Abū Bakr ‘Abd al-Qāhir ibn ‘Abd al-Raḥmān, a Persian from Jurjān (or Gurgān, at the southeast corner of the Caspian Sea), died in 471/1078 or 474/1081. He wrote some works on Arabic grammar, but became famous with his two very influential books on literary style. Dalā’il al-i‘jāz (Proofs of the Inimitability [of the Qur’an]) explores how syntax contributes to meaning and to stylistic excellence, not only in the Qur’an but also in artistic prose and especially in poetry. Imagery is the main subject of Asrār al-balāghah (The Secrets of Eloquence), in which he offers a perceptive and penetrating analysis of comparison, metaphor, and related tropes. The ideas proposed in these works were no less novel than their style, which is essayistic, often passionate and to some extent unordered. In the present excerpt little attempt has been made to make the translations of the poetic quotations more “literary” by means of a meter.
There is no compelling reason why literary criticism should itself have “literary” qualities (a fact all too familiar to modern readers), and many Arabic works falling in this category have the non-literary characteristics of scholarly works when they deal with matters of philology, grammar, lexicography, stylistics, rhetoric, poetics, the study of poetic motifs, plagiarism, and all the other elements that together form literary criticism. There are some exceptions, however, and when ‘Abd al-Qāhir writes about poetic language and imagery his prose style is itself of a quality that justifies inclusion here. Another reason is that it is important to get an idea of how Arabic poetry was received and discussed by discriminating critics.
It is important to realize that comparisons may acquire a certain magical power that words cannot describe and that the art of exposition fails to match in elegance and beauty. For the comparison may reach a point where it turns disinterested acquaintances into suitors, diverts the bereaved from their grief, cools the anger of alienation, reminds people of lost pleasures, bears witness to the feeling of glory, and demonstrates all the power and ability that eloquence possesses.
This is shown by the verses by Ibn al-Rūmī:891
The rose’s892 cheeks became ashamed because they were preferred:
their rosy blushes testify to that.
The rosy-colored rose would not have been ashamed if he
who falsely favored it had been less obstinate.
The narcissus is clearly to be preferred, though some will
deny this and stray from the straight path.
Decisive in this case is that the one is the leader of
the garden flowers, and the other drives them away.893
How different the two! One threatening
to strip the world, the other full of promise.
Its glance deters the drinking friends from mischief
and it enhances the enjoyment of wine and singing.
Seek in your mind its namesake among pretty women,
and you’ll be sure always to find one894
Think hard: only the rose bears its own name,
no pretty woman is named after it.
It is the stars above that raised them both
with rain from clouds, just like a father does.
Look at the two brothers895: the one
more closely like his father is the glorious one.896
Where are cheeks, compared with eyes, in preciousness
and leadership, except in false analogy?
The ordering of the artistry897 in this passage is as follows: first, he effects the reversal of the terms of comparison,898 as has been discussed above, in the chapter on comparison. Thus he compares the redness of the rose to the redness of blushing in shame. Then he pretends to forget this, deceiving himself into the belief that it is real shame. Then, having become assured of this in his heart, after the image has taken hold, he looks for a cause899 for that shame and makes that cause the fact that the rose has been preferred to the narcissus and has been given a place that even it does not think it deserved. It begins to feel embarrassed and becomes fearful of the blame of critics and the taunts of mockers. It finds itself being extolled with praise that is clearly false and so exaggerated that his praise becomes, as it were, a mockery of the one meant by it instead. Then the poet, thanks to his penetrating intelligence and productive natural talent for the magic of eloquence, adds to this the concoction of arguments in favor of the narcissus, as you have seen, and how it is entitled to being preferred to the rose. In this way he achieves a beauty and excellence the like of which is hardly to be found in others.
The following verses by Abū Hilāl al-‘Askarī are worthy of being placed alongside this piece, and of being associated with it in the subtlety of their artistry:
The violet claimed to be as lovely as his [the beloved’s] downy cheek,900
so they tore its tongue from its throat.
They did no wrong by making an example of it,
since it had so badly overpraised itself.901
Recent poets have occasionally produced witty, subtle, original, and charming examples of this artistry, which cannot be commended enough and the excellence of which offers ample scope for praise. Among these is Ibn Nubātah’s description of a horse:
A black one, from whom the night draws its ink
the Pleiades rising between his eyes,
Who went at night, chasing dawn, flying in its course,
folding up the spheres behind him:
When he feared it was about to escape,
he held on to it with legs and face.902
Even better and more accomplished in artistry is his verse from another piece:
It is as if dawn has slapped its forehead,
then it retaliated and rushed into its insides.903
The beginning of this piece is:
The noble steed you gave has come to us,
its neck linking earth and sky:
Have you made us governor and sent it as a lance,
the hairs of its mane being the lance’s vane?
