by Robert Irwin
He, if a demon, ravaged on his way,
And if a man, … No man could do the like.’
One day of Sirius, whose vapors shine,
Whose asps, on his hot earth, contort their shape,
I set my face against him, with no veil
Or covering, except a ragged cape
And long hair, from both sides of which the wind,
When raging, makes my uncombed mane to blow,
Far from the touch of oil and purge of lice,
With matted dirt, last washed a year ago,
As for the dried-up desert, like a shield,
I cross on foot its seldom-traveled sand.
I scan its start and end when I have climbed
A height, and sometimes crouch and sometimes stand.
The yellow she-goats graze about me, like
Maidens whom trailing dresses beautify.
At dusk, they stand around me, like a ram,
White-footed, long-horned, climbing, dwelling high.
Warren T. Treadgold, ‘A Verse Translation of the Lamiyah of
Shanfara’, Journal of Arabic Literature 6 (1975), pp. 31–4
COMMENTARY
There are some extremely obscure passages in this poem and it attracted a number of commentaries by Arab scholars in the Middle Ages. It is in the nature of translation that some of the problems are ironed out, as the translator has to choose one particular meaning over another; therefore any English translation of the Lamiyyat is bound to be easier to read than the original Arabic. The Lamiyyat is a spare poem, dispensing with many of the traditional trappings of the qasida. As well as the nasib, the rihla is also absent. Perhaps because of this, the poem has an unusual thematic unity. It evokes a mountain rather than a desert setting. In these mountains the poet leads a brutish existence which is not very different from that of the animals he hunts. Although Shanfara was an outcast from tribal life, his verses still celebrate such tribal values as generosity. As Treadgold notes, ‘She-camels’ teats are tied up to keep their young from nursing. But if a thirsty herdsman milks the camels dry, the young can get no milk even from untied teats.’ With reference to arrow-shafts, he notes, ‘In a pre-Islamic game, players drew numbered arrow-shafts as lots, for larger and smaller portions of a slaughtered she-camel.’ War was sometimes personified as Umm Qastal, ‘the Mother of Dust’ (i.e. the dust of battle).
TA’ABBATA SHARRAN was another of the sa’alik poets and a friend of Shanfara’s. Ta’abbata Sharran means ‘mischief under his armpits’; this curious name referred to the sword which the poet carried there. Like ‘Antara, he was a ‘crow’, for he had an Abyssinian mother. He was famous for his saying: ‘I love this world for three things: to eat flesh, to ride flesh and to rub against flesh.’ Reputedly the jinn inspired his verses. His poem on how he met a ghoul in the desert is one of the most famous examples of the early Arabic qit’a. A qit’a was an extemporary composition which expressed a single emotion or experience and was a quarter, or less, of the length of the standard qasida. In theory it had formed part of a qasida, but had become detached from it. In practice, it is clear that many qit’as were independently composed pieces. (Shanfara had been as famous for his qit’as as for his qasidas).
Ta’abbata Sharran’s short poem about the encounter with a ghoul in the wilderness is called the Qit’a Nuniyya (‘The Short Poem Rhyming in Nun’). His embrace of this monster can be seen as a rejection of humanity, and, as such, in keeping with the pervasive misanthropy of the sa’alik poets.
O who will bear my news to the young men of Fahm
of what I met at Riha Bitan?
Of how I met the ghul swooping down
on the desert bare and flat as a sheet.
I said to her, ‘We are both worn with exhaustion,
brothers of travel, so leave my place to me!’
She sprang at me; then my hand raised
against her a polished Yemeni blade.
Then undismayed I struck her: she fell flat
prostrated on her two hands and on her throatlatch.
She said, ‘Strike again!’ I replied to her, ‘Calm down,
mind your place! For I am indeed stouthearted.’
I lay upon her through the night
that in the morning I might see what had come to me.
Behold! Two eyes set in a hideous head,
like the head of a cat, split-tongued,
Legs like a deformed fetus, the back of a dog,
clothes of haircloth or wornout skins!
