Night and Horses and the Desert

by Robert Irwin

but return me to my youth

  and I would live again

  all its tears and sorrow.

  3

  Live where you will,

  acquire virtue and knowledge, for

  the fuller man is he who says:

  This is what I am,

  not ‘My father was so-and-so’.

  Pound, Arabic and Persian Poems (1970), pp. 64–5

  Abu Firas was Mutanabbi’s younger rival. ABU FIRAS al-Harith ibn Sa’id al-Hamdani (932–68) was the son of a Greek slave mother and the cousin of the Emir Sayf al-Dawla. He was employed by Sayf al-Dawla as a governor and general; at the age of sixteen he became governor of Manbij. Despite Sayf al-Dawla’s trust in him, other members of the Hamdanid clan sneered at his half-caste origins and Abu Firas was provoked to respond in an early poem as follows:

  I see that my people and I are different in our ways, in spite of the bonds of parentage which should tie us:

  The furthest in kinship are the furthest from injuring me, the nearest kin are the closest to harming me.

  Much of Abu Firas’s early poetry was devoted to boasts about his lineage and his prowess. He also commemorated the frontier war against the Byzantines in verse, but in doing so observed conventions that went back to Jahili times. One modern critic of Abu Firas’s poetry has justly observed that ‘one who is not conversant with the facts will find it impossible to make out from his poems that Syrians and Greeks, Muslims and Christians fought in such large numbers and with the most perfect military equipment of the age. They might equally be dealing with the petty warfare of two Bedouin tribes.’ In 962 Abu Firas, on a hunting expedition outside Manbij, was captured by a Byzantine force dispatched by Nicephorus II Phocas. Abu Firas was taken in chains to Constantinople:

  I was taken prisoner, though my companions were not unarmed in battle, my horse no untrained colt and its master not inexperienced;

  But when a man’s allotted day comes, no land or sea can shelter

  him.

  Abu Firas spent four years as a captive in Constantinople, from where he wrote melancholy poems mingled with boasting:

  We are among those who do not accept mediocrity,

  We either take the throne in this world or, failing that, the tomb.

  Although most of his poems were written before his captivity, the Rumiyyat, the ‘Byzantine Poems’, are his best-known works. Some of the Rumiyyat poems are addressed to Sayf al-Dawla, and beg the ruler to put up his ransom. (This was an age when it was common to conduct diplomatic and business correspondence in verse.) A few unflattering poems were dedicated to his captors. Other poems were addressed to his mother and other people. The Rumiyyat consists for the most part of poems of lament and entreaty, recollecting lost loves, lost friends and lost homeland. Abu Firas deplores the triumph of his enemies at the Aleppan court, and above all he laments his unbridgeable distance from his mother. As a prisoner-poet he can be compared to the soulful Charles of Orleans, captured at Agincourt and imprisoned in the Tower of London.

  What follows is the elegy he composed in prison on learning of the death of his mother. His mourning for her death is inextricably tangled with mourning for his own plight.

  Mother of the captive (may your grave be refreshed by rain), the fate which the captive has met was in despite of you.

  Mother of the captive (may your grave be refreshed by rain), he is perplexed, unable to stay or go,

  Mother of the captive (may your grave be refreshed by rain), to whom can the bearer of the good news of the ransom go?

  Mother of the captive, now that you are dead, for whom will his locks and hair be grown?

  When your son travels by land or sea, who will pray for him and seek God’s protection for him? …

  You have faced the calamities of Fate with no child or companion at your side;

  The darling of your heart was absent from the place where heavenly angels were present.

  May you be mourned by every day that you fasted patiently through the noonday heat;

  May you be mourned by every night you remained wakeful until bright dawn broke;

  May you be rnourned by everyone oppressed and fearful to whom you gave shelter when there were few indeed to do so;

  May you be mourned by every destitute and poverty-stricken man whom you made rich when there was little marrow left in his bones.

  Mother, how long a care have you suffered with no-one to help you …

  Mother, how often did good news of my approach come to you, but was forestalled by your untimely death;

  To whom can I complain, in whom confide, when my heart is overwhelmed by its sorrows?

  By what prayer of woman shall I be shielded? By the light of what face shall I gain comfort?

