page_title: Women in Islam
section_title: Romantic love
hierarchical_section_title: Women in Islam / Love / Romantic love
caption_attribution_description: English: Taj Mahal, Agra, India. Français&#160;: Taj Mahal, Agra, Inde.
context_page_description: The experiences of Muslim women vary widely between and within different societies. At the same time, their adherence to Islam is a shared factor that affects their lives to a varying degree and gives them a common identity that may serve to bridge the wide cultural, social, and economic differences between them.
  Among the influences which have played an important role in defining the social, spiritual, and cosmological status of women in the course of Islamic history are Islam's sacred text, the Quran; the Ḥadīths, which are traditions relating to the deeds and aphorisms of Islam's Prophet Muḥammad; ijmā', which is a consensus, expressed or tacit, on a question of law; qiyās, the principle by which the laws of the Quran and the Sunnah or Prophetic custom are applied to situations not explicitly covered by these two sources of legislation; and fatwas, non-binding published opinions or decisions regarding religious doctrine or points of law.
context_section_description: In traditional Islamic societies, love between men and women was widely celebrated, and both the popular and classical literature of the Muslim world is replete with works on this theme. Throughout Islamic history, intellectuals, theologians, and mystics have extensively discussed the nature and characteristics of romantic love ('ishq). In its most common intellectual interpretation of the Islamic Golden Age, ishq refers to an irresistible desire to obtain possession of the beloved, expressing a deficiency that the lover must remedy in order to reach perfection. Like the perfections of the soul and the body, love thus admits of hierarchical degrees, but its underlying reality is the aspiration to the beauty which God manifested in the world when he created Adam in his own image.
  The Arab love story of Lāyla and Majnūn was arguably more widely known amongst Muslims than that of Romeo and Juliet in (Northern) Europe, while Jāmī's retelling of the story of Yusuf (Joseph) and Zulaykhā — based upon the narrative of Surat Yusuf in the Quran — is a seminal text in the Persian, Urdu, and Bengali literary canons. The growth of affection (mawadda) into passionate love (ishq) received its most probing and realistic analysis in The Ring of the Dove by the Andalusian scholar Ibn Hazm. The theme of romantic love continues to be developed in the modern and even postmodern fiction from the Islamic world: The Black Book (1990) by the Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk is a nominal detective story with extensive meditations on mysticism and obsessive love, while another Turkish writer, Elif Şafak, intertwines romantic love and Sufism in her 2010 book The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi.
  In Islamic mysticism or Sufism, romantic love is viewed as a metaphysical metaphor for the love of God. However, the importance of love extends beyond the metaphorical: ibnʿArabī, who is widely recognised as the 'greatest of spiritual masters [of Sufism]', posited that for a man, sex with a woman is the occasion for experiencing God's 'greatest self-disclosure' (the position is similar vice versa):
  The most intense and perfect contemplation of God is through women, and the most intense union is the conjugal act.
  This emphasis on the sublimity of the conjugal act holds true for both this world and the next: the fact that Islam considers sexual relationships one of the ultimate pleasures of paradise is well-known; moreover, there is no suggestion that this is for the sake of producing children. Accordingly, (and in common with civilisations such as the Chinese, Indian, and Japanese), the Islamic world has historically generated significant works of erotic literature and technique, and many centuries before such a genre became culturally acceptable in the West: Richard Burton's substantially ersatz 1886 translation of The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight, a fifteenth-century sex manual authored by Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Nafzawi, was labelled as being 'for private circulation only' owing to the puritanical mores and corresponding censorship laws of Victorian England.
caption: The Taj Mahal near Agra in India was commissioned by the Moghul Emperor Shah Jahan (1628-1658) in memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal, and completed in 1648.[211] It is studded with numerous inscriptions, almost all of which are from the Quran.[212] Scholars have suggested that the Taj Mahal complex is a representation of paradise.[212]
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