Ta’abbata Sharran’s ‘How I Met the Ghul’, in Stetkevych,
The Mute Immortals Speak, p. 96
COMMENTARY
According to E. W. Lane’s Arabic – English Lexicon (which is essentially a compilation based on medieval Arab dictionaries), a ghul is a ‘kind of goblin, demon, devil or jinnee which, the Arabs assert, appears to men in the desert, assuming various forms, causing them to wander from the way and destroying them’. Lane also quotes one of the medieval dictionaries, the Taj al-’ Arus, as adding that the ghul was ‘terrible in appearance, having tusks or fangs, seen by the Arabs, and known by them; and killed by Ta’abbata Sharran’. According to Jahiz, the ghul rode on hares, dogs and ostriches. The Banu Fahm was Ta’abatta Sharran’s own tribe. Riha Bitan was part of the territory of a hostile tribe. The poem is most unusual as an example of pre-Islamic fantasy literature.
In time various genres evolved from within the qasida, including madih (panegyric), hijja (satire), fakhr (boasting) and marthiya or ritha (lament). The first three genres will be discussed in more detail in subsequent chapters. Ritha, however, was of particular importance in the pre-Islamic period. Women tended to specialize in this sort of composition (though they did not monopolize it). Al-Khansa’ bint ‘Amr ibn al-Sharid of the tribe of Banu Sulaym, ‘the Gazelle’ (575–645?), was not only the most celebrated specialist in the funeral elegy, but perhaps also the greatest of women poets in medieval Arab literature. Not much is known about her life. She married and had six children. Her husband was reputed to have been a wastrel. Born a Jahili pagan, she converted to Islam and died at an advanced age sometime in the early Umayyad period. Her verses are passionately intense and it is said that she used to rock and sway in a trance as she recited them. She lost two brothers in tribal warfare; in the lament for her brother which follows, she celebrates the male, tribal values of generosity and courage.
A mote in your eye, dust blown on the wind?
Or a place deserted, its people gone?
This weeping, this welling of tears, is for one
now hidden, curtained by recent earth.
None can escape the odds of death
in the ever-changing deals of chance.
To the pool that all men shun in awe
you have gone, my brother, free of blame,
as the panther goes to his fight, his last,
bare fangs and claws his only defence.
No mother, endlessly circling her foal,
calling it softly, calling aloud,
grazing where the grass was, remembering then,
going unendingly back and forth,
fretting for ever where grass grows new,
unceasingly crying, pining away,
was closer than I to despair when he left –
a stay too brief, a way too long.
For to him we looked for protection and strength,
who in winter’s blast would see none want,
nor keep to his tent to husband stores
but set his board at the bite of cold,
ready his welcome, with open hand,
a heart so quick to command in need.
No woman, alone, saw him ever set foot
in any but honourable quest.
Straight as a lance, his youth still whole,
like a casting of gold in the folds of his clothes,
for ever held he lies in a grave
unmarked but for stone and staring rock.
To tho
se who would lead he pointed the way
like a towering height, the head aflame,
when travellers lost in confusion turn
searching the sky, in shrouds, unstarred.
‘For Her Brother’, Tuetey, Classical Arabic Poetry, pp. 119–20
Here is an example of ritha by Khansa’, this time in a somewhat more wistful mode:
What have we done to you,
death that you treat us so,
with always another catch
one day a warrior
the next a head of state;
charmed by the loyal
you choose the best.
Iniquitous, unequalling death
I would not complain
if you were just
but you take the worthy
leaving fools for us.
Fifty years among us
upholding rights
annulling wrongs,
impatient death
could you not wait
a little longer.
He still would be here
and mine, a brother
without a flaw. Peace
be upon him and Spring
rains water his tomb
but
could you not wait
a little longer
a little longer,
you came too soon.
