Ishq: A History of Sacred Love

About the Book

There is a word that has no adequate translation. The Arabic dictionaries connect it to a climbing vine that wraps itself so completely around whatever it touches that the two can no longer be separated. In the Islamic philosophical tradition, it is considered the force that holds the cosmos together. In the poetry of the Punjab, it is the fire that burns the lover alive, and is called, by the burned, a blessing. The word is ishq. This book is its history.

Have you ever woken at three in the morning with an unidentifiable ache—not a physical pain, but a deep, sourceless longing?  For four thousand years, the poets, mystics, and philosophers of the East have explored this exact wound, giving it a name: ishq.

In this sweeping, beautifully crafted work of literary narrative nonfiction, Inderjeet Singh Chawla traces the history of this all-consuming sacred love across four millennia and six civilizations. Ishq is not ordinary affection; derived from an ancient Arabic word for a climbing vine that winds so tightly around a tree that it kills what it embraces, it is a terminal, absolute obsession that demands the annihilation of the self.

The journey begins in the river valleys of Mesopotamia with Sumerian hymns inscribed in wet clay, before moving to the pre-Islamic Arabian desert, where weeping at the abandoned ruins of a campsite became the first philosophical expression of absence as the truest medium of love. From there, Chawla guides readers to the intellectual epicenter of Abbasid Baghdad. Here, the mystic Al-Hallaj is executed for claiming to be God—proving that true ishq dissolves the boundary between lover and Beloved—and the female mystic Rābia introduces the radical concept of pure, disinterested love.

The fire of ishq then sweeps through Persia, finding its ultimate voice in Rūmī's weeping reed flute, before converging in the Indian subcontinent. There, the Arabic and Persian traditions fuse with Sanskrit devotion, echoing through the verses of Kabīr, the romance of Waris Shah, and the Sikh Gurūs' own radical courage, captured in Gurū Nānak's own words that to walk the path of love is to arrive "with your head on your palm."

Grounded in rigorous scholarship but written with gripping, accessible pacing, ISHQ is no detached academic study. It was born from the author's own profound spiritual awakening upon hearing a song by Bulleh Shah in a Delhi concert hall.

Whether you are a longtime student of Rūmi, a lover of Qawwali music, or encountering this immense spiritual tradition for the first time, ISHQ invites you to view the wound of separation not as a problem to be solved but as the very condition of being fully alive.

The fire burns. Step into the flame.