-For Haidar Bagir

Love: an explanation that has thrilled and confused for centuries; a word that easily becomes banal and yet can also make people ready to surrender themselves. We cannot define it. It is not part of what we know conceptually.

"Love cannot be defined," Ibnu Arabi, the 12th-century Spanish-born Sufi and thinker is claimed to have said in his al-Fut?ht al-Makkiyya (The Meccan Illuminations). "He who defines love has not known it...for l