‘Lament for a Brother’, in Pound, Arabic and
Persian Poems (1970), p. 29
Earlier in this chapter the Lamiyyat was discussed as if it was by Shanfara, and perhaps it was indeed by him. However, there are literary historians who believe that it is one example among many of highly accomplished pastiches of ancient desert themes. In the case of the Lamiyyat, it is perhaps the work of a well-known eighth-century rawi, Khalaf ibn Hayyan al-Ahmar (733–96). Not only was Khalaf famous as a rawi, he was also notorious as a pasticheur of Jahili poetry. It is clear that poets who came later did forge Jahili poetry. They did so for various reasons. Sometimes they forged poems to make polemical points – for example, against a rival tribe. Philologists were tempted to fake verses in order to provide a context and an explanation for obscure bits of Bedouin vocabulary. Anthologists produced poems to fill gaps in their collections. Rawis produced poems in emulation of the poets whose work they studied and passed them off as being by the hands of old masters.
Even in medieval times, it was known that some of the poems which were said to have been written in pre-Islamic times must have been composed later. In the opening decades of the twentieth century, however, two scholars took an even more sceptical position regarding the entire corpus of pre-Islamic poetry. In an article published in 1925, D. S. Margoliouth, Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford, argued that all pre-Islamic poetry had been forged in subsequent centuries. A year later, Taha Husayn, the distinguished Egyptian novelist and man of letters, produced a book on pre-Islamic poetry which made essentially the same case. Such a view is certainly too extreme. It is indeed probable that many of the Jahili poems that have come down to us have been tampered with and improved in the Islamic period, and it is hard to see how their original forms can ever be reconstructed with perfect confidence. Nevertheless, even if we are sometimes dealing with impostures, they are accurate and sensitive frauds which seem to conform closely to ancient conventions; whether they are what they purport to be or not, many of them are literary masterpieces in their own right.
So far discussion has been confined to examples of what the Arabs considered to be poetry. However, the pre-Islamic Arabs also composed pieces which they did not regard as poetry, even though they might qualify as such by Western criteria. Short rhyming verses were composed in a metre known as rajaz, although this metre became only semi-respectable among poets in the Umayyad period. (Rajaz will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3, in the context of a broader discussion of Arabic metres.) Apart from the shanty-like verses composed in rajaz, prose was also known among the Jahili Arabs – obviously, for that was what they spoke most of the time. A specialized form of rhythmic rhymed prose, saj’, was used by the kahins, or soothsayers, to deliver their prophecies. Their utterances were ‘formulated in short rhymed phrases, with rhythmical cadences and the use of an obscure, archaicizing and cabalistic vocabulary’. Bedouin weather-and star-lore was also customarily couched in saj’. In the Islamic period, saj’ slowly lost its occultist associations and rhymed cadenced prose was used to create effects that were purely literary and rhetorical.
No literary prose worthy of the name has come down to us from the pre-Islamic period. Wise sayings were memorized and subsequently included in anthologies written in later centuries. In this early period even wise sayings and proverbs tended to be framed, transmitted and preserved within the qasida, and it was Jahili poetry, especially the qasida, which provided the key literary form for the rest of the Middle Ages. For centuries to come, Arabs who had never spent time in the desert or ridden a camel would compose poems on the deserted campsite theme and on the hardships of the journey through the wilderness.
2
The Qur’an
Before it could be told, it happened, it sprang from the source from which all history springs, and tells itself as it goes. Since that time it exists in the world, everybody knows it or thinks he does – for often enough the knowledge is unreal, casual and disjointed. It has been told a hundred times, in a hundred different mediums. And now it is passing through another, wherein as it were it becomes conscious of itself and remembers how things were in the long-ago, so that it both pours forth and speaks of itself as it pours.
Thomas Mann, Joseph in Egypt
The Prophet Muhammad was born in the Hejaz in western Arabia c. 570 and died in 632. Around the year 610 he began to receive a series of revelations from God, which were dictated to him by the Archangel Gabriel. Thereafter the Archangel continued to dictate suras, or chapters, of what would become the Qur’an. The Prophet in turn preached the revelation to Arabs first in Mecca and later in Medina. One of the chief aims of the Qur’an was to warn the Prophet’s audience and to bring them to the worship of Allah, the one true God. Since Muslims hold the Qur’an to be the actual word of God and not a human document, it would be a mistake to regard it as merely the ‘Bible’ of Islam. Most Muslims believe that the Qur’an is uncreated, has existed from eternity and that it is a faithful reproduction of a scripture in heaven. When the thirteenth-century lexicographer Ibn Manzur wrote of Arabic as ‘the language of Paradise’, he meant it literally.
