Beauty in Islam

The words ḥusn and jamāl and other derivatives of the same roots mean beauty. Several other terms are used in the Qur’an to refer to beauty and perfection in connection with God’s creation of the world such as zukhruf, ṭayyib, bahīj, zīna and their derivatives. The derivatives of ḥusn are used in the Qur’an in the sense of goodness, virtue as well as excellence and perfection, as in aḥsana kulla shay’in khalaqahu (32:7), fa-aḥsana ṣuwarakum (40:64; 64:3). The stem ḥusn appears as an attribute of the names of God, al-asmā’ al-ḥusnā (59:24), commonly understood as the ‘beautiful’ names although it should be perhaps interpreted in the sense of ‘good’ and ‘best’. In classical Arabic, ḥusn means ‘beauty’ and is synonymous with jamāl. Ḥusn and jamāl with their derivatives encompass aesthetic as well as moral beauty – in other words, the beautiful and the good. 

The Qur’an dedicates an important place to the pleasing beauty of God’s creation. God made the world beautiful in the sense of appealing to the senses, by perfecting all things and giving them ornamental attributes. The term zayyana, meaning ‘to ornament’, is used in this context: God has adorned the sky with stars. Ornamentation is an essential aspect of beauty (15:16; 18:7; 27:88; 32:7; 35:27-28; 37:6-7; 41:11-12; 50:6; 67:3-5). One of the most powerful testimonies of the significance of sensuous beauty in religion is the fact that, unlike in Christianity, the Qur’an and other Muslim religious texts describe Paradise in physical sensual terms, referring to precious materials – natural and processed – such as gems and jewellery, garments, architecture, and ornaments (55:54, 76), and to beautiful young women, or khayyirāt and ḥisān (55:70). 

God not only created nature to please, but he also gave the human being an excellent shape: aḥsan taqwīm (95:4). Human beings are allowed to adorn themselves with beautiful garments and jewellery for which God provided the material on earth (7:26; 16:14; 35:12). The only truly narrative text in the Qur’an, 12:30, 32, which tells the story of Potiphar’s wife’s encounter with the Prophet Joseph, powerfully expresses the fascination with human beauty. When Potiphar’s wife introduces Joseph to her female friends, they get so mesmerised by his physical beauty that they cut themselves with the fruit knives they are holding.  

A rare phenomenon in the history of religions is the abundance of descriptions of the Prophet Muhammad’s physical features and of how he dressed and perfumed himself. Following this tradition, the Arabic medieval chronicles often describe the physical features of monarchs. Verbal portraiture substituted for effigies. 

Several hadiths (recorded traditions of the prophet Muhammad) praise human beauty as a virtue, describing the handsome believer as the utmost perfection, or saying that handsome people are auspicious: uṭlubu al-khayra ʿinda ḥisān al-wujūh. The philosopher and jurist Al-Ghazali (d. 1111) describes physical beauty as blessing and power (niʿma, qudra). The notion of beauty being auspicious is also found in the visual arts. Erotic literature and the celebration of female beauty had an acknowledged status even among members of the religious establishment.

The famous and often-quoted hadith about God being beautiful and loving everything beautiful might not necessarily be authentic, but it always had a great impact, particularly on Sufism. 

From the perspective of Sunni orthodox thought, al-Ghazali’s discourse on beauty (using both terms jamāl and ḥusn) is paramount. Beauty is good because it is a source of pleasure and pleasure is pursued for its own sake. God’s perfect creation is comparable to a work of art made by an artist or designer (muṣawwir). Just as a work of art, be it calligraphy or wall painting, inspires the beholder to reflect upon the artist’s talent, the beauty of the world inspires the human being to think of the Designer who created it. In long passages, al-Ghazali invites the believer to contemplate the wonders of the universe in search of God, ‘pleasure being a form of cognition’. God created beauty for the human beings to enjoy so that they get a taste of the eternal bliss of the Hereafter. Beauty can be visual, as well as perceptible by smell, touch and also cognition. Al-Ghazali also referred to a form of beauty beyond the material one sensed through sight, hearing, touch, and taste, which is the intelligible beauty of knowledge and virtue perceived rather by ‘inner sight’. The more exalted the subject of perception, the higher the pleasure so that the knowledge of God is the perfect perception of beauty and the utmost form of pleasure that surpasses all sensuous and intellectual satisfactions.

