A fine book on a lovely subject, in Spenser’s lost usage of that word: ‘has to do with love’. Lovely, in the use Spenser may have made up, becomes a strong word where otherwise it is a weak.

As one who has happily perused the ‘courtly love’ literature of medieval Europe – Christendom – this contemporary tradition in Islamdom is gorgeous in its similarities and its paths pursued that are arguably more strange. Since I grew up on Lancelot, the self-devotion to an ideal of love in these pages is amazingly moving. When has love ever been so in fashion? Not today; its heyday was the 12th, 13th centuries, and I am intrigued by its simultaneous flowering in these neighbour climes. Influence, yes; but what was in the air?

I understand that these poets have had ‘easy translations’ into English that make them merely dissolute. As fun as that is, it misses the secret language… not abstruse, mark you, nothing need be abstruse; it misses what the talk of wine and goblets stood for, the religious underpinnings to the idea of the beloved, and other pertinent matter explained in this book. It is a Sufi explication of Islam, irreverent to conventional pieties, to the point of cheerful blasphemy… you know the drill. But deeply religious at its heart: true religion, which (everywhere in the world, they believed) was the Religion of Love and none other.

I haven’t finished. Research needs push ever on and on, down from the door where they began. I’ll come back, and I look forward to it.

One note: The editor has ascertained that Hafiz’s poems were addressed to a woman – to his own satisfaction, which he feels ought to be to ours. It seems there is no real reason to decide either way (you can find this out in the footnotes), and I think the question should be left open-ended. So that others too, Mr Editor, can read the way they are most comfortable with. ( )