by Robert Irwin
The Chief Ustadh was sparing of words and disinclined to talk except when questions were asked him, and he found someone capable of understanding him. Then he would become vivacious, and things would be heard from him which were not to be had of anyone else, with eloquent expressions, choice phraseology, and subtle sentiments, with no hesitation or difficulty. I saw at his court a number of persons who endeavoured to win his favour by various accomplishments and forms of knowledge, and none of them could refrain from expressing his admiration for the proficiency of the Chief Ustadh in the very line which he had come to exhibit, and declare plainly that he had never seen his equal, and did not believe that his equal had been created.
He was so courteous, good-natured and simple-minded that when any specialist in any study or science presented himself, he would quietly listen and express approval of all he heard from him after the fashion of one who knew no more of that particular subject than enough to enable him to understand what was being communicated. Only after long association, involving the lapse of months or years, if it chanced that such a person asked a question of the Chief Ustadh, or something was said about the subject in his presence and he was desired to supplement it, did his tide swell, and his genius luxuriate, abashing the person who deemed himself master of the subject or matter. Many a self-conceited individual was put to shame in his presence, but only after he had given them free field and free rein, spared them till they had exhausted their stores, and rewarded them liberally for their performances.
Such then was his proficiency in recognized studies and sciences; in addition he was sole master of the secrets of certain obscure sciences which no-one professes, such as Mechanics, requiring the most abstruse knowledge of geometry and physics, the science of abnormal motions, the dragging of heavy weights, and of centres of gravity, including the execution of many operations which the ancients found impossible, the fabrication of wonderful engines for the storming of fortresses, stratagems against strongholds and stratagems in campaigns, the adoption of wonderful weapons, such as arrows which could permeate a vast space, and produce remarkable effects, mirrors which burned a very long way off, unheard-of sleight of hand, knowledge of the refinements of the art of modelling and ingenuity in the application of it. I have seen him in the room where he used to receive his intimate friends and associates take up an apple or something of the sort, play with it for a time, and then send it spinning having on it the form of a face scratched with his nail, more delicately than could have been executed by anyone else with the appropriate instruments and in a number of days.
H. F. Amedroz and D. S. Margoliouth, The Eclipse of the
'Abbasid Caliphate, vol. 5 (Oxford, 1920-21), pp. 293–8
COMMENTARY
In the remainder of Miskawayh’s obituary of Ibn al-'Amid the historian goes on to deal with the latter’s statecraft and military skill, and his shaping influence on the Buyid ruler 'Adud al-Dawla.
The flattering phrases in inverted commas are stock ones.
Ustadh is another word for master or chief.
Ibn Zayd al-Asadi al-Kumayt (c. 679-744) was a noted poet. However, little of his Diwan has survived to the present day.
Abu 'Ali al-Husayn ibn 'Abd Allah IBN SINA (980-1037), also known in the medieval West as Avicenna, was born in Turkestan and died in Hamadhan. He enjoyed immense fame as one of the Arab world’s greatest philosophers and physicians, and his compendious treatises on these subjects were translated into Latin and much studied in the West, where they had an important role in determining the shape of medieval scholasticism. Ibn Sina carefully studied Aristotle and other Greek philosophers, but he strove to take their thought further and, of course, to reconcile it with the Islamic revelation. Many of his works are now lost, but some 250 treatises and letters have survived. Like the Ikhwan al-Safa’ and many other philosophers, including Ibn Tufayl (see Chapter 6), Ibn Sina made occasional use of fiction or fantasy as a teaching device. So his philosophical work included ‘short stories in which personal and spiritual self-realization is expressed in symbolic form’, as Julian Baldick has noted. In the story of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, ‘Life, Son of Certainty’, he described how Hayy, a man growing up on a desert island, deduced the nature of the universe and the gnostic truth behind mere appearances. Thereafter two angels instruct Hayy in the nature of the universe. There is a fantastical, science-fiction quality to some of what they describe, such as the Spring of Life, the Muddy Sea in the far west, and the land of Perpetual Darkness. And there is the realm of terrestrial matter:
All kinds of animals and plants appear in that country; but when they settle there, feed on its grass, and drink its water, suddenly they are covered by outsides strange to their Form. A human being will be seen there, for example, covered by the hide of a quadruped, while thick vegetation grows on him. And so it is with other species. And that clime is a place of devastation, a desert of salt, filled with troubles, wars, quarrels, tumults; joy and beauty are but borrowed from a distant place.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological
Doctrines (Harvard, 1964), p. 269
The cosmic traveller will witness many other marvels as he goes on to visit the seven planets and their inhabitants.
