If similar words in the language of dād carry similar connotations, according to the famous linguist Ibn Jinni, then the relationship between love and war, separated by the letter r, was not a matter due to mere coincidence alone, but rather to what the anagram between the two words indicates, of an entanglement in meaning. And the meaning, so that each of them appears to be an extension of the other, or its implied twin. This is something that is not confirmed by the sciences of psychology, sociology, and literary and artistic works alone. Rather, it is enough for us to go back a little to the facts of history in order to discover that love has played a significant role in igniting many of the fierce wars that the planet Earth has witnessed throughout its long history.
The war that broke out between the Greek Achaeans and the Trojans in the thirteenth century BC, which Homer made the most prominent background for the epic The Iliad, was caused by the charming Helen, the wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta, who was kidnapped by the Trojan Paris, which led the Spartans to besiege and seize Troy. After a long siege. In the ancient wars between the Hebrews and the Philistines, the Palestinian Delilah tipped the scales when she cut the hair of her beloved Samson, whose strength lay in his hair, triumphing over the call of duty over the call of the heart.
As for Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt in the time of the Ptolemaics, her captivating beauty tottered on the lines separating her patriotic feeling and her wild desires. She was the one who intended to seduce the Caesar and marry him, and to trap the Roman leader Mark Antony, to cause the empire to split against itself, before the honey turned into poison. Witchcraft led to a tragic suicide, following the defeat of both sides in the Battle of Actium in 31 BC.
In Arab history, there is much similar evidence of the role of love in igniting bloody wars between parties disputing over the hearts of women, as it is narrated on the authority of Kulayb ibn Rabi’ah, the leader of Banu Taghlib, that after his uncle refused to marry him to his daughter Jalila, he preferred to marry her to the king of Tuba’, who He presented him with boxes of gold and jewelry that made him salivate. Kulaib and his tough assistants hid in the boxes of the bride’s trousseau, until when they reached the king’s palace, they came out of their boxes and killed him.
However, the other side of this duality is confirmed by the deep hole that love creates in the lover’s body and soul, before it turns into a shadow of the beloved and his prisoner. It is not strange that Greek mythology symbolizes love with the arrows that Cupid shoots from his quiver, severely injuring the lover’s heart that cannot be healed, while the irresistible desire for possession and feelings of excessive jealousy can turn the relationship between the two parties into a bitter conflict in which all the tools, tricks and traps of war are used. While Freud attributed the matter to the duality of love and death, and to the confrontation existing within the human soul between the instincts of life and destruction represented by Eros and Thanatos, Lacan, in contrast, went on to link the violent aspect of love to the early childhood stage, where the child is not content with being breastfed, but is overwhelmed by a sadistic desire to possess him or devour him. Oral, and where “vampire vermin is only a symbolic embodiment of oral vermin.”
In his book “Fragments from a Discourse on Love,” Roland Barthes, for his part, confirms Lacan’s sayings, considering that the lover’s body is a childish body par excellence. Since he is unable to be convinced that he is not the other, and is afraid that the beloved will prefer someone else over him, he sometimes intends to erase himself, and at other times to erase the beloved. If Qais bin Dharih reflects the tormented and weak side of childish fantasies searching for satisfaction, as in his saying:
If Lubna was mentioned, I would be excited to mention her
Just as the breast is fragile, it is an orphan
The other side of the equation is represented by the Homsian jinn rooster, who, due to excessive jealousy and unrealized possession, deliberately killed his beloved Ward, and it seemed to him that she had granted the witness of her lips to someone else, and he said after he killed her:
I ran my sword through her throat
And my tears are running down her cheeks
I have been quenched by her rich blood for a long time
Passion quenched my lips from hers
The deep intertwining between love and war also left its effects in the language itself, such that the epithets and semantic fields related to the first were almost completely borrowed from the second, which explains the description of love as violent, passionate, predatory, destructive, destructive, and murderous, making death its inevitable destination and obligatory outcome. Jagged eyelashes, predatory eyelashes, lethal eyes, dismembered livers, torn hearts, stolen minds, and so on are also evoked in the fierce battle of love.
