Most books about love describe it. This one makes a claim about it and then dares you to break the claim. Prince Ghazi sets out what he calls a theorem of love, argues that it meets Karl Popper's test for a scientific statement — that it must be capable of being shown false — and then invites anyone in the world to disprove it. His one condition is that they read the book first.
He is unusually well placed to make that offer. He holds doctorates from Cambridge and from al-Azhar, and his al-Azhar thesis became the widely translated Love in the Holy Qur'an. This book took thirty years of reading and five years of writing, and it is where those two halves of his training finally meet.
How it is built to be read
642 pages sounds like a commitment until you see the structure. There are 71 chapters, most of them six or seven pages, and each one stands alone. The author's own recommendation is a chapter a day, or one in the morning and one at night, which puts the whole book comfortably inside two months. The trim helps: at 5 by 7.75 inches it has the footprint of a novel rather than a reference volume, so it actually travels.
Every chapter closes with a single takeaway sentence, and all 71 are gathered again in the Summary, so the argument can be recovered in a few pages once you have read it properly. Every section ends by answering the question why do you need to know this? There are no footnotes and no technical jargon anywhere in the book. Instead each quotation carries its full reference in line, repeated in full every time, so you can open at any chapter without hunting backwards for a source.
What is in it
The range is the point. Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Auden, Dante, Aristotle, Alexander Pope, C.S. Lewis, Henry James and Karl Popper sit alongside the Qur'an, the hadith and the Sufi literature of love, plus working material from biology, chemistry, cognitive and developmental psychology, anthropology and mysticism. Three appendices trace the stages of love through Jane Eyre and Turgenev's First Love and set out the full list of seventy stages. A closing bibliography names the thirty-three best books ever written on love, with the reason for each one.
Readers who care about architecture will notice two things. The Introduction and the nine Parts map onto Aristotle's ten categories for defining a thing, so that love is examined from every available angle in turn. And the book runs to seventy-eight chapters counting the appendices and bibliography, an allusion to the seventy-seven branches of faith. Perhaps, the author suggests, love is the one more.
Questions the book answers
- What is the actual difference between love and lust, and can you have one without the other?
- What are the stages of falling in love, and how long does each one take?
- Is love at first sight real?
- Why does falling in love make people lose their reason, their will and their physical control?
- What is the difference between love, infatuation and obsession?
- Can you stop yourself loving someone? Should you?
- Can love be restarted once it has gone?
- What is actually happening in jealousy?
- Are soul mates a real thing?
- What does unrequited love do to a person, and what is the way out of it?
- What is beauty, why do we recognise it, and why does it have such power over us?
- Why is there love at all?
What others have said
"A scintillating tour of the great classical writers" on this most characteristic of human emotions.
Professor T. J. Winter — Shaykh Zayed Lecturer in Islamic Studies, Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge; Dean of the Cambridge Muslim College
Beautiful and wise, and "essential reading for 'thinking persons' and especially for lovers everywhere."
Professor Paul S. Fiddes — Professor of Systematic Theology, University of Oxford
Remarkable, humane, the product of a lifetime's reflection. "The book is a tour de force."
Professor Sir Iain Torrance — President Emeritus, Princeton Theological Seminary
"A work of stupendous erudition" that arrives at an original insight into the knowledge of love.
Dr Ismail Fajrie Alatas — Associate Professor, New York University
"A true inspiration for the quest of understanding" across religious and cultural borders.
Professor Klaus von Stosch — Schlegel Professor for Systematic Theology, University of Bonn
Reviewing it in The Muslim 500, the editors called it "accessible and entertaining and very often beautifully lyrical" despite the difficulty of its subject. The foreword is by Professor Miroslav Volf, Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.
Contents
- What is not Love?
- What is Love?
- What is Beauty?
- How Does Love Work?
- What is Falling in Love, and How Does it Work?
- Who Loves?
- When is Love?
- Where is Love?
- Why is Love?
Followed by a Summary, a closing exhortation, four appendices (Keys to Plato; the stages of love in Jane Eyre; the stages of falling in love in Turgenev's First Love; the total list of seventy stages of love) and a select bibliography of the thirty-three best books on love.
Who it is for
The author wrote it, in his own description, as a guide and self-help manual to love, aimed at the general public and at young people in particular. In practice it lands with three kinds of reader: anyone trying to understand what is happening to them while it is happening, anyone about to marry or already married who wants something more substantial than the usual advice, and anyone who simply wants the best thing written on the subject in a long time. It also makes an unusually good gift, which is worth saying about a book this size.
Book details
- Author: H.R.H. Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad bin Talal
- Foreword: Professor Miroslav Volf
- Publisher: Turath Publishing, jointly with White Thread Press
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 642
- Chapters: 71, in nine parts, plus summary, four appendices and bibliography
- Dimensions: 5 x 7.75 x 1.2 inches
- Weight: 1 lb 1.3 oz
- Language: English
- ISBN: 978-1-915265-37-1
