3
Court Culture (7th–8th centuries)
And that dismal cry rose slowly
And sank slowly through the air,
Full of spirit’s melancholy
And eternity’s despair!
And they heard the words it said –
Pan is dead! Great Pan is dead!
Pan! Fan is dead!
Elizbeth Barrett Browning,
‘The Dead Pan’
After the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, Abu Bakr, a kinsman by marriage, was acclaimed leader of the Muslim community and took the title of khalif, or caliph, meaning deputy. When Abu Bakr died in 634, Umar, who was similarly related to the Prophet, became caliph and he in turn was succeeded in 644 by Uthman, a son-in-law of the Prophet. However, Uthman’s partisan treatment of certain tribes caused dissent. After the murder of the Caliph Uthman and the death of ‘Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law (whose caliphate had been supported by, among others, the murderers of Uthman), the Umayyad clan, to which Uthman had belonged, held the caliphate for almost a century (661–750). As caliphs, they ruled over an expanding Muslim empire which was to stretch from the river Indus to the Atlantic shore of Morocco. The centre of government moved from the Hejaz to Syria, and Damascus became its capital. Although the Hejaz swiftly became a political backwater and the Arab armies which fought to defend and expand the territory of Islam were now mostly garrisoned in towns, poetry continued to be produced according to the conventions which had been hammered out in the deserts of Arabia. Arab poets, comfortably ensconced in towns like Basra or Samarkand, fantasized about themselves as travellers through the Arabian desert. They lamented the traces of abandoned campfires, complained of the hardship of waterless journeys, and celebrated the beauties of the camels and gazelles. But the old forms were made to serve new purposes.
Poetry flourished under the patronage of the Umayyad court and that patronage shaped much of the poetry. The concluding panegyric, or madih, in the course of which the poet sought a reward from his patron, often became the main burden of the qasida, so that the journey evoked in the qasida ended with the patron. Many a poet, having commenced his qasida with a lament for a lost love, concluded it by suggesting that the discovery of an appreciative patron was compensation for past grief. Panegyric is not the sort of genre which is likely to appeal to a modern reader. In his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Dr Samuel Johnson defined a patron in these terms: ‘Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery’. Although praise of a patron was an esteemed genre and the patron’s filling the poet’s mouth with gold coins was a favourite cliché in Arab literary history, it is not easy to bully an English reader into liking medieval Arabic panegyric. Like an advertising jingle, it has almost certainly been written to extort money from its target audience and so is likely to smell of insincerity. The later ‘Abbasid poet Ibn al-Rumi, admitting that his panegyrics were insincere, remarked that ‘God has reproached poets for saying what they do not do, but they are not guilty of this alone, for they say what princes do not do’. In modern times, it has often been monsters like Stalin or Kim II Sung who have received panegyric tributes. In Umayyad times qasidas were written to celebrate the merits of particular caliphs or, more generally, the virtues of Islamic government.
The Christian Arab, Ghiyath ibn Ghawth al-AKHTAL, who died sometime before 710, was the most accomplished eulogist of the Umayyads. (There is some disagreement about the meaning of the cognomen Akhtal, which means either ‘one whose ears are flabby and hang down’, or ‘one who is loquacious’.) Akhtal, who was favoured by the Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik, was chiefly famous for his panegyric qasidas, but he also composed epigrammatic poems and was one of the earliest poets in the Islamic period to celebrate the pleasures of wine.
Many’s the fellow worth his draught
in gold, good company, never ajar,
whom I joined in wine when the cock had crowed
and the night-long caravans drew to a halt;
wine of ‘Ana, where gliding by
the Euphrates draws its rolling wave;
three years under lock, it had shed its heat
and, mellowing, sunk to half the jar
which a Greek-tongued jack had filled to the brim
and decked with leaves of laurel and vine;
fair, neither black, of humble earth,
nor ruddy, from overconcern with the hearth;
dressed in a quivering gossamer gown
and a skin-tight bodice of fibre and tar;
golden, deepening to amber with time
confined in a vault among gardens and streams;
a virgin whose charms no suitor had seen
till unveiled in a shop for a gold dinar
by a busy fellow bustling about,
unkempt, in shabby patched-up clothes.
