It is no coincidence that passion means suffering. In the Oxford English Dictionary, the etymology of passion develops from bodily affliction in the late 2nd and early 3rd centuries CE to the ‘affection of the mind’ in the post-classical period; from martyrdom in the 8th century to the suffering of a martyr in the 10th and narrative of the suffering of Jesus in the 12th; from strong emotion in the early 13th to passivity in the 14th and enthusiasm, anger, and violent love in the 16th, followed by sense perception in the late 16th and the person as an object of affection in the 17th centuries. The overlap of bodily affliction, affective suffering, and expression of love and emotion extends between Christian theology, storytelling traditions, and Sadean sexual pleasure. It covers classical Latin, Old French, Anglo-Norman, Middle High German, and subsequently Latin, French, English, German, Spanish, and Italian. Curiously, this physical, mental, and affective overlap in the Latin, Romance, and Germanic languages is captured in Persian by the two nouns dard and shur. In classical and modern Persian poetry as well as in everyday speech, dard refers to both physical pain and the pain of love (dard-e ‘eshq). In Urdu poetry, the ‘love-pain’ of scars, wounds, and burning aches ‘make pain itself a metaphor for love’. Shur ranges from passion, excitement, and passion of love (shur-e ‘eshq) to disorder, inner turmoil, and social tumult (shuridan) and political revolt (shuresh). In the traditional musical corpus known as Radif, Shur is the name of a Dastgah (modal system of organizing melodic types in Persian traditional music). Scholars such as Francis Pritchett have acknowledged the untranslatability of the word shorish (shuresh) in Urdu poetry, but have suggested ‘passion’ or ‘passionateness’ as English counterparts.