by Robert Irwin
Which portion of the full name was used briefly to identify an individual varied according to circumstance. The essayist Jahiz took his name, really a nickname, from his goggle-eyed appearance. The cosmographer Qazwini derived his name from Qazwin, the town from which he came. Hariri means ‘silkworker’, but the fiction-writer Hariri owed his name to his father’s profession rather than his own. The famous fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldun was not actually the son of Khaldun; ‘Ibn Khaldun’ was an abridgement of his nasab and the Khaldun who was the ancestor of the historian seems to have flourished in the ninth or tenth century. It can be quite difficult to guess under what part of a name an Arab writer may appear in an index or catalogue.
Essentially the same system was used for naming women, who were chiefly identified as mothers of someone (umm means mother) and as daughters of someone (bint means daughter). However, in the chapters which follow there will not be many women’s names. The production of classical Arabic literature was dominated by men and few women wrote books. According to Ibn Ukhuwwa, the author of a tract on morals and market-inspection, ‘it is said that a woman who learns how to write is like a snake given poison to drink’. This was a commonly held attitude, but it was by no means universal (see, for example, in Chapter 7, Athir al-Din’s lamentation over his scholarly daughter, Nudar).
The first year of the Muslim calendar is the one in which Muhammad left Mecca for Medina. This year corresponds to A.D. 622 in the Christian calendar. Dates are given in this book according to the Christian calendar. However, the Muslim year, based on lunar months, is shorter than the Christian solar year. Therefore there is not a one-to-one relationship between Christian and Muslim years and this explains why many of the birth-and death-dates given in this book are accurate only to within two years.
In transliterating Arabic words and names I have dispensed with diacriticals (which in more academic texts are used to distinguish between long and short vowels and between hard and soft consonants). Otherwise I have tried to follow the usage of The Encyclopaedia of Islam, except that q is used to represent the letter qaf and j to represent the letter jim. The apostrophes ‘, as in Shi‘i, and ’, as in rasa’il, are used to represent different Arabic sounds; ‘ is the letter ‘ayn in the Arabic alphabet and is a glottal scrape; ’ is a hamza, which is not strictly a letter, but represents an unvoiced glottal stop (so that in rasa’il, for example, the i is sounded distinctly from the second a).
Bibliography
With few exceptions (notably the translations of Sir Charles Lyall) this bibliography includes only works which are currently available or which have been in print within the last couple of decades or so.
General Works
The Encyclopaedia of lslam (2nd edn., Leiden, 1954–, in progress).
Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, ed. Julie Scott Meisami and Paul Starkey, 2 vols. (London, 1998).
The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, ed. A. F. L. Beeston et al. (Cambridge, 1983); The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: ‘Abbasid Belles-Lettres, ed. Julia Ashtiany et al. (Cambridge, 1990); The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Religion, Learning and Science in the ‘Abbasid Period, ed. M. J. L. Young et al. (Cambridge, 1990).
H. A. R. Gibb, Arabic Literature. An Introduction (2nd edn., Oxford, 1926; repr. 1974).
Clément Huart, A History of Arabic Literature (English trans. London, 1903; repr. 1987).
Salma Khadra Jayussi (ed.), The Legacy of Muslim Spain (Leiden, 1992).
R. A. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (Cambridge, 1907; repr. 1969).
Specialized Studies
Adonis, An Introduction to Arab Poetics (London, 1990).
Edmund Bosworth, The Mediaeval Islamic Underworld (Leiden, 1976).
Johann Christoph Bürgel, The Feather of Simurgh: The ‘Licit Magic’ of the Arts in Medieval Islam (New York, 1988).
Robert Hamilton, Walid and His Friends: An Umayyad Tragedy. Oxford Studies in Islamic Art, vol. 6 (Oxford, 1988).
Andras Hamori, On the Art of Medieval Arabic Literature (Princeton, N.J., 1974).
Th. Emil Homerin, From Arab Poet to Muslim Saint. Ibn al-Farid, His Verse and His Shrine (Columbia, South Carolina, 1994). Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (Harmondsworth, 1994).
–, ‘The Arabic Beast Fable’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 55 (1992), pp. 36–50.
Philip F. Kennedy, The Wine Song in Classical Arabic Poetry: Abu Nuwas and the Literary Tradition (Oxford, 1997).
Joel L. Kraemer, Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam (2nd edn, Leiden, 1993).