While Arabic-Islamic culture did not articulate an all-encompassing theory of art, it produced dispersed yet elaborate concepts of artistic experiences regarding specific subjects, such as literature and music, that together form a substantial corpus on aesthetics. Although al-Ghazali compared God’s creation with a work of art, human artistic achievement was not associated with divine sources as in Greek culture. The notion of genius that would associate the human being with divine attributes is absent in the Islamic framework. Artistic works, ṣināʿāt, belong to the realm of knowledge that needs to be acquired through endeavour. 

Because of the significance of poetry as the paramount form of art in pre-modern Islamic society, the elaborate concepts of Arab poetical aesthetics are relevant to the understanding of other artistic aspects of culture as well. Despite the Prophet’s alleged hostility to poets and the rejection of music by some puritanical theologians, these arts were always highly celebrated and cultivated theoretically and practically. Retaining its faithfulness to the ideals of pre-Islamic poetical tradition and its hedonistic associations, and its emphasis on formal aesthetic and stylistic criteria, classical poetry maintained a worldly outlook and was left to thrive in the secular domain. 

Classical Arabic literary criticism adopted the Aristotelian distinction between form and content. The good poet was the one who masters his art, no matter the morality of his subject matter, with literary skills having priority over sincerity. According to the Persian mathematician al-Isbahani (d. 967), in his Book of Songs, ‘not all songs have a meaning and not all that is meaningful pleases the viewer and entertains the listener’. Meanings are everywhere, according to the Arabic prose writer al-Jahiz (d. 868) – the issue is to give them an attractive formulation. Later, historian and sociologist Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) judged most religious poetry as inferior because of the ubiquity of its content. Meaning, which is not the poet’s main concern, is like water, it assumes the shape and colour of the form that contains it. The poet’s role is to shape the container. An extreme statement endorsing the aesthetic function of the poetry is a saying that poetry is associated with sin and if involved with morality it degenerates. Unlike the Greeks, who considered poetry as a gift rather than a science, the Arabs emphasised the technical aspect of poetry and other arts, which require study and skill rather than divine revelation. The poet was often compared with a jeweller operating with precious metals. 

In his elaborate theories of literary criticism, the Tunisian poet Hazim al-Qartajanni (d. 1284) defined poetry as aiming to touch and move the soul rather than address the mind rationally as the natural sciences do. He emphasised the aesthetic experience where images, imagination and fantasy are involved in enhancing, exaggerating, and transfiguring reality to accomplish the required psychological effect. In the same vein, the eleventh century Persian polymath Ibn Sina qualified Arabic poetry as mainly aesthetic and subjective, made to address emotions, delight and impress without being bound by moral or ethical criteria. With these attributes it differed from Greek narrative and epic poetry, which was purposeful and engaged and aimed at influencing human conduct.  

The culture of adab at the court of Baghdad created the concept of the zarif, meaning the refined person. Al-Muwashsha (meaning the Embroidered Gown) is a manual of the ninth century authored by a man called al-Washsha (meaning the Embroiderer), describing in detail the rules and etiquette and social aesthetics that includes a section on the hygiene of the body as well as a section on the zarif’s female counterpart, the zarifa. The zarif has a pleasing appearance with a slender figure, dresses with taste without ostentation, cultivates a refined lifestyle, and carefully selects the objects he surrounds himself with. He displays fine manners at table and in conversations. The epitome of the zarif was the musician Ziryab (d. 857), educated in Baghdad where he served at the court of Harun al-Rashid, before he became famous at the court of the caliph ʿAbd al-Rahman II (r. 822-852) in Cordoba, where he introduced his own fashions in music, dress, cosmetics and cuisine. 

From the litterateur’s perspective, al-Jahiz emphasised the individual psychological factor in the aesthetic experience, giving it priority over fixed criteria of beauty. His approach followed the principle inherited from Manichaeism, that all things combine simultaneously positive and negative features, whose ultimate value and impact on the mind are determined by the quality and proportion of their mixture. Bad and good are not absolute values, but a matter of circumstances and subjective experience. Al-Jahiz viewed the human being as a microcosm which combines all elements and attributes that exist in nature, with all their disparity and contradictions. Addressing the subject of abstract beauty as being based on a mental process, al-Jahiz’s view was that it was not a commonly accessible matter, but rather required intellectual skill to be perceived.

