Alireza Korangy has been Assistant Professor of Classical Persian and Contemporary Iranian Linguistics at the University of Virginia and has taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2007 and is currently the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Persian Literature and acting president of Societas Philologica Persica. His recent books include Development of the Ghazal and Khaqani's Contribution: A Study of the Development of Ghazal and a Literary Exegesis of a 12th c. Poetic Harbinger (2013) and an edited volume, Essays in Islamic Philology, History, and Philosophy (2016). Hanadi Al-Samman is an associate professor of Arabic Language and Literature in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Anxiety of Erasure: Trauma, Authorship, and the Diaspora in Arab Women's Writings (2015) and has published in the Journal of Arabic Literature; Women's Studies International Forum; and Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics. She is co-editor of "Queer Affects" a special issue of the International Journal of Middle East Studies.Michael C. Beard is Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor of English and Adjunct Professor of Peace Studies at the University of North Dakota. He is co-editor of the journal Middle Eastern Literatures and is editor for the monograph series Middle East Literature in Translation. He publishes frequently on Arabic and Persian literatures, as well as translating works of literature. He has won the Lois Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work.

In the long literary history of the Middle East, the notion of 'the beloved' has been a central trope in both the poetry and prose of the region. This book explores the concept of the beloved in a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary manner, revealing how shared ideas on the subject supersede geographical and temporal boundaries, and ideas of nationhood. The book considers the beloved in its classical, modern and postmodern manifestations, taking into account the different sexual orientations and forms of desire expressed. From the pre-Islamic 'Udhri (romantic unrequited love), to the erotic same-sex love in thirteenth century poetry and prose, the divine Sufi reflections on the topic, and post-revolutionary love encounters in Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures connects the affective and cultural with the political and the obscene. In focusing on the diverse manifestations of love and tropes of the lover/beloved binary, this book is unique in foregrounding what is often regarded as a 'taboo subject' in the region.
The multi-faceted outlook reveals the variety of philological, philosophical, poetic and literary forms that treat this significant motif.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Dangerous Love
Sarah Bin Tyeer (University of London/SOAS)
Writing to the End of Love: Wah?d and the Motif Extremes of Ibn al-R?m?...............................................................................................................
Asaad al-Saleh (Indiana University)
Sexual Displacement in Season of Migration to the North........................................................................................................................
Benjamin Koerber (Rutgers University)
The Seduction of Fayr?z Ba?r?: The Affective Dimensions of Cultural Politics in Gam?l al-Gh???n?'s ?ik?y?t al-Khab?'a (2002)..............................................................................
Divine Love
Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab (Leiden University)
Satan as the Lover of God in Islamic Mystical Writings.........................................................................................................
Miral Mahgoub (Arizona State University)
Reverence for the Beloved as a Religious Metaphor: A Study of Raj?'a '?lim's ?ubb? (The Beloved)......................................................................................................
Gender and Love
Dylan Oehler-Stricklin (Washington University in St. Louis)
Individualism and the Beloved in the Poetry of Fur?gh Farrukhz?d......................................................................................................
Richard Serrano (Rutgers University)
"Making Love through Scholarship in Jam?l Buthayna".......................................................................................................
Domenico Ingenito (University of California Los Angeles)
Jah?n Malik Kh?t?n: Gender, Canon and Persona in the Poems of a Premodern Persian Princess.........................................................................................................
Erotic Love
Pernilla Myrne (University of Gothenburg)
Pleasing the Beloved: Sex and True Love in a Medieval Arabic Erotic Compendium..................................................................................................
Paul Sprachman (Rutgers University)
Love and Lust in the Early Islamic Republic: Amir Hassan Cheheltan's Revolution Street...................................................................................................................................................
Christine Kalleney (Franklin and Marshal College)
Tempting the Theologian: The "Cure" of Wine's Seduction.............................................................................................................................
Dialectical Love
Mehmet Karabela (Queen's University)
Lovers in the Age of the Beloveds: Classical Ottoman Divan Literature and the Dialectical Tradition......................................................................................................
Ahmad Obiedat (Wake Forest University)
The Semantic Field of Love in Classical Arabic: Understanding the Subconscious Meaning Preserved in the "?ubb" Synonyms and Antonyms through Their Etymologies....................................................................................................