Proudly we ride it, with its white blaze and fetlocks,
the water of dark nights being a drop of its water.
It is as if dawn has slapped its forehead,
then it retaliated and rushed into its insides.
Moving at leisure, yet “Lightning” is one of its names,
veiled, but beauty is one of its peers.
Fires would not conceal their heat
if fires had any of its flare.904
Glances fix themselves on its flanks
only when you curb some of its ardor.
A noble horse (ṭirf) will not show its beauties in full
until the eye (ṭarf) is one of its captives.905
Pride of place in this type clearly goes to the following verses, by virtue of their striking and effortless originality:
Water flowing over the pebbles (…),
As if from the fast flow it is struck with madness
and the winds have clothed it in chains.906
The poet was fortunate inasmuch as his road had already been paved, since the comparison of ripples woven on the surface of ponds to the rings of a coat of mail was well known. Going one step further, he turns them into chains, just as Ibn al-Mu‘tazz had done:
Watercourses that were made to pour forth like chains,
to suckle the children of sweet herbs and flowers.907
Then he skillfully completes the image by attributing to the water a quality that made it necessary to throw it into chains. This is easily done: violent motion and excessive quickness are characteristic of madness, just as a gentle pace and slow deliberation are among the attributes of reason.
Of this type are the verses on a sword by Ibn al-Mu‘tazz, from a poem on al-Muwaffaq:908
A knight, sheathed in armor
that cuts to shreds the striking sword,
(a coat of mail) like water that once flowed on him
until it disappeared in him and froze.
In his hand he holds a sharp sword: when he brandishes it
you would think it trembles, fearing him.909
He wants to devise a cause for the sword’s shaking, so he makes it the trembling that overcomes it out of fear and awe inspired by the patron. It would seem that Ibn Bābak910 had this verse in mind and relied on it when he used the motif of trembling in the following verses:
The teeth of misfortunes may test me with their bite
and Time may weaken the strands of my strength,
Yet the sword does not shake from fear,
nor does the lance tremble from cold.
Here, however, the poet uses another method. What he means to say is: The fact that the movements of the lance look superficially like the movements of someone who trembles does not necessarily mean that it has some defect or condition. It is as if he turned the matter round, denying that the quality of trembling in the lance had the same causes that it has in living beings. Note that Ibn al-Mu‘tazz, by contrast, asserts that the movement in the sword has the same real cause as that found in living beings.
He (i.e. Ibn Bābak) repeated this (motif of) trembling in a manner altogether identical to the one I described above:
They said, His grief has weighed him down, so his back is bent!
But I said (and doubt is certainty’s foe):
The narcissus is not thin from love’s longing,
nor is pining the cause of the jasmine’s pallor;
The sword’s trembling is not from cold,
nor the bending of the lance from its being too soft.
A verse that deserves to be a model for this type is this one by al-Buḥturī:
[The lances] blunder into necks and faces,
intoxicated with the blood they’ve drunk.911
He transforms the act of those who stab with lances into a blundering on their part, just as Ibn al-Mu‘tazz had turned the moving and brandishing of a sword into a trembling. Then he seeks a cause for this blundering, just as Ibn al-Mu‘tazz had sought one for the trembling. The following verse by ‘Ulbah is also of this kind:912
It is as if the clouds held a wedding feast with the earth,
and the scattered confetti was camphor913
—and the verse by Abū Tammām:
It is as if the white clouds had buried under them (viz. the abandoned abodes)
a loved one: their tears did not cease flowing,914
so too the verse by al-Sarī in which he describes a new crescent moon:915
The month of joys, Shawwāl, has come to you,
and a murderer has killed the month of fasting!916
After that, he says:
It is like a tight silver (fiḍḍah) shackle, broken (fuḍḍa)
from the fasting people’s feet, who now walk proudly.