Put to the bargain on price agreed,
he winced, this double-dealing rogue,
turned a face when I clinched the deal
like the odd miss out in a boardful of scores.
When they fetched the jar with lantern and broach,
out leapt the wine as they stabbed it deep,
fierce like the spill from a pulsing vein,
and settled, decanted, round and still,
and it seemed, by the flare from the pouring glass,
that musk by the load had been in war.
Tuetey, Classical Arabic Poetry, pp. 175–6
Akhtal was famous for his literary alliance with the poet al-Farazdaq, and both were celebrated for their poetical contests or flytings (naqa’id) with yet another poet, Jarir ibn ‘Atiyya (d. 728). Although Jarir was a Bedouin poet, he visited the cities and found favour with the Ummayad princes and officials who dwelt there. He first attracted the attention of the Umayyad governor al-Hajjaj, but subsequently he secured the patronage of Caliph Umar II. Jarir specialized in satire (hijja), much of it being delivered in the context of naqa’id. Such demonstrations of poetical skill (which had originally taken place before tribal battles in pre-Islamic Arabia) should be seen more as a form of public entertainment than genuinely felt expressions of venom. Eulogy was not the only way to secure patronage and one gets the impression that some poets took to specializing in satire as a particular kind of blackmail: they hoped to be paid for not composing poetry, for their sole aim was to extract money from potential victims in exchange for silence.
Jarir, Akhtal and Farazdaq, though not desert-dwelling Bedouin themselves, composed poetry exactly in the manner of their pre-Islamic predecessors – as in this extract from one of Jarir’s qasidas, which employs the deserted campsite theme.
And how strangely time changes all!
The camel of youth walks slowly now; its once quick pace is gone; it is bored with travelling.
Salma K. Jayussi (trans.), in Beeston et al. (eds.), The
Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Arabic
Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, p. 408
The other member of this bickering trio, Tammam ibn Ghalib al-Farazdaq (d. 728), was a fellow tribesman of Jarir, for they both belonged to the tribe of Tammim. However, Farazdaq came from a different branch of it and he supported Akhtal in the battle of the poets. Farazdaq had a turbulent career, falling in and out of favour with various patrons, and he enjoyed (if that is the word) a terrible reputation as cowardly, spiteful, drunk and dissolute. Besides writing abusive poetry, Farazdaq was also a noted plagiarist. Quite a few of Farazdaq’s poems deal with love and domestic unhappiness.
where the wind plays round her pavilioned tent,
her whiteness shimmering cool as the pearls,
at whose step the very earth will light,
means more than a townswoman full of tricks
who gasps when she lays aside her fans.
Tuetey, Classical Arabic Poetry, p. 171
In the centuries which followed, the comparative assessments of the merits of Farazdaq and Jarir became a stock exercise among literary pundits. More generally, comparing and contrasting couplets by different poets was one of the earliest forms of medieval Arab literary criticism. The compare-and-contrast-Jarir-and-Farazdaq exercise was later reproduced and parodied in al-Hamadhani’s tenth-Century work of belles-lettres, the Maqamat:
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‘Compare Jarir and Farazdaq. Which of them is superior?’ He answered: ‘Jarir’s poetry is more sophisticated and linguistically richer, but Farazdaq’s is more vigorous and more brilliant.’ Again Jarir is a more caustic satirist and he presents himself as more noble in the field of poetry, whereas al-Farazdaq is more ambitious and belongs to the nobler clan. Jarir, when he composes love poems, draws tears. When he vituperates he destroys, but when he eulogises, he exalts. Farazdaq in panegyric is all sufficient. When he scorns he degrades, but when he praises, he gives full value. |
The Umayyad poets took for granted the superiority of those who had gone before them. Thus Farazdaq, when commenting on the inferior poetry of a contemporary rival, declared that
Cited in Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought
(Cambridge, 1994), P. 98
Incidentally, Farazdaq is said to have owned a book of poems, one of the earliest pieces of evidence for such a thing. Poetry seems to have first been written down towards the end of the first century hijri.
