Lovesickness was taken seriously as a distinct mental illness by physicians in the medieval Islamic world, new research shows.
Islamic scholars considered lovesickness, which they called ʿishq, to be different from melancholy – unlike Galen and other physicians from ancient Greece.
Doctors in the 10th century said lovesickness mostly afflicted the licentious and ignorant. However those in later centuries thought even the most noble people like prophets and saints were susceptible to suffering from it.
Islamic doctors had a tradition of seeing deep connections between mental/psychological health and physical health. In the 11th century Ibn Sīnā described how the mental state of a woman who was lovesick made her physically weak and ill. In the 13th century Ibn al-Nafīs proposed that the main physiological reason for lovesickness was the build-up of seminal fluids. For this reason he claimed the young, the unmarried, and even the morally upright, were more liable to suffer.
The medical understanding of lovesickness continued to evolve well into the sixteenth century in dialogue with literary discussions of obsessive love and the increasing use of love as the defining feature of the cosmos in Islamic mystical theology, known as the Sufi path of love associated with great mystics like al-Rūmī in the 13th century.
Al Qasimi Professor of Islamic Studies Nahyan Fancy, from the University of Exeter, examined the writings of key physicians from across the medieval Islamic world placing them into dialogue with the works of philosophers, literary scholars, religious polemicists and theologians to demonstrate these interconnections across traditions.