These concepts articulated by literati and philosophers were not detached from the reality on the ground, but rather mirrored the taste of the broad worldly environment of an urban society. The immense success of the Maqamat of the poet al-Hariri (d. 1122) as a literary narrative in rhymed prose, written in a highly recherché style, is one example. The hero of this narrative is a rather immoral person who makes his living with dubious methods, yet always succeeds in getting away unpunished thanks to his eloquent poetic pleadings, which elicited people’s sympathy and forgiveness. 

However, some thinkers, rather than literary critics, adopted Platonic concepts of beauty, such as al-Razi (d. 925 or 935), Miskawayh (d. 1030) and Ibn Hazm (d.1064), condemning love poetry and romances as frivolous and immoral. The aesthetic mainstream approach of classical poetry did not preclude the development of an engaged poetry with political, moral or religious associations as, for example, the poems interspersed in the chronicles or the poetry of jihad in times of warfare. Religious poetry was recited in mosques on festive occasions, notably the genre dedicated to the praise of the Prophet. The poem of ‘the Mantle’ or the Burda by the Sufi poet al-Busiri (d. 1294), is a most prominent example of such poetry, which acquired a liturgical and sacred status over the entire Muslim world. The poet composed it in praise of the Prophet following his recovery from paralysis after the Prophet appeared to him in a dream, wrapping him in a mantle. The poem had an unparalleled echo already in the poet’s lifetime. Inscriptions with its verses were widely engraved in sanctuaries and homes and used as talismans to avert illness or celebrate recovery. However, Sufi poetry symbolically adopted the conventional forms of wine and erotic poetry to address God. 

Whereas poetry was conceived to incite imagination and arouse emotion, music was the art to which Arabic literature attributed the most profound impact on the soul. Its stirring power was believed to lead to the profound religious experience of ecstasy or to the kind of intoxication associated immorality. Although the jurists Abu Hanifa (d. 767) and Shafiʿi (d. 820) condemned music, in particular when performed by slave girls, al-Ghazali contradicted them with the argument that there is no statement in the Qur’an or in the Prophet’s traditions to justify such hostility. One of al-Ghazali’s arguments in favour of music was that it is perceived by one of our five senses which, together with the mind, were created to be used. He mentions the musical performances of the Patriarch David and the singing of birds which flatters the ear and refers to a hadith saying that all prophets sent by God had a beautiful voice; a preacher should have, therefore, a pleasant harmonic speech to move his listeners. He divided the influence of music into two categories – spiritual and physical.

Al-Ghazali’s opinion was endorsed by other theologians, especially among the Sufis who, referring to the biblical Davidic tradition and to hadith, believed music to be an attribute of Paradise. In Sufi rituals, the samāʿ or musical performances, including singing and dancing, have been universally practised – although the debate over their permissibility has never stopped. Al-Ghazali viewed the samāʿ as an encounter with God that leads the mystic to ecstasy, uncovering hidden emotions and purifying the heart. Other advocates of music and poetry argued that music, like poetry or even language, cannot per se be wrong; their moral value depends rather on their context and use. Al-Ghazali, however, condemned the use of certain musical instruments that were employed in frivolous contexts. He approved of love songs because they arouse desire, strengthen feelings and excite pleasure, all of which are permissible on the condition that the relationship between the lovers is lawful – according to al-Ghazali, the Prophet himself authorised music, singing and dance as a natural expression of pleasure. Music performances should be allowed on festive occasions and celebrations, for pleasure is laudable. Al-Ghazali criticised opponents of music as being incapable of perceiving the beauty of God’s creation. 

Masʿudi (d. 956), who compiled the classic and gigantic Book of Songs, considered the study of music to be the noblest bequest of Greek culture because music ignites and transports the soul – it is the highest of all pleasures. Music was not only art but also science, pleasure, and therapy – a prescription for physicians to administer to the mind or body of the diseased. As many other authors, he believed that there was a correspondence between the human body and the universe and that the humours of the body were tuned to the vibration of music. 

The Ikhwān al-Ṣafā (Brethren of Purity – a tenth century secret society of philosophers), adopted the Pythagorean principle of mathematical proportions as defining the beauty of all things and as the basis of universal harmony. Earthly art is a reflection of the heavenly, superior world. The principle of earthly beauty reflecting the heavenly was adopted in Sufism, especially in its poetry, in which the love of God is often expressed using the terminology of erotic love and the ecstasy of the divine union depicted as drunkenness. Earthly music is an echo of cosmic music, produced by the movement of the celestial bodies reflecting the harmony of the universe. It can produce a perfect emotion which can exalt the soul and repel ugliness. It generates pleasure to the soul like wine does to the body. Ikhwān al-Ṣafā distinguished two aspects to the art of music - the art itself and its psychological effect. 

