The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature

by Robert Irwin

  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-SANAWBARI (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.

  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 alHusayn 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 librar
y 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 free-thinker 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 Rsalat al-Sahil wa al-Shahij, ‘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 otherwise.

  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…

  An equally elaborate and typically gloomy set-piece is devoted to the commonplace that all beasts must die:

  There escapes not from the claws of time the tawny lion, whose food is not sahm or mard, but who tears every day some prey which the robber’s arts cannot ensnare. Nay more, he frightens and keeps the people in their homes; his eyes are like two burning torches, or two camp fires. The ass turns to fly when she scents him; and he alarms a whole caravan, when they know he is near. In some terrible place he feeds two whelps with the maneless lioness that gives them suck. Many a torn victim is in his cave, rendered undistinguishable in shape, whose orphans he overwhelmed by his capture, and whom he ousted from the possessions that he had won. He grew weary of hunting beasts, and abandoned them, and became enamoured of human flesh and sought after that. If the morning traveller came too late for him, he would attack the loiterer, and fiercely. A man would make a meal for him; and even the flesh of a couple would not be overmuch. In the prime of his life he could overcome the black ostrich, and the mountain goat could not protect himself from him. Often at mid-day he would pounce on some secure flock of sheep and take the best of them to his home-keeping mate. Often at eventide he would make a raid upon some lowing ox, and return to his cubs with a wild calf or wild ass that had grown fat, feeding on the sweet-smelling fields. Little thought he of the antelope; that he would leave the poor wolf to chase. And in his old age there passes by him a man having in his hands a bow and arrows; and he leaps on one enemy and embraces him, and rips his body open and disembowels it; but the rest of the company shoot at him with axes and spears, and though he thinks it impossible, with their missiles they make him like a porcupine, and when he is dead they at first think he is only asleep, until the truth appears, when they in their spite raise him on their swords; and so his brilliant career is over, – that long career wherein by his violence he earned the name Kaswar, and by his leaps the name Miswar, ‘the leaper’. Or else there comes against him some captain with a band of horse, who, finding him crouching on his foreleg, thrusts him through with lances levelled, or cruelly hits him in a fatal spot. Or if he escape the one and the other, still his soul is discharged by
old age, contented with a scanty living after such splendid fare. Neither do the strokes of fate miss the fair-clad leopard, well-accustomed by long practice to sudden raids. The shepherds fear his onsets, and kind friends hasten to the traces of the wounds that he has inflicted. For him too there is assigned on some of his circuits a keeper of sheep or one who does not keep them; who thrusts a spear into his heart and saves the flock from his onslaught; who takes his skin, once his pride, and covers with it the mount of some runaway coward. Neither does the wolf escape the heel of time, even though he obtain the sheep that he covets, constantly snatching some lamb from the flock, and loosening some of its cords. Chased by the farmer’s hounds he escapes them, and seizes the keeper’s own lamb and devours it. He protects the cubs of the hyena after she has drunk the intoxicating cup that is not wine but death, treating them as his own, and feeding them with the product of his arts. At times he is starving and miserable, and even when hungry is envied for his fulness. ‘Tis supposed that he has been drinking blood, whereas in truth he has had no lack of destitution. And often indeed the flocks perish before him and he has a merry time, and he catches the shepherd asleep and has a feast. Yet are his fasts longer than his feasts; and thirst is co-partner with his vile nature. With such a life howbeit he is satisfied with all its hardships, and why should his miserable nature avoid it? Then one day he sees a lad, who is no fool, alone with a small flock, and this excites his cupidity. Howbeit ‘there is many a wound in the arrows of a lad’, so when the wolf makes his attack, our stripling having a bow in his hand, sends one of his arrows into the last place that the wolf would wish, and the wolf’s cubs become orphans, and sadly do they miss their shrewd and sagacious father. The hyena too is no stranger to death, whether he die a natural death, or whether there chase him from behind his ears the father of some family who makes him their food, so that they avert with his flesh the pangs of hunger when they overtake them. Or some morning, it may be, a savage dog surprises him, and hurries after him furiously, and takes him cunningly, so that neither running nor leaping saves him. Or, a torrent of water comes while the hyena is with his spouse in his lair, and the water carries them both away, and when morning comes he is drowned and voiceless. He might as well have never howled over a carcase; and never battened on the remains of the lion’s feast. How merrily used he to run over the stones! And now his skin is made into a mantle! Such are time’s vicissitudes! It makes the saturated thirsty; the fox does not escape for all his cunning, neither does the spirit of the dun hyena of the sandhills. Death too separates the hare from his mate, and cuts him off; neither is the rabbit’s mother helped by her prayer ‘God make me quick-footed, and stay-at-home, able to outrun the arrow up the hill’. She too is troubled by some snare, and finds herself suddenly in a bag; or else by some early-rising sporting