As has been noted, Akhtal was actually a town-dwelling Christian Arab. However, like many poets he used to make regular trips into the desert in order to sit at the feet of Bedouin tribesmen, so as to improve his mastery of the Arabic language. This sort of practice was widespread in the early centuries of Islam, not just among poets, but also philologists in the newly-founded Arab garrison towns of Basra and Kufa in southern Iraq. The philologists held that their language was preserved in its purest form in the desert. Moreover, the speech of the desert Arabs abounded in marvellous lexical rarities and both poets and lexicographers went out hunting for these. For instance, riman means ‘the sound of a stone thrown at a boy’; bartala means ‘to put a long stone in the front part of a watering trough and hence [sic] to offer a bribe’; a khadhuf is ‘a she-ass … so fat that, if a pebble is thrown at her with the fingers, or the two fore fingers, or with the extremity of the thumb and that of the forefinger, it sinks into her fat’; bahlasa means ‘to arrive suddenly from another country without any luggage’. Such eerily precise definitions are entertaining and these and other obscure lexical items fuelled the word games of a precious literary elite. Scholars wrote treatises on such matters as words which mean one thing and its opposite. (For example, tarab means both joy and fear.) However, the project of the eighth-century Iraqi philologists was a serious one, for their main aim was to fix and preserve the language of the Qur’an so that it should be comprehensible to future generations. They were successful to such a degree that, even in the twentieth century, the language of the Qur’an is still a living one. Consider that the English epic Beowulf, which was probably composed in the eighth century, is now incomprehensible to all save academic specialists in Anglo-Saxon, whereas the Qur’an, which was revealed in the seventh century, is still memorized by Arab schoolchildren and quoted in the streets, and continues to influence literary style.
Philology and lexicography are at the heart of Arabic literature. The philological enterprise was a conservative one. Scientific Arab grammar (nahw) developed remarkably early. The Persian ‘Amr ibn ‘Uthman Sibawayhi (d. 799?) wrote the first scientific study of the Arabic language and his Kitab, or ‘Book’, is still regarded as the basic grammatical work. As we shall see, there is a literary dimension to such intrinsically dry subject matter as grammar and philology in that many works were written to demonstrate mastery of grammar and vocabulary. Hariri’s eleventh-century masterpiece, the Maqamat, is an outstanding example, but it is by no means unique.
Khalil ibn Ahmad (d. 791), who taught Sibawayhi philology in Basra, was a leading researcher into the estimable rarities of the syntax and vocabulary of the desert Arabs and the compiler of a strangely ordered dictionary, the Kitab al-'Ayn. (He started with the letter 'ayn, because that was the sound which was made deepest in the throat; he then provided definitions for every word that had an 'ayn somewhere in it, before going on to the sound which was next deepest in the throat and defining all the words with that letter in it – apart, that is, from those which had already been defined because they had an ‘ayn in them.) He was also the pioneer of the systematic study of poetic metre. It is said that he received his initial inspiration while listening to the rhythmic blows of a smith’s hammer on an anvil and from there he went on to develop a systematic exposition of the sixteen paradigmatic metres of classical Arab poetry.
