Medieval Islamic societies considered lovesickness a distinct mental illness, research shows

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 10^th 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 11^th century Ibn Sīnā described how the mental state of a woman who was lovesick made her physically weak and ill. In the 13^th 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 13^th 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.

An example is Ibn al-Mubārak, who came from a family of physicians and served in Istanbul as the court physician to the Ottoman sultans Selim I (r. 918– 926/1512–1520) and Süleyman (r. 926–973/1520–1566). Earlier, he had studied in Shīrāz under the leading philosopher-theologian, Jalāl al-Dīn al-Dawānī (d. 908/1502).  He built upon Ibn al-Nafīs’s claim that ʿishq can be unintentional, and can even affect those who are morally upright more deeply. In his writings he explains that despite licit sexual intercourse being a treatment generally for this condition, the lovesickness of prophets and saints is not treated in that way since it is not accompanied by a desire for sexual intercourse. This is because their condition arises “due to the chastity of the lover” or “due to the perfection of the beauty of the beloved”, i.e. God, which makes the lover forget the desire for intercourse.