Rawdat Al-Qulub Wa-Nuzhat Al-Muhibb Wal-Mahbub (Book Review‪)‬

Rawdat al-Qulub wa-Nuzhat al-Muhibb wal-Mahbub, by 'Abd al-Rahman ibn Nasr al-Shayzari. By DAVID SEMAH and GEORGE J. KANAZI. Codices Arabici Antiqui. vol. 8. Wiesbaden: HARRASSO-WITZ VERLAG. 2003. Pp. xxv + 382. In 1971 Lois Anita Giffen published her Theory of Profane Love among the Arabs (New York: New York University Press), in which she surveyed and analyzed some twenty Arabic texts on "love theory," ranging from the ninth century C.E. to the seventeenth. Since then further research on this major genre of classical Arabic literature has been sporadic, although at least a fair number of important but previously unpublished texts have now appeared in print. Among these one of the more interesting (although not included in Giffen's survey) is the Rawdat al-qulub by the rather obscure late sixth/ twelfth-century Syrian author al-Shayzari, to which the late David Semah (he passed away in 1997) devoted considerable attention, and whose edition-in-progress of the text has now been completed and published by his colleague George Kanazi. (1)