Arabic Literature

An Overview

Pierre Cachia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135787165
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Literatura de Oriente Medio

Assuming no previous knowledge of the subject, Arabic Literature - An Overview gives a rounded and balanced view of Arab literary creativity. 'High' literature is examined alongside popular folk literature, and the classical and modern periods, usually treated separately, are presented together. Cachia's observations are not subordinated to any pre-formed literary theory, but describe and illustrate the directions taken, in order to present an overall picture of the field of relevance to the student of literature as well as to Arabists working in related fields.

1

THE ROOT

“Have poets left a song unsung?”

Such is at least one reading of an opening line by ‹Antara, one of the most celebrated of pre-Islamic poets. This is but one indication that the Arab poetic tradition – embodied in numerous orally transmitted compositions, some purportedly dating back to the middle of the fifth century, a good century and a half before the emergence of Islam – is the product of a long development, for it was already firmed up by conventions and even equipped with clichés, such as the striking comparison of the half-erased traces of a desert encampment to repeated tattoo-marks among the veins of the wrist (the wrist being, even nowadays, a favourite spot for tattooing), or the conceit that the swords of a warring clan are flawless except for the notches resulting from the blows dealt to an enemy.

Indeed poetry has long been deemed the supreme art form among the Arabs, one that flourished even at times when other arts were virtually unknown. The literary prose of the same period, on the other hand, consists only of some proverbs and orations reported at a much later date. An often quoted dictum by the critic Ibn-Rašīq (1000–63 or 71) has it that the early Arabs congratulated one another for only three occurrences: the birth of a boy, the emergence of a poet, and the foaling of a noble mare. And to this day attending a poetry recitation in the Arab world is an eye-opener for the outsider: he will see and hear an audience of hundreds sitting for four hours or more, listening intently and responding instantly and forcefully as one poet after another declaims his compositions.

The words for poetry, ši‹r, and for poet, šā‹ir, are from a root which has come to denote ‘feeling’, inviting an association with the Romantic notion that poetry is primarily concerned with emotion. Originally, however, the root denoted ‘knowledge, awareness’. The poet was a repository and recorder of tribal lore, hence the saying that “poetry is the register of the Arabs.” And indeed the Arabs have inherited from pre-Islamic times an imposing body of robust poetry that has set the standard for successive centuries.

In this, rhythm was achieved by repetitive patterns of long and short syllables, later analyzed and somewhat artificially expanded into sixteen metres, in most of which each line runs to between twenty-two and thirty syllables, divided into hemistichs. And no matter how long a poem was, the same rhyme was maintained throughout.¹

There are indications that at an early stage the poets had a supranormal function in the tribe. Each was believed to have a demon, and at least the satires he directed at an enemy had the character of a curse. When so engaged he might appear with half his hair anointed, one shoulder covered and the other bare, and only one foot shod, and he would point at the opposing tribe while delivering his verse. To this day the Arabic name for the index finger is as-sabbāba, ‘the curser’.

But it is also recorded that the tribes observed months of truce every year, when war even between sworn enemies was suspended, and during these months fairs were held in some centres – in Mecca, in Du-l-Majāz, and principally in ‹Ukāẓ – at which the tribes shared commercial and religious activities, and at which (as happens even now at folk festivals) poets competed for attention. If the accounts written somewhat later are to be believed, rival poets sought the arbitration of some highly respected master of the craft, and the judgments given and often acrimoniously disputed were concerned not with their demonic alliances but with their human fallibility in the use of words.

And from the start, the poetry on record had ample room for both tribal and personal motifs. The role of the individual in pre-Islamic society is well characterized in a poem by Durayd ibn-as-Simma (d. 630) which recounts how he participated in a raid on an enemy tribe which started well, but after getting away with some booty the raiding party, disregarding his advice, stopped to divide the spoils and was overtaken by a detachment from the offended tribe, with the result that a number of men, including the poet’s brother, were killed. The first five lines of his poem emphatically assert Durayd’s own acumen before proclaiming his tribal solidarity in strikingly jingoistic terms (ṭawīl/dī):

True was my counsel to ‹Āriḍ and his companions,

The kinsmen of as-Sawdā› – and the whole tribe are my witnesses:

Said I, “Beware: two thousand well-armed men,

Their leaders clad in armour of Persian make!”

But when they disregarded me I stayed at one with them, seeing

What they erroneously saw, that I was ill-advised.

I uttered my behest at Mun‹araj al-Liwā,

But they did not perceive its wisdom till next the sun was high.

Am I anything but a man of Xaziyya? When it errs, I err,

And when Xaziyya is wise, then am I wise.

