The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature

by Robert Irwin

  Poetry flourished under the patronage of the Umayyad court and that patronage shaped much of the poetry. The concluding panegyric, or madih, in the course of which the poet sought a reward from his patron, often became the main burden of the qasida, so that the journey evoked in the qasida ended with the patron. Many a poet, having commenced his qasida with a lament for a lost love, concluded it by suggesting that the discovery of an appreciative patron was compensation for past grief. Panegyric is not the sort of genre which is likely to appeal to a modern reader. In his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Dr Samuel Johnson defined a patron in these terms: ‘Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery’. Although praise of a patron was an esteemed genre and the patron’s filling the poet’s mouth with gold coins was a favourite cliche in Arab literary history, it is not easy to bully an English reader into liking medieval Arabic panegyric. Like an advertising jingle, it has almost certainly been written to extort money from its target audience and so is likely to smell of insincerity. The later ‘Abbasid poet Ibn al-Rumi, admitting that his panegyrics were insincere, remarked that ‘God has reproached poets for saying what they do not do, but they are not guilty of this alone, for they say what princes do not do’. In modern times, it has often been monsters like Stalin or Kim II Sung who have received panegyric tributes. In Umayyad times qasidas were written to celebrate the merits of particular caliphs or, more generally, the virtues of Islamic government.

  The Christian Arab, Ghiyath ibn Ghawth al-AKHTAL, who died sometime before 710, was the most accomplished eulogist of the Umayyads. (There is some disagreement about the meaning of the cognomen Akhtal, which means either ‘one whose ears are flabby and hang down’, or ‘one who is loquacious’.) Akhtal, who was favoured by the Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik, was chiefly famous for his panegyric qasidas, but he also composed epigrammatic poems and was one of the earliest poets in the Islamic period to celebrate the pleasures of wine.

  Many’s the fellow worth his draught

  in gold, good company, never ajar,

  whom I joined in wine when the cock had crowed

  and the night-long caravans drew to a halt;

  wine of ‘Ana, where gliding by

  the Euphrates draws its rolling wave;

  three years under lock, it had shed its heat

  and, mellowing, sunk to half the jar

  which a Greek-tongued jack had filled to the brim

  and decked with leaves of laurel and vine;

  fair, neither black, of humble earth,

  nor ruddy, from overconcern with the hearth;

  dressed in a quivering gossamer gown

  and a skin-tight bodice of fibre and tar;

  golden, deepening to amber with time

  confined in a vault among gardens and streams;

  a virgin whose charms no suitor had seen

  till unveiled in a shop for a gold dinar

  by a busy fellow bustling about,

  unkempt, in shabby patched-up clothes.

  Put to the bargain on price agreed,

  he winced, this double-dealing rogue,

  turned a face when I clinched the deal

  like the odd miss out in a boardful of scores.

  When they fetched the jar with lantern and broach,

  out leapt the wine as they stabbed it deep,

  fierce like the spill from a pulsing vein,

  and settled, decanted, round and still,

  and it seemed, by the flare from the pouring glass,

  that musk by the load had been in war.

  Tuetey, Classical Arabic Poetry, pp. 175–6

  Akhtal was famous for his literary alliance with the poet al-Farazdaq, and both were celebrated for their poetical contests or flytings (naqa’id) with yet another poet, Jarir ibn ‘Atiyya (d. 72.8). Although Jarir was a Bedouin poet, he visited the cities and found favour with the Ummayad princes and officials who dwelt there. He first attracted the attention of the Umayyad governor al-Hajjaj, but subsequently he secured the patronage of Caliph Umar II. Jarir specialized in satire (hijja), much of it being delivered in the context of naqa’id. Such demonstrations of poetical skill (which had originally taken place before tribal battles in pre-Islamic Arabia) should be seen more as a form of public entertainment than genuinely felt expressions of venom. Eulogy was not the only way to secure patronage and one gets the impression that some poets took to specializing in satire as a particular kind of blackmail: they hoped to be paid for not composing poetry, for their sole aim was to extract money from potential victims in exchange for silence.

  Jarir, Akhtal and Farazdaq, though not desert-dwelling Bedouin themselves, composed poetry exactly in the manner of their pre-Islamic predecessors – as in this extract from one of Jarir’s qasidas, which employs the deserted campsite theme.

  O, how strange are the deserted campsites and their long-gone inhabitants!

  And how strangely time changes all!

  The camel of youth walks slowly now; its once quick pace is gone;

  it is bored with travelling.

  Salma K. Jayussi (trans.), in Beeston et al. (eds.), The

  Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Arabic

  Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, p. 408

  The other member of this bickering trio, Tammam ibn Ghalib al-Farazdaq (d. 728), was a fellow tribesman of Jarir, for they both belonged to the tribe of Tammim. However, Farazdaq came from a different branch of it and he supported Akhtal in the battle of the poets. Farazdaq had a turbulent career, falling in and out of favour with various patrons, and he enjoyed (if that is the word) a terrible reputation as cowardly, spiteful, drunk and dissolute. Besides writing abusive poetry, Farazdaq was also a noted plagiarist. Quite a few of Farazdaq’s poems deal with love and domestic unhappiness.

