The Body In Arabic Love Poetry

Jokha Alharthi re-appraises the relationship between love, poetry and Arab society in the 8th to 11th centuries. She avoids familiar cliches about the purity of love in Udhri poetry - broadly speaking, an Arabic counterpart to the western medieval concept of unconsummated courtly love - and instead questions the traditional much-vaunted emphasis on chastity and the assumption that this poetry omits any concept of the body.