In another of Ibn Sina’s visionary recitals, Risalat al-Tair, ‘Letter of the Bird’, an adept is transformed into a bird and has to fly across the universe in order to find his original home. Again the story is an allegory of the progress of the philosophical initiate. Another philosophical allegory, Salaman wa-Absal (‘Salaman and Absal’), is the story of two princely brothers and of how Absal, the younger, was passionately desired by Salaman’s queen. In order not to yield to her passion or fall victim to her plotting, Absal travelled the world with an army, conquering it in the name of his brother. Eventually, however, on returning to court, he was poisoned by Salaman’s queen. The story is a fable about the progress of the philosophic gnostic and Absal’s death is merely the last stage in the advance to perfect illumination.
'Abd al-Qadir Abu Bakr al-JURJANI (d. 1078), another Persian writing in Arabic, produced Asrar al-Balagha, or ‘Secrets of Eloquence’, a literary treatise which dealt, among other things, with the nature of imagery, the sources of fantasy and transformational powers of comparison and metaphor. Jurjani argued that language was a convention and that words, and indeed metaphors and similes, had no independent meaning, but depended on their placement in a linguistic whole. The relationship between a word and its meaning was essentially arbitrary. Eloquence was a function of construction according to grammatical rules. Jurjani was a highly sophisticated literary theorist, who managed to create a technical vocabulary of secular literary criticism which was distinct from that which had been developed to study figurative language in the Qur’an. Despite the importance of what Jurjani wrote for the critical appreciation of poetry, he was actually chiefly preoccupied with problems posed by the language and text of the Qur’an. For the most part what he wrote was austere and taxing, but in the two passages below he waxes lyrical about the magical properties of eloquence (echoing, perhaps unconsciously, old Jahili notions about the power and nature of poetry).
Now you must know that by virtue of this method, comparisons are filled with some sort of magic, which is hardly describable in its property…. For this magic reaches, at times, such a degree, that it is capable of converting the misogynist to a flirt, of distracting people from the sorrow caused by their children’s death, of conjuring away the awe of loneliness, of retrieving your lost joy. It bears witness to the intrinsic glory of poetry and brings to light the rank and power it possesses!
And a little further on, he also observed:
You know what is the matter with idols and how their adorers are fascinated by them and venerate them. The same is the case with poetry and the images it creates and the novelties it shapes and the meanings it instills into hearts, all of this to the effect that what is motionless and silent appears to the imagination in the shape of the living and s
peaking, what is dead and deaf in the function of the speaking and eloquent, rational and discerning, and the non-existent and irretrievable as if it were existent and visible.
Bürgel, The Feather of the Simurgh, p. 57
Following the lead of al-Mu'tazz and others, literary theoreticians worked on expounding the kinds of rhetorical figures and tropes which might be found in poetry – for example: jinas meant using in close proximity two words having the same root letters, but with different meanings; tibaq referred to two words with opposite meanings in the same line; or husn al-ta'lil meant ingenious assignment of cause; iham was a double entendre in which the more improbable sense of the word was the correct word. Jurjani’s comments on the magical effects of language came in a work which was devoted exclusively to the rhetoric of poetry. This was the case with almost all medieval Arabic literary criticism; it dealt only with poetry. According to the cultured Vizier Ibn 'Abbad, ‘Prose is scattered hither and thither like flying sparks, but poetry will last as long as graven stone.’