  A. El Tayyib (trans.), in Ashtiany et al. (eds.), The Cambridge

  History of Arabic Literature: 'Abbasid Belles-Lettres, p. 323

  By the time Abu Firas was released from prison in 967, his mother was already dead, as were many of his friends. He experienced no better fate as a free man than he had in prison. A year after his release, Sayf al-Dawla died, and in the following year Abu Firas himself was killed while trying to seize Aleppo from Sayf al-Dawla’s son. It is related that, on hearing of his death, one of his grief-stricken sisters plucked her eyeballs out.

  Abu Bakr Muhammad al-SANAWBARSI (d. 945) was born in Antioch in northern Syria. He may have acquired the name Sanawbari, or ‘Skittle’, because of his dumpy shape. Sanawbari, who was the librarian of Sayf al-Dawla in Aleppo, specialized in poems about flowers and gardens. He was alleged to have been a keen gardener, but this may merely have been assumed on the basis of his poetry. In Jahili poetry, and in later poetry written according to what were supposed to be Jahili canons, natural features tended to be described only as part of an emotional landscape, as the backdrop to a troubled journey from a deserted campsite and the memories of a lost love. Interest in landscape for its own sake was something new in Sanawbari’s generation. Besides nature poems, he also produced mudhakarat, or poems addressed to small boys. However, in this anthology we will stick to the nature poems.

  Rise, O gazelle! Look up, don’t tarry!

  The hills are in wondrous reverie.

  Veiled was their faces’ fairness,

  Which now the spring unveiled.

  Roses their cheeks, daffodils

  Eyes which the beloved see,

  Anemones their gowns of silk:

  Purple engrossed with black.

  The blooming bean like

  Piebald doves’ flared tails,

  And fields of grain like soldiery in battle-line:

  Notched arrows readied on the bow.

  And wondrous starwort flowers seem

  The heads of peacocks as they turn their necks.

  The cypresses the eye would deem coy maidens,

  Their skirts above their shanks, tucked up.

  Swayed by the East Wind’s breath,

  deep in the night,

  Each one a supple maiden

  in maidenly playful court,

  As over the river the breeze’s sighs

  send ripples of delight

  And trail their mantles’ frills.

  Were the garden’s guardianship

  ever in my hands,

  No base foot ever would tread that ground!

  J. Stetkevych, The Zephyrs of Najd, p. 184

  When there is fruit in the summer, the earth is aglow and the air shimmers with light.

  When in autumn the palm trees shed their leaves, naked is the earth, stark the air.

  And when in winter rain comes in endless torrent, the earth seems besieged and the air a captive.

  The only time is the time of the radiant spring, for it brings flowers and joy.

  Then the earth is a hyacinth, the air is a pearl, the plants turquoises, and water crystal.

  Gild the cup with wine, lad, for it is a silvery day.

  Veiled in white is the air, bedecked in pearls, as though in bridal display.
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  Do you take it for snow? No, it is a rose trembling on the bough.

  Coloured is the rose of spring, white the rose of December.

  Mez, The Renaissance of Islam, p. 263

  Abu’l-Fath Mahmud ibn al-Husayn KUSHAJIM al-Sindi (d. 970/71) was of Indo-Persian origin, though born in Palestine. He served first the Hamdanids of Mosul and later Sayf al-Dawla in Aleppo as courtier, cook and astrologer. As a member of the Hamdanid prince’s retinue he became a close friend of Sanawbari and indeed married one of his daughters. Kushajim’s Adab al-nudama wa-lata'if al-zurafa, or ‘Etiquette of the Cup Companion and Refined Jests of the Elegant’, was (as its title suggests) a handbook for courtiers. In it, Kushajim transmitted the opinion of one courtier that of the three pleasures in life – listening to a singing-girl, privacy with a woman (i.e. sex with her) and conversation with a man – the last was best. A propos of dinner-table talk, Kushajim held that while street-corner storytellers might tell long stories, those of the nadim had to be short.

  Kushajim was a noted poet who specialized in wasf, and particularly in poetic evocations of nature. Together with his friend Sanawbari, he was one of the leading figures in the new genre of garden poetry. He also wrote tardiyyat, or poems about the hunt, and besides the poems he produced a prose treatise on hunt etiquette. However, he is probably best known for his poems about food. In his poetry he described all kinds of foodstuffs. He even wrote a poem about vermilioned eggs. Here is a poem about asparagus.