S. Leder and H. Kilpatrick, ‘Classical Arabic Prose Literature: A Researcher’s Sketch Map’, Journal of Arabic Literature 23 (1992), pp. 2–26.
Adam Mez, The Renaissance of Islam (London, 1937; repr. 1975).
Shmuel Moreh, Live Theatre and Dramatic Literature in the Medieval Arabic World (Edinburgh, 1992).
Wen-chin Ouyang, Literary Criticism in Medieval Arabic-Islamic Culture: The Making of a Tradition (Edinburgh, 1997).
Jaroslav Stetkevych, The Zephyrs of Najd (Chicago, 1993). Suzanne Pinckey Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual (Ithaca and London, 1993).
The Journal of Arabic Literature and Edebiyyat both contain many articles about and translations of classical Arabic literature.
Translations
A. J. Arberry, Aspects of Islamic Civilization (London, 1964).
A. F. L. Beeston (trans, and ed.), ‘The Epistle on Singing-Girls’ by Jahiz (Warminister, Wilts., 1980).
A. F. L. Beeston, Samples of Arabic Prose in its Historical Development (Oxford, 1977).
James A. Bellamy and Patricia Owen Steiner, Ibn Said al-Maghribi’s ‘The Banners of the Champions’ (Madison, Ind., 1989).
Herbert Howarth and Ibrahim Shukrullah, Images from the Arab World: Fragments of Arab Literature Translated and Paraphrased with Variations and Comments (London, 1977).
Alan Jones, Early Arabic Poetry: vol. I, Select Odes (Reading, Berks., 1992); vol. 2, Marathi and Su’luk Poems (Reading, Berks., 1996). (Jones’s introduction to pre-Islamic poetry, and indeed to Arabic poetry more generally, is excellent.)
Bernard Lewis, Islam from the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople, 2 vols. (New York, 1974).
Charles Lyall (trans, of Mufaddal ibn al-Mufaddal), The Mufada-liyyat: An Anthology of Ancient Arabian Odes, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1918–21).
–, Translations of Ancient Arabian Poetry: chiefly pre-Islamic (London, 1930).
Christopher Middleton and Leticia Garza-Falcon, Andalusian Poems (Boston, Mass., 1993).
James T. Monroe, Hispano-Arabic Poetry: A Student Anthology (Berkeley, Calif., 1974).
Reynold A. Nicholson, Translations of Eastern Poetry and Prose (Cambridge, 1922; repr. 1987).
A. R. Nykl, Hispano-Arabic Poetry and its Relations with the Old Provençal Troubadors (Baltimore, Md., 1946).
Omar S. Pound, Arabic and Persian Poems (Washington, D.C., 1970; 1986).
Franz Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam (London, 1975).
Stefan Sperl and Christopher Shackle (eds.), Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1996).
Charles Greville Tuetey, Classical Arabic Poetry: 162 Poems from Imrulkais to Ma‘arri (London, 1985).
Abdullah al-Udhari, Birds Through a Ceiling of Alabaster (Harmondsworth, 1975).
Translations of Individual Works or Authors
QUR’AN: A. J. Arberry (trans.), The Koran Interpreted (London, 1955). Alternative versions include: George Sale, The Koran, commonly called the Alcoran of Mohammad (London, 1734) (despite its early date, this version is of value because of its heavy annotation); Richard Bell (trans.), The Koran (Edinburgh, 1937–9; repr. 1960).
ANONYMOUS: Husain Haddawy, The Arabian Nights (London and New York, 1990); N. J. Dawood, Tales from the Thousand and One Nights (Harmondsworth).
IBN HAZM: A. J. Arberr
y, The Ring of the Dove (London, 1953). IBN MARZUBAN: G. R. Rex Smith and M. A. S. Abdel Haleem, The Book of the Superiority of Dogs over Many of Those Who Wear Clothes (Warminster, Wilts., 1977).
IBN AL-NADIM: Bayard Dodge (trans.), The Fihrist of al-Nadim, 2 vols. (New York, 1970).
IBN TUFAYL: Lenn E. Goodman, Ibn Tufayl’s ‘Hayy ibn Yaqzan’ (New York, 1972).
IKHWAN AL-SAFA’: Lenn Evan Goodman, The Case of the Animals versus Man before the King of the Jinn: A Tenth-century Ecological Fable of the Pure Brethren of Basra (Boston, Mass., 1978).
JAHIZ: Charles Pellat (ed.), The Life and Works of Jahiz (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969), English trans. D. M. Hawke; R. B. Serjeant, The Book of Misers (Reading, Berks., 1997).