Abu al-Faraj produced what was in effect an encyclopedia of Arabic poetry. 'Ali ibn al-Husayn ABU AL-FARAJ al-Isfahani (897–c. 967) was born in Isfahan in south-western Persia. Although he had Umayyad ancestors, Isfahani was in fact a Shi'ite. (The Shi'ites traditionally hated the Umayyad caliphs for the deposition of 'Ali and the slaughter of his two sons, Hasan and Husayn.) Another curious thing about Abu al-Faraj is that he used to wear clothes without washing them, until they fell to bits. Despite this unprepossessing habit, he found Buyid patrons in Baghdad and later worked in Aleppo under the patronage of the Arab Emir Sayf al-Dawla al-Hamdani (reigned 945–67).
Abu al-Faraj’s 24-volume compilation, the Kitab al-Aghani, or ‘Book of Songs’, dealt in the first instance with a group of 100 poems set to music, chosen in the previous century by a group of professional musicians, including Ibrahim al-Mawsili, for the Caliph Harun al-Rashid. Here poems were classified as songs, according to the singing styles of old Baghdad which were used to deliver them. However, Abu al-Faraj went on to consider other poems that had been set to music and, more important, he provided such a huge amount of anecdotal background information about all the selected pieces and their authors that his anthology really doubles as both a biographical dictionary and a cultural history of the Arab world from pre-Islamic times until the end of the ninth century. (Abu al-Faraj has been quoted in an earlier chapter as a source on the life and poetry of the Umayyad prince Walid.) One of the leading features of the Kitab al-Aghani was its stress on tarab, a kind of ecstatic loss of self-control, as the ultimate goal of music and poetry. In the stories of The Thousand and One Nights, audiences regularly tear their clothes or faint away in response to the singing of poetry. According to one of the authorities (al-Hutai’ah) cited in the Aghani, ‘Music is one of the talismans of coition.’ Abu al-Faraj’s book, which was extraordinarily popular and well memorized, was born out of a kind of antiquarian impulse and it promoted formal and archaic virtues in poetry.
Sayf al-Dawla al-Hamdani, for whom al-Faraj worked, had lands in northern Syria that marched alongside those of the Byzantine empire, against which he waged jihad (holy war). He was also a major literary patron and his victories against the Byzantines (when they happened) were loyally commemorated by his pensioned war-poets. The occasional defeats might also be transformed by literary art into victories. Apart from Isfahani, Ibn Nubata, Mutanabbi, Kushajim, the grammarian Ibn Jinni and the philosopher Farabi were among the pensioned scholars and encomiasts at Sayf al-Dawla’s court. The poet Abu Firas was his kinsman.
Abu Yahya IBN NUBATA (946–84), who is supposed to have studied poetry under Mutanabbi, preached sermons at Sayf al-Dawla’s court. Many of them were in support of Sayf al-Dawla’s war against the Byzantines. Praise of God and the Prophet, the Last Judgement and fear of God, as well as the practice of jihad, were among his leading themes. Ibn Nubata’s example encouraged the new style saj' Muslim pulpit oratory lent itself to saj' and it was perhaps influenced by Christian use of rhymed prose in their sermons. Sermons were collected, written down and studied by literary men. Ibn Nubata was a master of khutba, or liturgical oratory. Muslim sermons were usually quite short and, unlike Christian sermons, they were not attached to the explication of some particular scriptural text. It was normal to open with praise and thanks to God. However, what follows is the main section of one of Ibn Nubata’s sermons, which is a passage of moral exhortation.
Rid the heart of thoughtlessness and the soul of lustful desires. Subdue licentiousness by the thought of the onrushing death. Fear the day when your sins will be recognized by their scars. Think of him who up on high calls from heaven; who makes the bones alive; who gathers mankind at a spot where illusions cease but where sorrow and repentance endure. A caller, indeed, who makes decayed bones listen; who gathers together vanished bodies from the eyrie of birds of prey and the flesh of wild animals; from the bottom of the sea and the ridges of the mountains until every limb finds its proper place and every part of the body is restored.