  Lances we have, the tips whereof are curled,

  Their bodies like a hawser turned and twirled,

  Yet fair to view, with ne’er a knot to boot.

  Their heads bolt upright from the shoulders shoot,

  And, by the grace of Him Who made us all,

  Firm in the soil they stand, like pillars tall,

  Clothed in soft robes like silk on mantle spread

  That deep hath drunk a blazing flame of red,

  As if they brushed against a scarlet cheek

  Whereon an angry palm its wrath doth wreak,

  And as a coat-of-mail is interlaced

  With links of gold so twine they, waist to waist;

  Like silken mitraf that the hands display –

  Ah, could it last for ever and a day! –

  They might be bezels set in rings of pearl.

  Thereon a most delicious sauce doth swirl

  Flowing and ebbing like a swelling sea;

  Oil decks them out in cream embroidery

  Which, as it floods and flecks them, fold on fold,

  Twists latchets as of silver or of gold.

  Should pious anchorite see such repast,

  In sheer devotion he would break his fast.

  Arberry, Aspects of Islamic Civilization, p. 160

  COMMENTARY

  A mitraf is a square wrap with ornamental borders.

  This poem was recited by a courtier at the Caliph Mustakfi’s symposium on food in 947. Courtiers competed to recite poems in praise of stew, sugared rice, relishes, rare foods and so on. According to Mas'udi’s source this dinner party devoted to the poetry of food was the greatest day in the caliph’s life. The Buyid warlord Ahmad ibn Buwaih later arrested the caliph and put his eyes out in 949.

  According to Ibn Washshiyya, the zurafa’, the refined, avoided eating asparagus because of its cooling effect. He counselled the courtier more generally to avoid vegetables, fats, sausages and a whole string of other foods. The musician and courtier, Ziryab (Chapter 6), introduced asparagus to Muslim Spain.

  (The subject of the role of food in court culture puts me in mind of a story told about a nadim, or cup companion, in the service of Mahmud of Ghazna, the ruler of eastern Iran and Afghanistan (reigned 988–1030). One day the nadim turned up with a new vegetable which he claimed was quite wonderful: the aubergine. The nadim rhapsodized at some length on the glories of this vegetable, until the Sultan was moved to try it. However, having done so, the Sultan pronounced, ‘The aubergine is a very harmful thing.’ Whereupon the nadim launched into a lengthy diatribe about the awfulness of the aubergine. ‘Just a moment ago you were praising the thing to the skies!’ the Sultan expostulated. ‘But, sire, I am your nadim, not that of the aubergine,’ the assiduous courtier replied.)

  Abu al-'Ala al-MA'ARRI (973–1058) took the nisba, the last part of his name, from Ma'arrah, a town to the south of Aleppo in Syria. At the age of four he was blinded by an attack of smallpox. ‘When I was four years old, there was a decree of fate about me, so that I could not discern a full-grown camel from a tender young camel, recently born.’ Thereafter, he was largely dependent on his amazing memory. He carried the equivalent of a large library in his head. In 1008 he set off for Baghdad to look for patronage, fame and fortune as a poet. However, he was not successful and after eighteen months he returned to Ma'arrah. There he produced a body of work in poetry and prose which was remarkably consistent in its intellectuality, pessimism, cynicism and asceticism. (Although he continued until the day he died to describe himself in his writings as a poor man, he seems in fact to have become rich from the fees of students who came to study poetry with him.) Despite being strongly influenced by the poems of Mutanabbi, on which he wrote an admiring commentary, Ma'arri despised poets in general, for they wrote lies about things like deserted campsites, passionate love affairs, and heroic battles, whereas he was only really interested in telling everybody the truth about how awful life was. As the twentieth-century experimental Arab poet Adonis wrote of Ma'arri,

  … the poet says that a man’s native land is a prison, death is his release from it, and the grave alone is secure. Therefore the best thing for him is to die like a tree which is pulled up by the roots and leaves neither roots nor branches behind it. Humanity is unadulterated filth and the earth cannot be purified unless mankind ceases to exist. The truth is that the most evil of trees is the one which has borne human beings. Life is a sickness whose cure is death. Death is a celebration of life. Man smells sweeter when he is dead, as musk when it is crushed releases all of its aroma. Moreover, the soul has an instinct for death, a perpetual desire to become wedded to it.