All these poets [ostensibly] deceive themselves, ignoring the comparisons, and erroneously give the illusion that what commonly serves as the basis of the comparison is present and has happened in reality, in their presence. Then, rather than restricting themselves to claiming that this has happened, they devise a cause for it and come up with something that attests to it. Thus ‘Ulbah posits a wedding being celebrated by the sky and the earth, Abū Tammām gives the clouds a loved one buried in the dust, and al-Sarī pretends that those who fasted were fettered with a tight shackle which is broken in half, or bent apart so that it widens and assumes the shape of a new moon. The difference between the verse by ‘Ulbah and those of the two Ṭā’ite poets917 is that comparing snow to camphor is usual and common, used by everybody, as is turning raindrops that fall from the clouds into tears, or describing the clouds and the sky as weeping. The comparison of the sickle moon to a shackle, on the other hand, is unusual, even though its counterpart is common and the same motif is found in the same form. By this counterpart I mean the comparison of the crescent moon to a broken918 bracelet, as mentioned before. Thus a poet says:919
Resembling half a bracelet
of blazing gold,
and al-Sarī himself says:
The crescent moon appeared to us like half a necklace
on the neck of a woman dressed in blue.920
Note, however, that this is simple and does not contain an aetiology (ta‘līl) that would make it necessary for the moon to be a bracelet or a necklace.
I saw that someone921 quotes the verse by al-Sarī, “It is like a tight silver shackle,” together with other verses, quoting a piece by Ibn al-Ḥajjāj:922
both of whose guests have died,923
Why is it that I see the spherical loaf
is so honored and exalted with you,
Like the full moon, which we do not expect
to appear until evening?
Then he says: “He compares the bread with the full moon for two reasons: its roundness and the fact that it appears (only) in the evening.” He also says, “The best comparison is that which combines two motifs, like the verses by Ibn al-Rūmī:924
You, who resemble the full moon in beauty
and in being unattainable:
Be generous! Fresh water
will sometimes burst from a rock.”925
He also quotes Ibrāhīm ibn al-Mahdī:
You have shown compassion to young children like sandgrouse chicks
and to the moaning of distraught woman, like the bow of him who draws it.926
He continues: “Similar is the verse by al-Sarī, ‘It is like a tight silver shackle’.” But this does not resemble the other examples that he mentions, apart from the fact that it can be said to express both the shape of the crescent, through a broken shackle, and its color, through silver. If, however, he considers this to be the point that constitutes the verse’s striking originality, then it should not be quoted together with the other verses, because not one of these other verses contains an aetiology. There is nothing more to them than the joining of one tertium comparationis927 to another, such as the twanging and the curvedness of the bow, or the roundness of the full moon and its appearance in the evening. None of these motifs is the cause of the other, none of the two similarities mentioned needs to be validated by another.
A verse that is a true counterpart to al-Sarī’s verse and that uses the same approach is one by Ibn al-Mu‘tazz:
He poured me wine when dawn’s sword was already drawn
and night had fled in fear.928
Here the poet is not content with a comparison of outward appearance and unconstrained expression, as he was in his verse:
Until the morning appeared from behind its veil,
like a sword blade from its sheath.929
or in his verse:
When the tunic of darkness became thin
and dawn’s whiteness came like a rusty sword.930
Rather, he wishes to validate his claim that there was a drawn sword, and to behave as if he really did not know that it was merely a comparison, intended to convey whiteness and elongated shape. He does this by turning the darkness into a defeated enemy who feels threatened by a drawn sword and flees, fearing he will be struck with it.
So too in the following verse, where he makes the night fear dawn, though not using the same technique I am dealing with here:
We arrived there931 before the Dawn, who was masked
and hiding in ambush, while Night’s heart was wary of him.932
And here is a piece by Ibn al-Mu‘tazz, one verse of which illustrates our point:
Look at a world of Spring933 that comes
like a strumpet, all tarted up for the fornicators.
She comes as a visitor, like last year,
dressed up, perfumed with flowers.
When morning strips934 to reveal its (white) camphor,
birds of all kinds speak in their languages.
The rose laughs at the narcissus’s eyes that have become
inflamed, those still alive showing signs of dying.935
It is this last verse that I mean. That roses and other kinds of fragrant and blossoming flowers laugh when they open is a well known and common motif. In this verse the poet has given this a cause, by turning the rose, as it were, into a rational and discriminating being, gloating over the narcissus’s imminent demise, the reversal of its fortune, and the signs of impending extinction. He repeats this motif of the laughing rose in the following:
The rose laughed at the gillyflower
and we were relieved from shivering from cold.
He means that summer has come and the air is warm, as one sees from what follows:
And we enjoyed a midday nap in the cool shade
and smelled the basil, with camphor.