Unlike most poetry written in English, the metre of Arab poetry is quantitative. That is to say that, whereas in English verse metre is based on stress and on syllable count, Arab metre is based on various set patterns of long and short syllables (and in this, but only in this, it resembles Latin verse). Arabic has long vowels and short vowels. The short a is like that in ‘cat’, while the long a is like that in ‘margin’; the short u resembles the vowel sound in ‘foot’, while the long u sounds like the ‘oo’ in ‘food’; the short / resembles the vowel in ‘sin’, while the long / resembles the vowel sound in ‘yeast’. In poetry, a short syllable is formed by a consonant and a short vowel. A long syllable consists either of a consonant with a vowel and another consonant, or of a consonant plus a long vowel. It is evident that it is not really possible to reproduce this effect in an English translation. Even if one were successful in mimicking the Arabic metrical patterns, the English reader would be most unlikely to pick this up. As has been noted, there are sixteen paradigmatic metres in Arabic poetry, but some, such as tawil and basit, are more common than others. The lighter metres tended to be favoured for poems set to music and it must be remembered that a great deal of poetry was intended to be sung rather than recited. In the ninth century Jahiz wrote an essay on singing slave girls in which he remarked that ‘we can see no harm in singing, since it is basically only poetry clothed with melody’.
Rajaz (which has been considered to be a more disciplined form of saj', or rhymed prose) was not reckoned by Khalil ibn Ahmad to be one of the canonical sixteen metres. The word rajaz takes its unflattering origin from the ‘tremor, spasm, convulsion as may occur in the behind of a camel when it wants to rise’. In Jahili times rajaz had been used for lullabies, shanties, battle chants and camel-prodding songs. In Islamic times it continued to be used in the same sort of way as an accompaniment to rhythmical activities. However, from the Umayyad period onwards this Cinderella among metres came to be used in the composition of more serious poetry. A poem in rajaz differed from a qasida in several ways. In the qasida it was only in the first line that the two hemistiches had to rhyme; thereafter only the ends of the second hemistiches had to rhyme with one another. But in rajaz all the hemistiches had to rhyme with one another, a requirement which often forced the poet to adopt ingenious or even rather tortured solutions. In the early centuries all rajaz poems were short poems. In principle the rajaz metre is iong, long, short’, long in each hemistich. But really there are all sorts of elaborations and exceptions to the above and the whole subject is far more complex than it is possible even to hint at in a book which aims to be less than an encyclopedia of Arabic prosody.
The Umayyad age was a great period for the production of love poetry. It was in this period that the ghazal, or love poem, detached itself from the qasida. The word ghazal derives from the verb ‘to spin’. However, the word became spuriously linked to the Arabic for gazelle (also ghazal, but with the second vowel as a long a) and this was a conceit in which erotic poets delighted when evoking the grace and shyness of the beloved. Pre-Islamic erotic poetry had been hardly more than a specialized form of boasting, in which the poet commemorated his conquests and in which the women were usually presented as shyly submissive. In the Umayyad period the themes covered by the ghazal widened and came to include such unboastful topics as grief for a love which was not reciprocated.
‘Umar ibn Abi Rabi’a is held by many to be the Arabs’ first great poet of love and his Diwan (that is, the collection of his poems) is largely dedicated to the subject of unreciprocated love. An idle and wealthy man, the son of a Meccan merchant, he seems to have thought of little else. In particular, he wrote poems about his ill-fated love for Thurayya. She was just one of a number of cruel beauties who thought themselves above the poet, but she was more vigorous in her rejection of ‘Umar than most. She struck him on the mouth with her ringed hand such a blow that it loosened and blackened a couple of the poet’s teeth. Although ‘Umar sometimes lamented his lack of success in love, not all his poems are in a tragic mode. He was capable of commemorating the comic side of his lack of success and making jokes about love. Apart from commemorating his yearning for women and lack of success with them, his verses focused on the transience of pleasures and the need to seize them while one could. The following narrative poem, rhyming in ra, is effectively a short story about a perilous assignation.
or set off with the lengthening shadows, press forward into the next day’s heat?
But my desire was unfulfilled, for she had sent me no reply,
had she done so, she would have been excused, for speech persuades.
You long for Nu’m, but meetings are infrequent!
Encounters are mere chance! And yet your heart will not give her up.
