Among one eastern people, the Arabs, we find splendid treasures in the Moallakat. These were panegyrics which emerged triumphantly from the competitions of poets: poems, originating from before Muhammad’s time, written in letters of gold and suspended over the portals of the House of God in Mecca. They signal a nomadic bellicose nation, rich in herds, troubled by the internal rivalries of various tribes. Depicted in these poems are: the stubbornest allegiance to fellow tribesmen, a craving for honour, valour, an unappeasable thirst for vengeance, softened by the sorrows of love, by benevolence and self-sacrifice, of limitless extent. These poems offer us sufficient sense of the high culture of the tribe of the Quraysh, from which Muhammad himself sprang, but over which he cast a sombre veil of religion and thereby sought to conceal any prospect of genuine progress.
The value of these superb poems, seven in number, is augmented by the fact that the greatest variety predominates within them. Here we can give no briefer or worthier account of them than to interpose what the judicious Jones4 says of their character:
The poem of Imru’l-Qays is tender, glad, glittering, graceful, diverse and lovely. Tarafa’s is bold, aroused, bounding, but woven through with a certain gaiety. The poem of Zuhayr is sharp, solemn, chaste, full of moralistic injunctions and grave sayings. Labid’s poem is light, amorous, gracious and tender; it calls Virgil’s second Eclogue to mind: for it laments the pride and haughtiness of the Beloved and seizes the opportunity to enumerate her virtues in order to exalt the renown of her clan to the very skies. ῾Antara’s poem is proud, menacing, apposite, grand, yet not lacking in beautiful descriptions and images. ῾Amr is fierce, exalted, boastful; Harith by contrast is full of wisdom, wit and dignity. The two latter poems also represent poetical and political battle orations, which were delivered before an assembly of Arabs in order to still the destructive hatred of two tribes!
Since with this snippet we’ll surely prompt our readers to read or reread these poems, we now add another from the time of Muhammad, which is wholly in this spirit; its character might be described as sombre, even dark, yet glowing, hot for revenge and sated by vengeance:5
Beneath the cliff along the path
He lies struck down,
And no drops of dew trickle
Down into his blood.
He placed a heavy burden on me
And departed;
And yet, I shall shoulder
This burden.
‘The heir of my vengeance
Is my nephew,
The contentious,
The irreconcilable.
Dumbly he sweats the venom out,
As the viper is still,
As the snake exudes its venom,
Which no charm can counteract.’
A terrible message came to us
Of great and mighty misfortune;
It overmastered
The strongest among us.
Fate has devastated me,
Wounding the friend
Whose guest
Was never harmed.
He was the sun’s warmth
On a cold day;
And when Sirius scorched,
He was coolness and shade.
Lean of hip,
Not distressed,
Warm-handed,
Bold and powerful.
With firmness of mind
He pursued his goal,
Until he rested;
Then his firm mind rested too.
He was a raincloud,
Distributing gifts;
A ferocious lion
When he attacked.
Majestic before his people,
Black-haired, in long robes;
A lean wolf
Running against the foe.
Two flavours had he,
Honey and colocynth;
Dishes so flavoured
Everyone tasted.
He rode alone and terrifiying,
No one went with him
But his sword from the Yemen
Adorned with nicks.
At noon we young men
began The hostile campaign,
Rode through the night
Like restless and drifting clouds.
Each one was a sword,
Strapped about with a sword,
But ripped from its sheath
A glittering lightning bolt.
They sipped from the spirits of sleep;
But when they nodded their heads
We struck them
And they were gone.
We took our revenge in full;
Out of two tribes
Few escaped,
The least of them.
And if the Hudhaylite
Broke his lance to destroy him,
It is because he broke
The Hudhaylites with his lance.
They laid him down
On the rough resting place,
On the steep cliff where even the camels
Shatter their hooves.
When the morning greeted him there,
The murdered man, in that dreary place,
He was despoiled,
His plunder pillaged.
But now the Hudhaylites have been
Slaughtered by me with deep wounds.
Misfortune does not cow me;
Misfortune itself is cowed.
The thirst of the spear has been quenched
At its first slurp
And drinking again and again
Was not forbidden it.
Now wine is permitted once more
Which once was forbidden;
Through heavy toil
I won that permission.
By sword and lance
And by my horse I won
The privilege
That now is the property of all.
Reach me the goblet then,
O Sawad ibn ῾Amr:
For the sake of my uncle,
My body is one great wound.
And we handed the cup of death
To the Hudhaylites,
Whose effect is lamentation,
Blindness and abasement.
Then the hyenas laughed
At the deaths of the Hudhaylites,
And you saw wolves
Whose muzzles gleamed.
The noblest vultures flew down,
They strutted from corpse to corpse,
And so rich was the banquet spread there
They could not lift off to the heights.
Little is required for an understanding of this poem. The largeness of character, the seriousness, the justifiable cruelty of the action are genuine characteristics of the poetry. The first two stanzas offer a clear exposition; in the third and fourth, the dead man speaks and obliges his kinfolk to avenge him. The fifth and sixth are linked contextually with the first and are lyrically interchangeable; the seventh to thirteenth exalt the murdered man so that the magnitude of his loss may be felt. The fourteenth to seventeenth stanzas describe the expedition against the foe; the eighteenth turns backwards again; the nineteenth and twentieth could find a place just after the two first stanzas. The twenty-first and twenty- second could be positioned after the seventeenth; thus, the joy and savour of victory follow in the banquet, while the frightful joy of seeing the enemy struck down, a prey to hyenas and vultures, forms the conclusion.
It strikes us as quite remarkable that in this poem the purely prosaic treatment of the action becomes poetic through a transposition of the individual events. Accordingly, while the poem dispenses with virtually all exterior embellishment, its gravity is heightened; whoever reads it aright is compelled to glimpse the course of events, from beginning to end, built up bit by bit out of sheer force of imagination.