In his book “The Sociology of Arab Spinning,” Al-Taher Labib draws attention to the close relationship between love and war, where the two semantic fields of military and emotional conquests overlap, including plans to lure, besiege, tighten the cordon, surprise, and overthrow the other’s defenses. In addition, the repeated use of arrows turns love into a state of hunting, as confirmed by Denis de Rigmont in his reference book “Love and the West.” There is no clearer evidence of approaching love with tools of war than the words of Imru’ al-Qais, addressing Fatima, his steadfast beloved:
I am tempted that your love is my killer
And you do whatever Camry heart
And your eyes only shed tears to strike
With your arrows in tens of a dead heart
As the Arabian desert turned into a vast theater for arrows exchanged between lovers, the Umayyad poet Jarir insists on emphasizing the relationship between the triangle of love, beauty, and death. While he acknowledges that both lovers aim their arrows at the other, he acknowledges that the women in love never make mistakes in their aim, because they draw their arrows from the quiver of the jinn, unlike the case of their miserable lovers, as appears in his saying:
You hunt hearts with the nobility of a jinn
We throw some of them away and do not catch them
Then the poet returns at a later time to declare that the imbalance of power between masculinity and femininity is due to the latter’s arming itself, despite her muscular weakness, with the magic of the eyes that causes madness and mixed minds, leading to murder. In this he says:
The eyes at the end of which are poplars
They killed us and then did not revive our dead
They strike the core until it has no movement
They are the weakest human beings created by God
The Arabs found the association of love with equestrianism and war in the character of Antara Al-Absi as his ideal model, where the two opposite sparkles of lust and death are strikingly united. As the distance between the shine of swords and the shine of the lover’s woman’s lips disappears, the poet addresses his beloved by saying:
I mentioned to you that spears are spears
Semen and India’s eggs dripping from my blood
I wanted to kiss swords because…
It shined like the sparkles of your smiling mouth
Arab poets did not find any embarrassment in admitting their weakness in the face of love, nor did they find any contradiction between submission to the beauty of the beloved and their extraordinary courage on the battlefield. Abu Firas Al-Hamdani allowed himself to go beyond specificity to generalization, and to announce in the name of the group to which he belongs:
We are a people whose eyes make us melt
We are melting iron
The obedience of the hands of love leads us to the clouds
We are led into black wars
You will see us free on the bad day
In peace, the slaves were given to the slaves
Muslim bin Al-Walid, nicknamed Sari’ Al-Ghawani, did not deviate from the same meaning, when he said:
We fight the heroes of the raid and annihilate them
And the luck of the heels kills us in peace
The deep intertwining between love and war has left its effects in the language itself, so that epithets and semantic fields related to the first are almost completely borrowed from the second.
The matter of love in the West is no different from what it is in the East, despite the differences between the two civilizations in terms of concepts, traditions, and vision of things. Baudelaire, especially in his collection “Flowers of Evil,” may be one of the Western poets who most embodies the relationship of beauty with horror and love with death, and he is the one who promises that “love, sitting on the skull of humanity, arrogantly sits on the throne of the world.” His difficult emotional relationship with Jean Duval seemed like a real war during which they exchanged all forms of violence, lust, and destruction. He does not hesitate to address her by saying, “You entered like a knife into my miserable, mourning heart.” May your hands be punished, O cunning one, with whom I have bound my fate, like a prisoner in shackles and an alcoholic. Then he returns in another poem to confirm his overwhelming desire to take revenge on her, declaring without embarrassment: “I want, one night, when the hour of bliss strikes, to creep silently towards the treasures of your body, to punish your joyful flesh, and to thicken your forgiven chest with stabs.”
As for Pablo Picasso, due to his exacerbated ego and deep sense of superiority, he seemed like a true tyrant who wanted to possess all the women he could see, before including them as former concubines in his personal album, refusing to emancipate them completely and subjecting them to severe abuse. This prompted his friend Paul Eluard to say about him: “He loved Picasso very much, but he destroyed everything he loved.” Finally, nothing is more indicative of the painful, conflictual nature of love than Nietzsche’s saying, “The misfortune of lovers is the harm and imbalance that subject them to physical combat.” They are doomed to destroy harmony among themselves and to constantly fight. The wounds one causes to the other is what makes them unite, and fighting is the price.”