Then, a fearful trial will be your lot, O men, your faces will be covered with dust from the reeling of the earth and you will be livid with fright. You will be naked and bare-footed as you were on the day you were born. Then the Caller will demand your attention. His look will pierce you through and through. Full of perspiration you will be covered with dust. The earth will tremble with all its burden – mountains will totter and fall and will be swept away by the rising wind.
Wide open were the eyes,
Not an eye could close:
The station was crowded with heavenly and earthly folk:
And whilst the creatures standing were awaiting the realization of what had been told them
With the angels in their ranks all around:
So, there surrounds them hell’s darkness,
There covers then smokeless flame,
They hear it roar and gurgle,
Showing forth wrath and anger,
Here upon those that were standing sink on their knees
The guilty then will receive their certain doom and even the pure will be in fear and trembling. And the Prophets will bow for fear of the Lord.
Then they will hear: where is the servant of God; where, the son of his handmaid? Where is he who persisted in his delusion? Where is he who was torn away by death when unprepared? They will all be detected and called to account for the use they made of their lives. They will plead and prevaricate; they will stand in terror before Him who knows their most secret thoughts. Like lightning, then, God will thunder and with an iron rod He will rule. All their excuses will melt away before a Book regularly kept, the precise register of their sins. Then, indeed will the soul realize its plight, will have no companion or helper save the just but severe judge.
‘And the wicked shall see the fire and shall have a foreboding that all shall fall into it, and they shall find no escape from it.’ May God lead you and us to the path of salvation and take away from you and us the burden of gloom and make the pure doctrine of the unity of God or light in the darkness of the Last Day! The word of the Creator is the richest source of wisdom and the brightest light in darkness.
When one blast shall be blown upon the trumpet, And the earth and the mountains shall be lifted up and shall both be dashed in pieces at a single stroke. On that day the woe that must come suddenly shall suddenly come.
Mez, The Renaissance of Islam, pp. 321–2
(The passage in quotation marks comes from the Qur’an.)
Abu’l-Tayyib Ahmad ibn Husayn al-MUTANABBI (915–65) was born in Kufa. He acquired the name, which means ‘would-be prophet’, early on in his life in the 930s, when he had preached to the Bedouin in the Syrian desert and had tried to set up a new religion there with himself as its prophet. Subsequently he settled for becoming a poet, perhaps the greatest poet of his age. From 948 onwards he spent nine years in the literary service of Sayf al-Dawla in Aleppo. (Later, he was to write under the patronage of the Buyid Emir 'Adud al-Dawla
in Shiraz.) Mutanabbi always liked to present himself as the equal of his patron and was skilful at praising himself at the same time as he praised his patron. There is a marvellous swagger to his fakhr, for example:
I have tasted the bitter and the sweet of affairs
And walked over the rough and smooth path of days.
I have come to know all about time. It cannot produce
Any extraordinary word or any new action.
Franz Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of
Knowledge in Medieval Islam (Leiden, 1970), p. 277
Or take his most famous line:
I am known to night and horses and the desert, to sword and lance, to parchment and pen.
In 965 Mutanabbi was traversing a wilderness when he was confronted by robbers. He was about to flee, when one of his servants said, ‘What about those famous lines of yours, “I am known to night and horses and the desert, to sword and lance, to parchment and pen”?’ The poet turned and fought and was killed.
The following short verses have a less lethal swagger.
1
Shame kept my tears away
but’s brought them back again.
My veins and bones seep through the skin
graining her iv’ry face
with lines anew.
Unveiling shows pale veil beneath
as woman’s Rhetorick
of inlaid gold and pearl
in filigree marks cheek
and jowl.
Her night of hair she parts in three
(to make for me four nights of one?);
pale moon reflects her day of face,
that she and I may double see
as one.
2
I was born to feel close
to others,