The opposite sentiment is voiced by aš-Šanfarā (d. c.550), one of several rogue poets who relied not on the backing of their tribe to survive, but on their own wits and hardihood (ṭawīl/lū):

Up with the breasts of your riding-beasts, my mother’s sons,

For to another kinship I incline.

Urgent are my needs. Moonlit is the night,

And for my purposes the mounts and saddlebags are strapped.

To the noble-spirited, earth offers a refuge from harm,

A lone retreat for him who shuns reproach.

The land, I swear, does not shrink before one

Set questing by fear or desire, if he but keep his wits.

Other kinsmen have I: The nimble-footed wolf,

The furtive spotted serpent, the shaggy-maned hyena.

That is a company midst whom one’s secrets are kept

And one is not shunned for a fault once committed.

Between these poles was a wide range of human experience for the pre-Islamic poets to explore. They left to posterity a treasury of love-songs, wine-songs, and hunting-songs. Prominent of course were poems praising tribes and chieftains, celebrating warlike deeds with the consequent elegies on the death of heroes. But there was also praise for the peace-makers.

The early Muslim scholars who collected this precious material called any of these poems on a single theme a qiṭ‹a, ‘a piece’, as if it was a fragment detached from a larger unit. They reserved the term qaṣīda, now used for any poem, for a kind of ode constructed on a particular tripartite pattern. This pattern is best exemplified in seven – or, in a different collection, ten – widely recognized masterpieces known as the mu‹allaqāt, i.e. ‘the suspended odes’, so called because they were purportedly written in gold and suspended inside the ka‹ba, the cubical shrine that was revered in Mecca even before it became the focus of the Muslim pilgrimage. The term may, however, with only a little straining, be taken to refer to the stringing together of several themes.

The first part of a qaṣīda, was known as the nasīb or amatory prelude. This was the celebration of a lost love. Sometimes what stirred the poet’s emotion was an apparition which he took to be the spectre of the beloved. More commonly, however, the entire poem started with a situation so conventional and so well understood by the audience that it was not explicitly described: The poet, traveling through the desert with one or two companions, comes upon the traces of an encampment where once dwelt a woman he loved, and he gives expression to what was known as “weeping over the ruins.” Here and elsewhere specific locations are named, the significance of which is now lost but which may be presumed to have been desirable sites to which only prestigious tribes had access. But the features that stir the poet’s emotional recollection are precise. Thus in Zuhayr’s (d.609) suspended ode:

Is it ›Ummu ›Awfā’s, this unspeaking ruin

In the rocky plain between Darrāj and Mutaṯallam?

And that abode of hers at Raqmatayn, resembling

Retraced tattoo marks among the veins of the wrist?

There do the wild cows and oryxes follow one another,

And their young spring up from their resting places.

I halted there after twenty years

And, by toilsome imagining, made out the abode:

The blackened hearth-stones, where the cauldron once rested,

And a trench, like a cistern’s edge, uncrumbled.

When I knew the abode, I called to the spring-site:

“Good morning, spring-site! May you be safe!”

Usually, the amatory prelude was more nostalgic than erotic. But in some instances – notably in the suspended ode of Imru›u-l-Qays – it leads to a boastful recounting of the poet’s many seductions. Among the many days he remembered with relish were:

… The day I entered the howdah – ‹Unayza’s howdah –

She saying, “Many be your woes! You force me down!”

And again, as the saddle-frame swayed beneath us both,

“You’ve hocked my camel, Imru›u-l-Qays. Dismount!”

I told her, “Travel on, with its nose-rein loosened,

And do not banish me from your oft-tasted fruit.

Many like you have I visited at night – a pregnant or nursing mother,

Distracting her from a one year-old bedecked with amulets.

If, behind her, he cried, she turned towards him

With half her body, the other half unturned beneath me.”

And a day when, on a sand dune, she denied herself

To me with an oath from which was no evasion:

“O Fāṭima, go softly with some of this cocquettishness.

If adamant to cut me off, be seemly!

Is your delusion that my love for you is fatal,

And that whatever you command, my heart obeys?

If any trait of mine displeases you,

Then slip my garments from your own – they will slip off!

Soon, however – either as a proud reaction to rejection, or with a convenient transitional phrase such as “Often do I set off when birds are in their nests” which Imru›u-l-Qays uses in four of his poems, or even without any such preparation – the poet launches into the second part of the ode, the raḥīl or journey in which he has opportunity to describe the desert setting and its fauna, his own mount, his hardihood and skill in hunting or in battle. A prime example is in Labīd’s (d. c.661) suspended ode, where having urged himself to turn away from a hopeless love he moves through a concatenation of images – functionally thorough and sharp in detail² – of which the first few lines read:

Cut short your longing for an uncertain union:

The best preserver of a love is a decisive break.

Richly repay the gracious one, but the sole...