Nu’m’s nearness brings you no comfort,
nor does her remoteness let you forget, yet you cannot endure separation.
And there was another woman before Nu’m, against the likes of whom
I was warned – I am an intelligent man! – Better that you desist, take heed!
Whenever I visit Nu’m, a kinsman of hers
is always crouched, ready to spring, on seeing us together.He can scarcely abide it when I stop by her abode,
he hides his bitter hatred, yet signs of it show through.Take her my greetings! For he
spreads abroad the tale of my visits, at times from the rooftops, at times in whispers.
Let her words when I met her at Midfa’ Aknan
be your password: ‘Is this the man of whom such tales are told?Is this the one whose looks you praised ‘til I thought –
God bless you – I would not forget him ‘til the day I am buried?Look and see, Asma’! Do you know him?
Is this the Mughayri so much talked about?’She replied: ‘It is true! No doubt his constant travel
in the cold of night, in mid-day heat have changed his aspect.If this be he, then he is certainly no longer
the man I knew – but a man may change!’Nu’m saw a man who, when the sun is at its height,
travels in the heat, and who, when it is night, travels in the cold.A mighty traveler, who covers the ground by leagues, is tossed
from desert to desert, tangled of hair, and dust-covered.And his shadow, mounted on his beast, is small,
a man exposed to heat and cold except what his costly cloak conceals.
Nu’m was pleased by the shade of her chambers,
midst well-watered, luxuriant green gardens,And by a guardian who protected her from every distress,
so she has nothing to keep her awake.· · ·
The night of Dhi Dawran you forced me, the blind lover,
to set out, to brave terror.From a ledge in the darkness I watched her companions,
being careful to hide from the circling guards.Until sleep should take firm hold on them,
I maintained a precarious perch, intolerable were it not for my burning desire.
My sturdy mount was in the open, its saddle
exposed to night wanderers or any passer-by.I asked myself, ‘Where is her tent?
And how can I secure my return?’Then I recognized a perfume of hers; and my love,
so vivid, almost like a presence, guided my heart to her.When I could no longer hear their voices, when the
lamps and fires kindled in the evening were damped;When the moons whose departure I had been awaiting,
vanished, when the herdsmen all went home, and revellers all fell deep in sleep;
When my sinuous crawl betrayed
no sound, my body crouching for fear of the tribe;Then I voiced my greeting, startling her,
almost causing her soft greeting to become a scream.Biting her finger, she said, ‘You have brought scandal on me.
You are the sort who makes even the easiest things difficult.I wonder, are we nothing tos you? Are you not afraid
– may God protect you – when your enemies lie all around me?By God! I do not know whether your urgent need
brought you here tonight, or those whom you fear fell asleep?’So I answered her, ‘Only longing and love led me
to you, not a soul knows.’She said, when she was again composed, when her fright had vanished,
‘May your Almighty Lord preserve you.