MAS’UDI: Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone, The Meadows of Gold: The Abbasids (London, 1989).
USAMAH IBN MUNQIDH: Philip K. Hitti, Memoirs of an Arab-Syrian Gentleman (New York, 1929; repr. 1964 et seq.).
1
Pagan Poets
(A.D. 500–622)
‘Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet ‘tis early morn:
Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle-horn.’
Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘Locksley Hall’
If we define literature as something that is written down, then there was no such thing as Arabic literature before the coming of Islam. The Arabic book was a creation of Islam. However, between the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. the inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula did compose a considerable body of prose and verse – especially verse. This body of literature was designed to be recited, it was committed to memory by its audience, and it was orally transmitted from generation to generation. Even after literacy became widespread in the ninth century and it became common to compose on to paper, still the written literature retained many of the characteristics of oral composition. Moreover, what was written was usually intended to be read aloud to an audience. Spymasters, sorcerers and solitary ascetics might indulge in silent, private reading, but not many other people did. Medieval Arabic literature was noisy.
St Nilus, in the course of describing a Bedouin raid on the monastery of Mount Sinai in A.D. 410, mentioned the special songs with which the Bedouin celebrated their arrival at a watering-hole. Doubtless the songs or poems were as old as the Bedouin way of existence itself. However, it does not seem that any Arabic poetry composed earlier than the sixth century has survived to the present day; though some of the versions of poems which were allegedly composed in the sixth century have survived, those poems were not actually written down until the eighth or ninth century.
Most of what we know about Arabia in the age of Jahiliyya, the pagan period of ‘Ignorance’ prior to the preaching of Islam, both concerns poetry and has been transmitted in the form of poetry. According to a ninth-century philologist and biographer of poets, al-Jumahi, ‘In the Jahili age, verse was to the Arabs the register of all they knew, and the utmost compass of their wisdom; with it they began their affairs, and with it they ended them.’ According to another saying, ‘Poetry is the public register [diwan] of the Arabs: by its means genealogies are remembered and glorious deeds handed down to posterity.’ According to the fourteenth-century North African philosopher-historian, Ibn khaldun, ‘The Arabs did not know anything except poetry, because at that time, they practised no science and knew no craft.’
Pre-Islamic poetry composed in the Arabian peninsula (as well as in what is now southern Iraq) celebrated the values of nomadic, camel-rearing tribal life. Poets boasted of the tribes’ exploits, commemorated tribal genealogies and celebrated inter-tribal feuds and camel raids. Metre and rhyme were mnemonic aids in preserving a tribe’s history. The poetry they produced enshrined the tribal values of desert warriors: courage, hardihood, loyalty to one’s kin, and generosity. The theme of vengeance features prominently in early Arabic poetry. The Jahili Arabs believed that dead men in their graves become owls and, if a man’s killing was unavenged by his kinsmen, then the owls would rise from the earth crying, ‘Give me to drink! Give me to drink!’ Poetry was also used to convey wisdom and moral precepts with a more general application. Aphorisms in verse formed part of the common conversational stock.
The Prophet Muhammad is said to have declared that ‘Verily eloquence includes sorcery’. In pre-Islamic Arabia the boundary between writing a poem and casting a spell was far from clear. Poetry was commonly referred to as sihr halal (legitimate magic). Tribal poets saw their poetry as a kind of sorcery by means of which one could build up one’s own strength and weaken that of one’s enemies. Poets were inspired by jinns. A qarin means ‘companion’, but it has the special sense of a jinn who accompanies a poet and inspires him, thus acting as his genius. Not satisfied with inspiring poets, the jinns were also known to compose poetry in their own right. The soothsayers (kahins) of the Jahili period made use in their incantations of a rhythmic form of rhymed prose, known as saj’, as well as of a crude, folk-poetry metre known as rajaz. In the very earliest period the distinction between a soothsayer and a poet was blurred.