Ibn Khaldun regarded music as the most sophisticated form of art because it could only subsist in a highly civilised and urbanised society as an expression of leisure and luxury, devoid of any function other than that of pastime and enjoyment. It therefore perishes when its cultural environment declines. In the visual arts and material culture of the mediaeval Muslim world, the depiction of music occupies a prominent place as a sign of auspiciousness. It is often associated with representations of courtly scenes, showing musicians and musical performances along other pastimes. The juxtaposition of good wishes as inscriptions to these scenes reiterates this message.

Arabic literature on kingship includes numerous references to the sages of Greece, India, and Persia, who described music both as a serious subject and a useful pleasure that educated and cultivated the mind, improved the character, and revived the spirit. It is therapy for melancholy and is therefore essential to the well-being of kings.  The belief in the therapeutic effects of music, or the influence of musical modes on the mind, was based on the Greek doctrine according to which the elements and humours are in relation to particular notes and rhythms, reflecting cosmic order. The Arab polymath Al-Kindi (d. 873) was one of the great protagonists of this doctrine; he analysed the soothing combination of music, colours and perfumes. Musical scenes are one of the major motifs in the pre-modern decorative arts. As symbols of pleasure and princely life, they fulfilled an auspicious function. 

Unlike poetry and music, the visual arts have not been the subject of theoretical debate in Arabic literature. In recent years, historians of Islamic art have dedicated their attention to the Arab mathematician and physicist Ibn al-Haytham’s (d. 1039) discourse on beauty. Ibn al-Haytham achieved a breakthrough in the field of optics by studying the mental aspects of visual perception. Sight can only perceive the physical properties of an object, or the raw material, which it channels to the mind without analysing them. It is the mind that interprets the visual impulses that reach the eye by physical means. The perception of an object’s beauty is achieved through the mental faculty of discrimination by establishing analogies, categories and associations with stored memories. 

Ibn al-Haytham’s psychological analysis of visual aesthetics and the mental process of visual perception converge with the theories of his contemporary, Ibn Sina (d. 1037), who emphasised the psychological factor, endorsed in most Arabic statements on beauty. Ibn Sina conceived pleasure as dependent on two factors – beauty and the perception of it. The latter is a form of knowledge and thus variable and relative. The intensity of pleasure is proportional to the degree of perfection and at the same time to the extent of its perception. 

The emphasis on the pleasure factor in beauty may perhaps explain the prominence and characteristic significance of ornament in Islamic art. Decorated surfaces have been one of the earliest expressions of Islamic art. The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, built in 691, was decorated with glass mosaics not only on its inner walls following Byzantine tradition, but on the outside as well. The entire inner walls of the Umayyad mosque of Damascus, completed in 721, were the largest surface ever to be decorated with glass mosaics. Surface decoration also characterised Abbasid architecture and the far-reaching spread of glazed pottery from ninth century Iraq was an unprecedented phenomenon in the world at that time. The qualification of Islamic art by some Western scholars as horror vacui (literally ‘fear of empty space’, or filling the entire surface of a space or artwork with detail), although highly debatable, is a reaction to the significance of surface decoration in Islamic art and the development of infinite geometrical designs and their arabesque interpretation. Extreme orthodox opinion rejected the ornamentation of the mosque, the melodious recitation of the Qur’an and the golden illuminations of its manuscripts. However, the evidence of practice reveals a clear vote in favour of aesthetic and artistic expression as a form of religious veneration. Magnificently illuminated Qur’an manuscripts are among the greatest achievements of Islamic art as is the ornamentation of mosques. The melodious recitation of the Holy Book was cultivated according to musical rules and performance styles. 

A remarkable feature of Islamic art and material culture was the investment of great skills and intense labour to adorn objects made of common or base materials, turning them into works of art for princely patrons, such as stucco on brick in architecture or copper alloys for vessels.

The dogma that the Qur’an is the word of God transmitted to humanity in the form of a book has played a decisive role in the visual arts; calligraphy was a highly regarded artistic discipline. Calligraphy was not confined to books or religious texts, being rather a major ornamental motif universally applied. Under a predominantly political and urban artistic patronage, the same artistic idiom was applied indiscriminately in religious as well secular contexts following autonomous aesthetic rather than cultic criteria.  

