Recently published by the Family Library, in the Egyptian General Book Authority, headed by Dr. Ahmed Bahey El-Din, the book “The Perfect Love of the Arabs” by Dr. Youssef Khalif.
In the introduction to the book, Youssef Khalif says: “Whoever thinks that virginal love is a phenomenon that was unique to the Arab desert in the Umayyad era alone, or that it is one of the colors of love that was unique to the Athra tribe among all the Arab tribes, is mistaken. This type of love is as old as this poetry, and the roots of this love extend back to the pre-Islamic era. For her sake, he gave his life and his art for her love.
The lives and poetry of these orphaned men were nothing but a more similar picture of the life and poetry of the Umayyad virgins, so that it is impossible to say that this love did not appear except in the days of the Umayyads.
-The Umayyad life was not the one that created this love out of nothingness, or created it for the first time in the history of the Arabs, but it is the Arab desert since its earliest times that created it and brought it into being. The first time, then it was printed with its new Islamic stamps, so its distinctive features were completed, and its traditions and components settled with which it acquired its final image and its final, fixed form.
-He continued: «This is the basic idea that I try in these pages to present, trying to remove a settled illusion in the minds of many researchers in Arabic literature, and to correct a common mistake in our literary research, which is that virginal love is a purely Umayyad phenomenon that is rooted in connection with what preceded it.
From the beginning, I am not with those who believe that this love entered the myth and deepened it until it turned it into a purely mythical product, or a group of stories woven by the imagination of the narrators, and formulated by the Achilles of Samar. This is another illusion that ignores the nature of the environment in which this love appeared.