Arabic is a Semitic language and therefore it is related to such languages as Hebrew, Amharic and Syriac. The earliest rock-cut inscriptions in what is effectively the same language as classical Arabic date from the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. The Arabic script used today derives from the Syriac alphabet and appears in the early seventh century. It has an alphabet of twenty-eight letters. Arabic vocabulary is organized round what are mostly triconsonantal roots. For example, the trilateral root K-T-B generates a whole cluster of verbs and nouns with related meanings. Kataba means ‘he wrote’; inkataba, ‘he subscribed’; istakataba, ‘he dictated’. Kitab means ‘book’ and indeed any piece of writing, whether short or long. A katib is a scribe; a kutubi, a bookseller; maktab, an office; maktaba, a bookshop, and so on. To take as another example, a root-form with more diffuse meanings, the three letters SH’R (in which the SH is one letter and in which the apostrophe stands for the Arabic letter ‘ayn), sha’ara means he knew, sensed or felt, and sh’ir means poetry or knowledge. The primary sense of sha’ir was a man endowed with intuition; by extension, it came to mean a poet. (Nevertheless, one should not imagine that Arabic word formation was completely logical, as some modern artificial languages are. Other words formed from the triliteral root SH’R refer to barley and to the Dog Star, among other things.)
Arabic poetry, as opposed to rhymed prose, is defined by conformity to specific thematic and metrical conventions. It is not enough for a poem’s lines to rhyme and be rhythmic. Only certain forms of metre could be used for qasidas (and the question of metre will be discussed in more detail in subsequent chapters). A qasida is an ode. The earliest qasidas to have survived date from no earlier than the mid-sixth century. By convention the Arabic ode was supposed to follow a set form, based, however loosely, on a journey through a desert. (The related verb, qasada, means to journey towards something, or to aim for a thing.) The ninth-century anthologist and literary critic Ibn Qutayba(on whom see Chapter 4) described the typical sequence of themes in a qasida:
I have heard from a man of learning that the composer of Odes began by mentioning the deserted dwelling-places and the relics and traces of habitation. Then he wept and complained and addressed the desolate encampment, and begged his companion to make a halt, in order that he might have occasion to speak of those who had once lived there and afterwards departed; for the dwellers in tents were different from townsmen or villagers in respect of coming and going, because they moved from one water-spring to another, seeking pasture and searching out the places where rain had fallen. Then to this he linked the erotic prelude (nasib), and bewailed the violence of his love and the anguish of separation from his mistress and the extremity of his passion and desire, so as to win the hearts of his hearers and divert their eyes towards him and invite their ears to listen to him, since the song of love touches men’s souls and takes hold of their hearts, God having put it in the constitution of His creatures to love dalliance and the s
ociety of women, in such wise that we find very few but are attached thereto by some tie or have some share therein, whether lawful or unpermitted. Now, when the poet had assured himself of an attentive hearing, he followed up his advantage and set forth his claim: thus he went on to complain of fatigue and want of sleep and travelling by night and of the noonday heat, and how his camel had been reduced to leanness. And when, after representing all the discomfort and danger of his journey, he knew that he had fully justified his hope and expectation of receiving his due meed from the person to whom the poem was addressed, he entered upon the panegyric (madih), and incited him to reward, and kindled his generosity by exalting him above his peers and pronouncing the greatest dignity, in comparison with his, to be little.
Kitab al-Shi’r wa-l-Shu’ara, trans. R. A. Nicholson, in
A Literary History of the Arabs, pp. 77–8∗
Although only some qasidas precisely followed the ordering of themes prescribed by Ibn Qutayba (for example, the opening lament for the lost love might be omitted), still the description cited above does provide a good preliminary map. Most qasidas open with an evocation of a deserted campsite (atlal), or other dwelling place. Typically, the author of a qasida, in demanding a halt to the journey at this point, addresses a couple of notional travelling companions. The remains of a former campsite provide a pretext for the nasib, the amatory prelude in which the poet remembers a past passion. Characteristically the poet looks back, with both regret and pride, on a previous erotic encounter. He will never see the woman again and he boasts of the intensity of his anguish. In the next section, the rihla, the poet complains of fatigue and suffering as he journeys by camel (or occasionally horse) to a new destination. He is also likely to praise his mount (and in many poems one feels that the excellence of the camel more than compensates for the lost lady love). Finally, in the madih, or panegyric, which normally concluded the qasida, the poet put forward his case for being rewarded for his poem and he increased his chance of getting that reward by praising a patron. Alternatively, in the final part he might praise himself, or his tribe, or satirize an individual. The goal of the poem was in its end, whether that end was panegyric, self-adulatory, or satirical. It was common for a qasida to be terminated with a violent thunderstorm. (Incidentally, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’, with its opening ‘Comrades, leave me here.…’, followed by a lament for the lost love, his cousin Amy, conformed to the rules for opening a qasida, but failed to follow the set pattern of the Arabs much further.)