Although the hostility to figural representations, based on hadith rather than explicitly prescribed in the Qur’an, is confirmed in the sacral domain of the mosque and the Qur’anic text, the reality of material culture indicates that its impact was not significant beyond the domain of worship. Figural representations have an uninterrupted tradition with varying emphasis across regions and periods. It has been argued that the exclusion of figural representations from the religious domain led artistic creativity to unfold in the direction of abstract and geometric designs. The taste for abstract rather than naturalistic motifs cannot be explained alone with the ban of figural motifs in the religious context. After the construction of the Umayyad mosque of Damascus, with its uninhabited gardens, the genres of landscapes and still-lifes, which are permissible, did not appeal much to Islamic artists. The pavements of the desert palace of Khirbat al-Mafjar in eighth-century Palestine, which is the largest mosaic carpet known to date, indicates the passion for the geometrical ornaments inherited from the Byzantine Levant that influenced Islamic art in the following centuries. 

When referring to architecture, the Qur’an mentions the ruins of ancient cities and the vestiges of bygone civilisations as examples of the futility of earthly life that should serve as a lesson in humility, in the same sense as the tower of Babel in the Bible exemplifies the ostentatious aspect of architecture. The Qur’an’s disdain for worldly architecture is reiterated in the hadith. This, however, did not preclude Muslim monarchs, whose duty was to establish and oversee the religious institutions in their realm, from becoming major patrons of religious architecture and art. For the same reasons, some scholars took a sceptical attitude towards ostentatious monuments and the lavish decoration of sanctuaries, among them Ibn Hazm and al-Ghazali. However, the mainstream of Islamic culture saw in the lavish architecture and decoration of the mosques a glorification of Islam as a religion and as a political force. This attitude is confirmed in the architectural legacy of the Muslim world. 

In absence of any theological dictate, the design of the mosques adopted a variety of forms, some even inspired from Christian architecture, yet following regional traditions. The only religious precept to be adhered in mosque architecture is the orientation towards Mecca. 

The words ‘Paradise’ and ‘Heaven’ have been used in the last decades in numerous titles of Western publications dealing with Islamic art, making it a cliché to associate Islamic art with paradisiacal visions. Although the material culture and the arts of the Islamic world cannot be reduced to being more motivated or inspired by the after-life than other artistic traditions, the tangible nature of the Muslim Paradise, where the believer’s felicity is a sensual experience, mirrors a culture that celebrates the beauty of the form.

Citations

The main secondary sources for this article, based on Arabic sources, are: Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Beauty in Arabic Culture, (Princeton 1999) and José Miguel Puerta Vílchez, Historia del Pensamiento Estético Àrabe, (Madrid 1997); English translation: C. Lopez-Morillas, Aesthetics in Arabic Thought: from pre-Islamic Arabia through al-Andalus, (Leiden 2017). Citations of the latter refer to the Spanish text. ʿAbbās, I. Tārīkh al-naqd al-adabī ʿinda al-ʿarab. 2nd ed.,( Amman 1993); Abu Deeb, K. Al-Jurjānī’s Theory of Poetic Imagery, (London 1979); idem, Literary criticism, in: The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature. Abbasid Belles-Lettres, eds. J.Ashtiany & T.M. Johnstone, (Cambridge 1990), 339-387;  Allen, T., Imagining Paradise in Islamic Art, (Sebastopol/ Calif. 1993); Idem, and  Five Essays on Islamic Art, (Solipsist Press 1988); Allen, R. and D. S. Richards (eds.), Arabic Literature in the Post-Classical Period, (Cambridge 2006; Arnold, T. W., Painting in Islam, (New York 1965); Basset R., ‘Burda’’, EI2; Behrens-Abouseif, D.“Beyond the secular and the sacred: Koranic inscriptions in medieval Islamic art and material culture”, in: Word of God, Art of Man: The Koran and its Creative Expressions; Selected Proceedings from the International Colloquium, London, 18-21 October 2003, ed. F. Suleman, (Oxford 2007), 41-9; Bencheikh, J.E., Poétique Arabe. Essai sur les voies d’une création, (Paris 1975);  Dahiyat, I. M., Avicenna’s commentary on the poetics of Aristotle, Leiden 1974; Ettinghausen, R., Al-Ghazzālī on beauty, in: Art and Thought, Issued in Honor of Dr. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday. (ed. K. Bharatna Iyer), (London/Luzac 1947), 160-65., (repr. in: Islamic Art and Archaeology. Collected Papers, ed. M. 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Rémi Larousse, (Paris 2008); Neubauer, E., Musiker am Hofe der frühen Abbasiden, ( Frankfurt a.M. 1965); Pellat, Ch., Arabische Geisteswelt dargestellt von Charles Pellat auf Grund der Schriften von al-Ǧāḥiẓ 777-869,( Zürich/Stuttgart 1967); Rosenthal, F., Four Essays on art and literature in Islam, Leiden 1971; idem, Das Fortleben der Antike im Islam, (Zürich/Stuttgart 1965) ; Sabra, A.I. (trans. & comment.), The Optics of Ibn al-Haytham. Books I-III On Direct Vision, 2 vols., (London, 1989); Sawa, G. D., Music performance practice in the early ʿAbbāsid era, (Toronto 1989); Schimmel, A., Calligraphy and Islamic culture, (New York 1984); Shehadi, F., Philosophies of music in medieval Islam, (Leiden/New York/Köln 1995); Shiloah, A. (trans. & ed.), al-Kātib, al-Ḥasan Ibn Aḥmad Ibn ʿAlī, La Perfection des connaissances musicales (Kitāb kamāl adab al-ġinā’), (Paris 1972; Sperl, S., Mannerism in Arabic poetry - A structural analysis of selected texts (3rd century AH/9th century AD- 5th century AH/11th century AD), (Cambridge/New York 1989); Trabulsi, A., La Critique poétique des Arabes, (Damascus 1995); Ward, G.R., Beauty, in: Encyclopaedia of the Koran, (Leiden/Boston/Köln 2001); ʿUṣfūr, J. Qirā’at al-turāth al-naqḍī, (Kuwait 1992); idem, al-Ṣūra ‘l-fanniya fī l-turāth al-naqḍī wa-l-balāghī, (Cairo 1992); Van Gelder, G.J., The Bad and the Ugly. Attitudes towards invective poetry (hijā’) in classical Arabic literature, (Leiden/New York 1988).

