Poem: “I used to shun my companion”

I used to shun my companion
if his religion was not like mine;
but now my heart accepts every form.
It is a pasturage for gazelles, a monastery for monks,
a temple of idols, a Ka’ba for the pilgrim,
the tables of the Torah, the holy book of the Qur’an.
Love alone is my religion, and whichever way
its horses turn, that is my faith and creed.

“I used to shun my companion,” by an anonymous medieval Arabic poet, from Music of a Distant Drum: Classical Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew Poems, translated by Bernard Lewis. Copyright © 2001 by Princeton  University Press. Reprinted by permission.