The Qur’an is the fulfilment and ‘seal’ of earlier revelations, including those contained in the Old and New Testaments. The revelations received by Muhammad cover a wide range of themes and the Qur’an contains detailed religious and social legislation, passages of moral exhortation and of mystical imagery, eschatological prophecy, proverbs, tales from biblical and ancient Arabian legend. Particular emphasis is placed on the visible and marvellous signs of God’s creation. The suras vary considerably in length, the longest being 286 verses long and the shortest consisting of only three verses. Although the verses (ayat) rhyme, they are not considered to be poetry. The canonical text of the Qur’an was not at first written down in its entirety, but was preserved in the memories of the Prophet’s contemporaries, as well as in written fragments on papyrus, palm leaves, and other materials. Probably it was not until the caliphate of ‘Uthman (reigned 644–56) that concerns about variations in the transmission of the revelation led to the collecting and writing down of the Qur’an. The book, which contains 114 suras, is quite short. It is, for example, shorter than the New Testament.
According to Muslim doctrine, the Qur’an is untranslatable. English renderings of it are held to be not translations, but rather versions or interpretations. Not only is the Qur’an untranslatable, it is also inimitable. A tenth-century literary theorist, al-Baqillani (d. 1013), wrote a treatise on the incomparability of the Qur’an. In it, he urged his readers to study the great poems from the Jahili period and the early centuries of Islam: ‘Contem
plate all this with the quiet attention of a bird, with lowered wings, relaxation of the mind and concentration of the intellect.’ Having studied these poems and compared them with the Qur’an, they would realize how the form and style of the holy book’s revelation transcended mere literature. All sorts of stories, some of them apocryphal, were told about leading literary figures who nevertheless tried and failed to emulate the Qur’an – Bashshar ibn Burd, Ibn al-Muqaffa‘, Mutanabbi and Ma‘arri among them. The text of the Qur’an explicitly rejects the notion that it is the work of either a poet or a soothsayer. Since it is inimitable and untranslatable, it is not held by Muslims to be a work of literature.
Although the Qur’an is not literature, it cannot be excluded from any discussion of Arabic prose and poetry since in all sorts of ways it exercised a massive influence on Arabic literary forms. As the modern Arab poet Adonis put it, the ‘Qur’an was not only a new way of seeing things and a new reading of mankind, but also a new way of writing’. The Qur’an, also known simply as al-Kitab, ‘the Book’, was the first great event in Arabic literature. It served as a stylistic model for Arab poets and prosodists. Its use of various narrative forms provided a precedent for later literary experiments. For instance, the twelfth-century compiler of fables, Ibn Zafar (on whom see Chapter 7), cited the appearance of fables in the Qur’an (concerning the ant and the gnat, and King Solomon and the lapwing) in defence of his own compilation. The Qur’an was regularly quoted or alluded to in poems and works of fiction and provided much of the currency of Arabic literature. It was almost universal practice to open a work of literature with an exordium which directly or indirectly quoted the Qur’an. The Thousand and One Nights prefaces its magical tales with the following invocation: ‘Praise be to God, the Beneficent King, the Creator of the world and man, who raised the heavens without pillars and spread out the earth as a place of rest and erected the mountains as props and made the water flow from the hard rock and destroyed the race of Thamud, ‘Ad and Pharaoh of the vast domain. I praise Him for His infinite grace.’ In referring to ‘the race of Thamud, ‘Ad and Pharaoh of the vast domain’, the anonymous compiler of The Thousand and One Nights was alluding to the stories of vanished pre-Islamic races narrated in the Qur’an. In making such an allusion, doubtless the author wished to imply that the stories he was going to relate, also notionally set in pre-Islamic times, contained warnings or messages of moral value for those who read them.