Depart, depart, you army of pleasures,
from every garden and pond!936
Ibn al-Rūmī blames the rose for this (viz. announcing the end of spring):
Decisive in this case is that the one is the leader of
the garden flowers, and the other drives them away.
Ibn al-Mu‘tazz makes it laugh because it drives them away, just as a conquering and victorious person laughs having stripped others of their worldly powers and taken complete possession. A case where the laughter is given some kind of cause is when he says:
Love has died in me, my youth has gone,
and I have had my fill of all the pleasures I craved.
Now when, in company, I try to behave like a young lover937
my gray hair laughs at me with my friends.938
There is no doubt that the laughter is given an additional meaning that it does not have, for instance, in Di‘bil’s verse:
[… a man] on whose head
the gray hair laughs, so he weeps.939
This addition is nothing more than the poet making the gray hair laugh like someone who is amazed to see a man attempt to do something unbefitting him and affect something for which he is not suited. Here, the form of the comparison is concealed, as I have mentioned, and supposedly forgotten. The same is the case with the following verses by Ibn al-Mu‘tazz:
When they saw us in a blazing army
In bright sunlight that laughed, but without bemusement,940
As if gold had been poured upon the earth,
And our swords appeared from their sheaths,
So as to be a cause of their death,
While we swaggered in iron armor and the earth shook,
And sinew twanged and nab‘ wood clamored,941
They shielded themselves from fighting by fleeing.942
What concerns us here are the words “laughed, but without bemusement.” The very denial of a cause is an indication that the laughter could have been given a cause, and that it was definitely real. After all, if you were to revert to the explicit comparison and say, “the sun’s beaming looked like someone laughing,” and then add “without bemusement,” it would be unacceptable. You will see this also in the following verse by a Bedouin Arab, if you were to count it among the same kind:
A coat of mail that mocks the arrowheads,
Like a snake’s slough.943
There is another kind of aetiology. It occurs when a certain concept or some act or other has a well-known customary or natural cause; then a poet comes along who denies this and posits another cause. An example of this is al-Mutanabbī’s verse:
He is not bent on killing his adversaries
but he takes care not to disappoint the expectant wolves.944
What people are familiar with is that when a man kills his adversaries he does so because he wants to destroy them and defend himself against the harm they may do, so that his domain remains safe and uncontested. As you can see, al-Mutanabbī claims that his patron has another reason for killing his enemies.
One should note that the introduction of such a pretended novel reason is possible only if it conveys a noble quality in relation to the patron, or an effective kind of blame. Thus al-Mutanabbī, in this verse, intends to describe him with a high degree of generosity and munificence, as someone dominated by his noble natural disposition; someone whose love of living up to the expectation of those who approach him and whose desire not to dash their hopes have reached such an extent that, knowing that wolves will anticipate plentiful sustenance and a time of abundance on account of the slaying of the enemies when he goes to war, he is loath to disappoint them, to frustrate their hopes by not aiding them. There is yet another kind of praise here, namely that he defeats his enemy and utterly routs them so that they will not thereafter aspire to repeat their conduct: that he will then no longer need to kill them and shed their blood; and that he is not someone who gives in to his wrath and rancor, killing wantonly, or who withholds forgiveness when he is in power, and similar praiseworthy qualities.
A striking, though somewhat tortuous example of this kind is offered by Abū Ṭālib al-Ma’mūnī’s verses, in an ode praising a vizier of Bukhara, as follows:
[He is] fond of praise, loves earning glory
and agitated, happy to give,
Only tasting slumber because he hopes to see
the apparition945 of a petitioner at eventide.946
It seems he specifies the evening because petitioners and those bringing requests would arrive in his presence only early in the day, as is the custom of rulers. Therefore, since such visitors seldom come in the evening or at other times when they would not be granted an audience, he longs for them and sleeps, in the hope of seeing them appear in his dreams. But an excessive tortuousness can impair the motif one wishes to underscore: you will notice that these words can also mislead one into thinking that the poet argues that the patron is someone whose gifts are not desired by everyone, and that he does not belong to the same category as the man of whom it has been said,
Your gift is an ornament to a man if you bestow
something good on him—not every gift is an ornament.947
But this objection is easily rebutted and one should pay little attention to it, given that the poet is always intent on proving that his patron is generous, someone hankering after petitioners, always glad to see them; bent on denying that he is a dour miser, someone who knits his brow when he has to force himself to disburse and who has to fight his inner self to part with his money just so that he can be called a generous man, all the while loving praise and riches at the same time, someone who does not let himself be guided by what Abū Tammām intends by his verse:
East and West have never come together for a traveler,
nor glory and dirhams in the palm of a man.948
Such a man will hasten to listen to panegyric poems but will be slow to reward the panegyrist. Now, if it is taken for granted that this was the poet’s purpose, one should banish any misgivings from one’s mind.