  Ma'arri seems to have been fonder of animals than men. He was a fervent vegetarian (vegan, even) and he was even opposed to the eating of honey because this was cruel to bees. He may have been influenced in this by Indian religious ideas. Certainly Ma'arri entertained a number of heterodox ideas. He seems to have doubted the possibility of an afterlife. He thought that procreation was sinful. He advocated cremation. He hated Sufis, describing them as ‘one of Satan’s armies’. Although he was usually sufficiently cautious to write obscurely when dealing with contentious matters, he gained a reputation as a freethinker and a heretic. In particular, his Al-Fusul wa al-Ghayat (‘Paragraphs and Periods’) was seen as an attempt simultaneously to emulate and parody the Qur’an, and it shocked his contemporaries.

  Ma'arri followed politics closely and wrote both poems and animal fables to comment on current events. In the Risalat al-Sahil wa al-Shabij, ‘Letters of a Horse and a Mule’, the animals discuss politics, warfare and taxation in Syria. Although Ma'arri sometimes wrote panegyrics in praise of one great figure or another, these were usually floridly and ostentatiously insincere. He produced three collections of poetry. The Saqt al-Zand, ‘Spark from the Fire-Stick’, collected his early productions. Al-Dir'iyyat, ‘On Coats of Mail’, is a small collection of poems on the subject the title suggests. Ma'arri’s most famous work, the Luzum ma lam yalzam, ‘The Constraint of What Is Not Compulsory’, a collection of 1,592 poems, derived its title from the severe double- or even triple-rhyming constraint which he had imposed upon himself. Ma'arri’s poetry can be difficult, as he himself was aware, for he produced his own commentaries on his collections of poems.

  III

  Vain are your dreams of marvellous empire,

  Vainly you sail among uncharted spaces,

  Vainly seek harbour in this world of faces

  If it has been determined otherw
ise.

  V

  You that must travel with a weary load

  Along this darkling, labyrinthine street –

  Have men with torches at your head and feet

  If you would pass the dangers of the road.

  XI

  Myself did linger by the ragged beach,

  Whereat wave after wave did rise and curl;

  And as they fell, they fell – I saw them hurl

  A message far more eloquent than speech:

  XII

  We that with song our pilgrimage beguile,

  With purple islands which a sunset bore,

  We, sunk upon the desecrating shore,

  May parley with oblivion awhile.

  L

  Alas! I took me servants: I was proud

  Of prose and of the neat, the cunning rhyme,

  But all their inclination was the crime

  Of scattering my treasure to the crowd.

  LVIIII

  There is a palace, and the ruined wall

  Divides the sand, a very home of tears,

  And where love whispered of a thousand years

  The silken-footed caterpillars crawl.

  LXIX

  And where the Prince commanded, now the shriek

  Of wind is flying through the court of state:

  ‘Here,’ it proclaims, ‘there dwelt a potentate

  Who could not hear the sobbing of the weak.’

  CII

  How strange that we, perambulating dust,

  Should be the vessels of eternal fire,

  That such unfading passion of desire

  Should be within our fading bodies thrust.

  Ma'arri, The Diwan of Abu’l-Ala, trans. Henry Baerlein

  (London, 1908), pp. 34, 35, 36, 44, 45, 48, 54

  Ma’arri’s prose style was highly elaborate, as can be seen from the following extract from his letters:

  And my grief at parting from you is like that of the turtle-dove, which brings pleasure to the hot listener, retired in a thickly-leaved tree from the heat of summer, like a singer behind a curtain, or a great man hedged off from the frivolous conversation of the vulgar; with a collar on his neck almost burst by his sorrow; were he able, he would wrench it with his hand off his neck, out of grief for the companion whom he has abandoned to distress, the comrade whom Noah sent out and left to perish, over whom the doves still mourn. Varied music does he chant in the courts, publishing on the branches the secrets of his hidden woe …