Nimrod, whose heart is madly set upon the chase, who spurs against her on the high ground a fiery hunter, with a ribbon round his neck, or else sends against her some falcons which break the vertebrae of her back; or else an eagle pounces upon her, and so trouble overtakes her. Or can the decree of God be foiled by the wild ass, over whom day and night pass, keeping him still fresh, by no means decrepit, now braying, now rumbling, with five or eight mates, who trample the ground with no light step, having fed on plants watered by the spring rain, and scrambled for the puddles and Sumi? Off flies their fur, and only their flesh and bones remain, until the meadow plants dry up, when he takes them wherever there is the trace of a stream; and when Al-Han’ah or Al-Dhira rises, and they are hastening to a watering-place, the summer heat kindles fiery thirst, and they bethink them of some deep pond, whither at the false dawn they descend. But fate has set some bowman on the watch, with a twanging weapon in his hand, a weapon which says to the victim die! and it dies, a weapon selected by some vagabond of the tribe ‘Abs or Kahlan; who watched it when it was a growing wand, until it became a magician’s wand in his hand. Every summer he would bring it water to shorten the dry period for it; and at last when its growth was complete and it was suitable for the chase, he came one morning and detached it, with no hasty or violent wrench, and set it on a stand in his tent. There he let it imbibe the juice of the bark, and then applied the knife. And when he had shaped it to his satisfaction, he took it to one of the fairs of the Arabs, merely intending to learn its value, not with any idea of selling it to any one to live upon its spoil. There, though offered for it sacks and garments, he flaunted it among the people, and refused to come to terms, and was unwilling to return home without it; and though offers were constantly increased, he thought it ruin to part with it, and going off to a watering-place with it in his hand, sat down to watch for the beasts. At the end of the night the she-asses come trooping, with the warlike champion in front; and now piercing death approaches, and he is shot by one who feeds on wild-beasts’ venison, who earns the title flanker or liverer. Straightway he hits him, and the mistresses abandon the mate who has found his death-blow, and the straight-shooter coming out of his hiding-place takes him to his little children, and makes of his flesh strips and slices, while his skin is despatched to the tanner. Like him does the short-nosed wild bull meet death – the creature who trembles if a man sees him, who endures for a long time, during which the hunter can devise nothing against him; and then one day he looks in the direction of the riverbed, and the channels greet him with a flowery carpet, and the high wind inspirits him with his skin free from wounds, till the north wind drive him to take refuge near some far-off lotus, nowhere near the other lotuses, where he remains the long night complaining of the cold, the clouds emptying their load of hail upon him: and at morning the hunter comes upon him with his hounds, keen-scented after game, stout, tough fighters, with eyes like grey ‘adris flowers; with leashes fastened to their necks, a very torment to the quarry. When he sees them, he turns his back to fly, fancying that a fire is raging in the desert. Then, after fleeing far, he rounds in fear and cold, and plunges with the two spears that grow apart from each other in his head; and the dogs retreat from him and leave him the victory, while the boldest of the pursuers lies prostrate in the dust. And when he feels sure of escape there crosses his path a mounted horseman, from whose arrows he receives a wound in the breast or in the thigh, and who returns bringing with him the wild bull to his hearth after his hunt. Death overlooks neither the absent nor the present, and ‘God’s is the matter before and after, and that day shall the believers rejoice’. So also with his snubnosed mate, she too has no long term here; for often her calf falls into the power of some hungry wolf, some savage, wandering, rebellious creature; he makes the attack while she is in a desert land, heedless; and then when she returns to give milk to her calf, she finds nothing but blood and bones. Then she abides distraught three or four days, and after that returns to her feasting and watering. This makes her forget her calf, and she is satisfied to let things go their way. Had time overlooked her, she would not have blamed it; as it was, time afflicted her with adversity, and not she it. Neither is security from the assaults of destiny granted to the gazelle which never is sheltered by walls, but strays at large in the wide and empty plains, that spends not its nights between shih and ala, but haunts instead the countries that abound in gum acacia and arak, where it is safe from the hunters’ nets. God sends it fatness, and mischief is removed from it. There it pleases itself with the arak fruit, ripe and unripe, having taken to itself a lair with a bed, the fruit having stained its mouth cherry-colour, it being red (Adam) and its mate black (Eve), and the two in a Paradise if only they could abide there. Not indeed that they resemble our first parents, though their colours correspond with their names; – and while they are in this beatific existence, fate fouls their clear water, and the snake is sent to them, the snake by which it was decreed that the old Adam should fall; which finds our fair gazelle astray under the shade of some bush, fearing no mischief; and the seducer falls upon it with its poisonous fang, and gives it a taste of death, death which separates it from all its friends. It might as well never hav
e tasted young herb or old; and never snuffed the pleasant Zephyr. Off flies his mate, miserable for loss of him; and then after the lapse of time becomes the mate of another; to be herself in her turn the prey of that destruction which gathers them that come after to them that have gone before. ‘The life of this world is but a deceptive ware.’