Such misgivings as I mentioned might, however, occur in connection with al-Mutanabbī’s verse:
Before he gives to petitioners he gives to the one who announces
their arrival, as if he were told about water when thirsty.949
But this is an aside and will, God willing, be dealt with in full elsewhere.
The verse about the apparition of the petitioner builds from verses such as
I get under the covers even though I do not feel sleepy:
perhaps a dream vision of yours will meet mine.950
It is not too far-fetched to see in this model, too, the invention of an unusual cause, only it is not quite as striking and out of the ordinary. After all, one may easily imagine that someone madly in love wants to see his beloved if he has not been with her for a long time; and if he wants that, he may well wish he were asleep for that particular purpose.
The following verse is to be connected with this section:
Solace departed with my departure; it is as if
I have made my sighs follow it, as an escort.951
Here the poet gives a striking cause for the sighs rising from his breast, ignoring the usual, well-known reason and cause for it, namely sadness and sorrow. The meaning is: solace has departed from me with my departing from you, i.e. at my departing, and together with it, and through it. Since the breast is the place of fortitude, and sighs rise there too, it is as if solace and deep sighs have lodged together there as two companions. When one departed, the other was bound to escort it, as a duty of friendship.
The following verses by Ibn al-Mu‘tazz are of this type, follow the same path, and are strung on the same thread:
I punished my eye952 with tears and sleeplessness,
since my heart was jealous of my sight, for you.
It bore this patiently, victoriously
gaining the pleasure of seeing you.953
The usual reason eyes are tearful and sleepless is the beloved’s aloofness, or the intervention of the chaperone, and other such reasons for grief. As you can see, he has abandoned all that, claiming that the cause is as he said, the heart’s jealousy of the eye on account of the beloved, preferring to be her sole beholder; and claiming that, to please his heart and obey its command, he sought to punish his eye, making it cry and robbing it of sleep. He uses the same motif of punishing the eye with tears and sleeplessness in a poem that begins:
Say to the sweetest creature in shape and figure:
are you avoiding me in earnest or aren’t you?
That is not what my desires told me;
Alas, I see you have betrayed love!
What do you think of a lover enthralled by you,
submissive, who cannot but be humble?
If his eye whores with another, then lash it
with long insomnia and tears, as legal punishment.954
Here he has made weeping and sleeplessness a punishment for a crime that he imputes to the eye, as he did in the verse quoted before. The crime, however, takes a different form here from the crime in the other verse. Here, the eye’s crime is looking at someone other than the beloved, and considering as licit what is illicit and forbidden; there, the crime is looking at the beloved himself955 and competing with the heart in seeing it. Here, the heart’s jealousy of the eye is the reason for the punishment, whereas there the jealousy exists between the beloved and some other person.
There is no doubt that the second verse falls short of the first and that the first is vastly superior. For in it he made one part of himself jealous of another, extremely wittily and subtly creating a quarrel between his eyes and his heart over the beloved. The jealousy in the second verse, on the other hand, is of the ordinary kind. Moreover, the word “whores”—even though what follows has added charm by being artfully crafted and is made more acceptable by the allusion to the Prophetic tradition “the eye whores,”956—is nevertheless bound to rouse some aversion.
If you want to see this motif displaying the same artfulness in its most wonderful and wittiest form, consider these verses:
She came to me, scolding me for crying—
Welcome, she and her scolding!
She said, with bashfulness in her words:
“Do you cry with the eye you see me with?”
I said, “If it approves of anyone but you,
I command tears to discipline it.”957
With the word “discipline” the poet shows you the good discipline of the astute man who guards his diction from what is offensive and requires an apology. Still, mastery is evident in the verse by Ibn al-Mu‘tazz. Not every excellence is evident at first glance: rather, it is apparent after a perusal and reflection, by thinking about the matter from beginning to end. As you know, there is no more eloquent way of showing the enormity of the crime he wishes to denounce than to mention the prescribed penalty [for fornication]; and that can only be achieved by means of the word “whores.” In this way many poets without natural talent who followed the method of Abū Tammām have come to grief. This is not the place to expatiate on this subject; my purpose is now to show you some types of make-believe (takhyīl) and to lay down rules, as it were, which may be found helpful in the detailed exposition that follows.