The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature

by Robert Irwin

  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 speaking, 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 alHusayn 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-Agbani, 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-Agbani 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 find
s 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,

  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 mourned 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