The selected primary sources referred to in this article are: 

al-Farābī, Iḥṣā’ al-ʿulūm, ed. ʿU. Amīn (Cairo 1949); al-Ghazālī, Iḥyā’ ʿulūm al-dīn, 16 vols.,(Cairo 1357/1938-39); al-Ḥarīrī, Sharḥ maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī, commented by Ibn al-Khashshāb and Ibn Barbarī, (n.p. 1326/1908-9); Ḥāzim al-Qartajannī, Minhāj al-bulaghā’ wa sarāj al-udabā’ , (Tunis 1966); Ibn Ḥazm, Ṭawq al-ḥamāma, (Beirut 1992); Ibn Khaldūn, al-Muqaddima, (Beirut n.d.); Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Rawḍat al-muḥibbīn, Cairo n.d; al-Iṣbahānī, Kitāb al-aghānī, 24 vols.,( Cairo 1963); al-Farābī, Kitāb al-musīqī al-kabīr, ed. Gh. ʿA. Khashaba (Cairo 1967); al-Jāḥiẓ, al-Ḥayawān. eds. ʿA. Hārūn & M.B. Ḥalabī (Cairo 1948); al-Jāhiẓ, (attributed to), al-Kitāb al-musammā bi-l-maḥāsin wa-l-aḍḍāḍ. (Le Livre des Beautés et des Antithèses), ed. Gerlov Van Vloten (Leiden 1898); (repr. Amsterdam 1974); al-Jurjānī, ʿAbd al-Qāhir, Asrār al-balāgha fī ʿilm al-bayān, (Beirut 1995); al-Kātib, al-Ḥasan Ibn Aḥmad. Kitāb kamāl adab al-ghināʾ, ed. Gh.ʿA. Khashaba, (Cairo, 1975); al-Masʿūdī, Murūj al-dhahab, Beirut 1982; al-Nawājī, Ḥulbat al-kumayt fī l-adab wa-l-nawādir al-mutaʿalliqa bi-l-khamriyyāt, (Cairo 1299/1881-82); al-Washshā, ʿAbū Ṭayyib Muḥammad Ibn Isḥāq, Kitāb al-muwashshā, ed. R. Brünnow (Leiden 1886); Hämeen-Anttila, Jaakko, ‘Al-Suyūṭī and Erotic Literature’, in: (ed.) Antonella Ghersetti, Al-Suyuti, a Polymath of the Mamluk Period. Proceedings of the themed day of the First Conference of the School of Mamluk Studies (Ca' Foscari University, Venice, June 23, 2014), Leiden 2016.