crucially, of music. We grew fluent in love and martyrdom, and that makes itself known in the lyrics we ache to. These expressions collapse the years between us and those whose hearts first taught us how to love, and through their own epics, archived in phrases we still use today, teach us that love is worth dying for.