  A woman free of the desert born

  where the wind plays round her pavilioned tent,

  her whiteness shimmering cool as the pearls,

  at whose step the very earth will light,

  means more than a townswoman full of tricks

  who gasps when she lays aside her fans.

  Tuetey, Classical Arabic Poetry, p. 171

  In the centuries which followed, the comparative assessments of the merits of Farazdaq and Jarir became a stock exercise among literary pundits. More generally, comparing and contrasting couplets by different poets was one of the earliest forms of medieval Arab literary criticism. The compare-and-contrast-Jarir-and-Farazdaq exercise was later reproduced and parodied in al-Hamadhani’s tenth-century work of belles-lettres, the Maqamat:

  ‘Compare Jarir and Farazdaq. Which of them is superior?’ He answered: ‘Jarir’s poetry is more sophisticated and linguistically richer, but Farazdaq’s is more vigorous and more brilliant.’ Again Jarir is a more caustic satirist and he presents himself as more noble in the field of poetry, whereas al-Farazdaq is more ambitious and belongs to the nobler clan. Jarir, when he composes love poems, draws tears. When he vituperates he destroys, but when he eulogises, he exalts. Farazdaq in panegyric is all sufficient. When he scorns he degrades, but when he praises, he gives full value.

  The Umayyad poets took for granted the superiority of those who had gone before them. Thus Farazdaq, when commenting on the inferior poetry of a contemporary rival, declared that

  Poetry was once a magnificent camel. Then, one day, it was slaughtered. So Imr’ul Qays came and took his head, ‘Amr ibn Kulthum took his hump, Zuhayr the shoulders, al-A’sha and Nabigha the thighs, and Tarafa and Labid the stomach. There remained only the forearms and the offal, which we split among ourselves. The butcher then said, ‘Hey you, there remains only the blood and impurities. See that I get them.’ ‘They are yours,’ we replied. So we took the stuff, cooked it, ate it and excreted it. Your verses are from the excrement of that butcher.

  Cited in Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought

  (Cambridge, 1994), p. 98

  Incidentally, Farazdaq is said to have owned a book of p
oems, one of the earliest pieces of evidence for such a thing. Poetry seems to have first been written down towards the end of the first century hijri.

  As has been noted, Akhtal was actually a town-dwelling Christian Arab. However, like many poets he used to make regular trips into the desert in order to sit at the feet of Bedouin tribesmen, so as to improve his mastery of the Arabic language. This sort of practice was widespread in the early centuries of Islam, not just among poets, but also philologists in the newly-founded Arab garrison towns of Basra and Kufa in southern Iraq. The philologists held that their language was preserved in its purest form in the desert. Moreover, the speech of the desert Arabs abounded in marvellous lexical rarities and both poets and lexicographers went out hunting for these. For instance, riman means ‘the sound of a stone thrown at a boy’; bartala means ‘to put a long stone in the front part of a watering trough and hence [sic] to offer a bribe’; a khadhuf is ‘a she-ass… so fat that, if a pebble is thrown at her with the fingers, or the two fore fingers, or with the extremity of the thumb and that of the forefinger, it sinks into her fat’; bahlasa means ‘to arrive suddenly from another country without any luggage’. Such eerily precise definitions are entertaining and these and other obscure lexical items fuelled the word games of a precious literary elite. Scholars wrote treatises on such matters as words which mean one thing and its opposite. (For example, tarab means both joy and fear.) However, the project of the eighth-century Iraqi philologists was a serious one, for their main aim was to fix and preserve the language of the Qur’an so that it should be comprehensible to future generations. They were successful to such a degree that, even in the twentieth century, the language of the Qur’an is still a living one.

  Consider that the English epic Beowulf, which was probably composed in the eighth century, is now incomprehensible to all save academic specialists in Anglo-Saxon, whereas the Qur’an, which was revealed in the seventh century, is still memorized by Arab schoolchildren and quoted in the streets, and continues to influence literary style.

  Philology and lexicography are at the heart of Arabic literature. The philological enterprise was a conservative one. Scientific Arab grammar (nahw) developed remarkably early. The Persian ‘Amr ibn ‘Uthman Sibawayhi (d. 799?) wrote the first scientific study of the Arabic language and his Kitab, or ‘Book’, is still regarded as the basic grammatical work. As we shall see, there is a literary dimension to such intrinsically dry subject matter as grammar and philology in that many works were written to demonstrate mastery of grammar and vocabulary. Hariri’s eleventh-century masterpiece, the Maqamat, is an outstanding example, but it is by no means unique.

  Khalil ibn Ahmad (d. 791), who taught Sibawayhi philology in Basra, was a leading researcher into the estimable rarities of the syntax and vocabulary of the desert Arabs and the compiler of a strangely ordered dictionary, the Kitab al-‘Ayn. (He started with the letter ‘ayn, because that was the sound which was made deepest in the throat; he then provided definitions for every word that had an ‘ayn somewhere in it, before going on to the sound which was next deepest in the throat and defining all the words with that letter in it – apart, that is, from those which had already been defined because they had an ‘ayn in them.) He was also the pioneer of the systematic study of poetic metre. It is said that he received his initial inspiration while listening to the rhythmic blows of a smith’s hammer on an anvil and from there he went on to develop a systematic exposition of the sixteen paradigmatic metres of classical Arab poetry.

  Unlike most poetry written in English, the metre of Arab poetry is quantitative. That is to say that, whereas in English verse metre is based on stress and on syllable count, Arab metre is based on various set patterns of long and short syllables (and in this, but only in this, it resembles Latin verse). Arabic has long vowels and short vowels. The short a is like that in ‘cat’, while the long a is like that in ‘margin’; the short u resembles the vowel sound in ‘foot’, while the long u sounds like the ‘oo’ in ‘food’; the short i resembles the vowel in ‘sin’, while the long i resembles the vowel sound in ‘yeast’. In poetry, a short syllable is formed by a consonant and a short vowel. A long syllable consists either of a consonant with a vowel and another consonant, or of a consonant plus a long vowel. It is evident that it is not really possible to reproduce this effect in an English translation. Even if one were successful in mimicking the Arabic metrical patterns, the English reader would be most unlikely to pick this up. As has been noted, there are sixteen paradigmatic metres in Arabic poetry, but some, such as tawil and basit, are more common than others. The lighter metres tended to be favoured for poems set to music and it must be remembered that a great deal of poetry was intended to be sung rather than recited. In the ninth century Jahiz wrote an essay on singing slave girls in which he remarked that ‘we can see no harm in singing, since it is basically only poetry clothed with melody’.

  Rajaz (which has been considered to be a more disciplined form of saj’, or rhymed prose) was not reckoned by Khalil ibn Ahmad to be one of the canonical sixteen metres. The word rajaz takes its unflattering origin from the ‘tremor, spasm, convulsion as may occur in the behind of a camel when it wants to rise’. In Jahili times rajaz had been used for lullabies, shanties, battle chants and camel-prodding songs. In Islamic times it continued to be used in the same sort of way as an accompaniment to rhythmical activities. However, from the Umayyad period onwards this Cinderella among metres came to be used in the composition of more serious poetry. A poem in rajaz differed from a qasida in several ways. In the qasida it was only in the first line that the two hemistiches had to rhyme; thereafter only the ends of the second hemistiches had to rhyme with one another. But in rajaz all the hemistiches had to rhyme with one another, a requirement which often forced the poet to adopt ingenious or even rather tortured solutions. In the early centuries all rajaz poems were short poems. In principle the rajaz metre is ‘long, long, short’, long in each hemistich. But really there are all sorts of elaborations and exceptions to the above and the whole subject is far more complex than it is possible even to hint at in a book which aims to be less than an encyclopedia of Arabic prosody.

  The Umayyad age was a great period for the production of love poetry. It was in this period that the ghazal, or love poem, detached itself from the qasida. The word ghazal derives from the verb ‘to spin’. However, the word became spuriously linked to the Arabic for gazelle (also ghazal, but with the second vowel as a long a) and this was a conceit in which erotic poets delighted when evoking the grace and shyness of the beloved. Pre-Islamic erotic poetry had been hardly more than a specialized form of boasting, in which the poet commemorated his conquests and in which the women were usually presented as shyly submissive. In the Umayyad period the themes covered by the ghazal widened and came to include such unboastful topics as grief for a love which was not reciprocated.

  ‘Umar ibn Abi Rabi‘a (644?–721?) is held by many to be the Arabs’ first great poet of love and his Diwan (that is, the collection of his poems) is largely dedicated to the subject of unreciprocated love. An idle and wealthy man, the son of a Meccan merchant, he seems to have thought of little else. In particular, he wrote poems about his illfated love for Thurayya. She was just one of a number of cruel beauties who thought themselves above the poet, but she was more vigorous in her rejection of ‘Umar than most. She struck him on the mouth with her ringed hand such a blow that it loosened and blackened a couple of the poet’s teeth. Although ‘Umar sometimes lamented his lack of success in love, not all his poems are in a tragic mode. He was capable of commemorating the comic side of his lack of success and making jokes about love. Apart from commemorating his yearning for women and lack of success with them, his verses focused on the transience of pleasures and the need to seize them while one could. The following narrative poem, rhyming in ra, is effectively a short story about a perilous assignation.

  Should you depart from Nu’m’s encampment at the first hint of the

 
; morrow’s dawn,

  or set off with the lengthening shadows, press forward into the

  next day’s heat?

  But my desire was unfulfilled, for she had sent me no reply,

  had she done so, she would have been excused, for speech persuades.

  You long for Nu’m, but meetings are infrequent!

  Encounters are mere chance! And yet your heart will not give her up.

  Nu’m’s nearness brings you no comfort,

  nor does her remoteness let you forget, yet you cannot endure separation.

  And there was another woman before Nu’m, against the likes of

  whom

  I was warned – I am an intelligent man! – Better that you desist,

  take heed!

  Whenever I visit Nu’m, a kinsman of hers