Abu al-Khattab, you will be my prince,
without rival, as long as I live.’I spent the night in joy, receiving what I desire,
kissing her mouth time and again.Such a night – but its passage was short;
never before had one passed so quickly.Oh what joy, what conviviality we had there
with none to spoil it!When the night had passed, or almost so,
and the stars were about to fade,She said, ‘The time for the clan to awake
has come, but I will meet you again in ‘Azwar.’I was startled to hear someone shout ‘Let us be off,’
as the full golden morning dawned.When she saw that some still lay abed
while others had risen, she said, ‘Tell me, what do you recommend?I replied, ‘I will make a dash for it, and either I escape them,
or their swords will have their vengeance.’She said, ‘Would you prove correct what the enemy has said of us,
admit to what was rumored?If we must find some way out, let it be
otherwise, something more hidden, discreet.’· · ·
I will tell my two sisters how our affair came to this;
I never intended to be slow in telling them.Perhaps they will find a way out for you,
for they have their wits about them while mine are befuddled.’She left in distress, her face pale with fear,
shedding a trickling tear of sadness.Two noble women came toward her, wearing
dresses of white and green silk.She said to her sisters, ‘Help me with a young man
who came visiting; one good turn will deserve another.’So they approached and were astonished, but said,
‘Do not blame yourself unduly, for the matter is not so serious.’The younger said to her, ‘I will give him my dress,
my shift, and this cloak, so long as he is careful.He should arise and walk among us in disguise,
thus our secret will not out, nor will he be discovered.’Thus the buckler between me and those I feared was
three women – two full-bosomed, one budding fair.When we had crossed the encampment, they said,
‘Do you not fear your enemies on a moonlit night?’And they added, ‘Is this always your way,
are you incorrigible, not ashamed; will you not desist, take heed?If you do return, cast your eye on someone else
so that our tribe will think you love another.’Adel Suleiman Gamal (trans.), in A. H. Green (ed.), In Quest of
‘Umar ibn Abi Rabi‘a’s Diwan is not very long, perhaps because the puritanical Caliph Umar II (reigned 717–20) threatened the poet with banishment and made him swear an oath to renounce the composing of poetry. The specific instance which had aroused the caliph’s wrath against the poet was that ‘Umar had written a poem in which he seemed to be implying that people like him only went on the hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca) in order to admire the pretty women. ‘Umar was not the only poet in the early centuries to link the themes of amorous desire and making the pilgrimage. Every year the hajj brought throngs of pilgrims to Mecca, as well as to Medina, the city where the Prophet Muhammad is buried, and it was part of the ritual that women who performed the pilgrimage should do so unveiled. It was well known that many who went on pilgrimage did so not only to fulfil a religious duty, but also in the hope of finding a marriage partner.
Many of the pilgrims brought large sums of money with them and were prepared to spend lavishly in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Under the Umayyad caliphs the centre of government had moved from the Hejaz to Syria, but many aristocratic Arabs withdrew from the political fray and retired to Mecca or Medina. Perhaps for these reasons, Medina in particular acquired a reputation in the late seventh and early eighth centuries as a kind of medieval Las Vegas – somewhere to find love and pleasure. The place seems to have attracted gamblers, singing-girls and transvestite performers. A cult of amorous flirtation (dall) developed, and this found literary expression in a school of erotic poetry which was urban, cynical and, in the long run, rather stereotyped. The conventional stock-in-trade of Arab love poetry included the saliva of the beloved, her smile like a flash of lightning, her glance like a sword blade, the tears of blood of the lover and his wasting away. Poetic accounts of the progress of an affair frequently had room for such conventional subsidiary figures as the reproacher, the jealous watcher and the gossip. These figures argued with the poet and conspired to thwart the course of true love. The short, monothematic qit'a gained in popularity as a result of its use by this school of poets.
One pervasive and, to the Western reader, strange feature of Arabic love poetry should be noted, and that is that the masculine pronoun in ghazal can refer to either sex. According to the fifteenth-century littérateur and pornographer, Shaykh Nafzawi,
His garment clothes a sculpted form that enthrals the hearts of many.
And how soft that gentle waist wrapped round!
It were as if two rounded jewel-caskets lie upon his breast, well-shaped
and set there high above his belly but just below the neck.
In these lines the masculine form is used, but applied to the description of a woman.
Shaykh Nafzawi, The Glory of the Perfumed Garden (1975), pp. 66–7
In the example cited by Nafzawi, it is indeed clear that the subject is female. However, in some poems one is left utterly uncertain whether the poet is wooing a woman or a beautiful boy – particularly in examples produced by notorious bisexuals such as the ninth-century poet Abu Nuwas. Addressing a woman as if she were a man perhaps helped to keep the woman’s identity secret. Moreover, the masculine pronoun is also more versatile for rhymes.
Pious folk held that it was improper to mention a woman’s name in poetry, and for this reason the Caliph ‘Umar I attempted to ban love poetry (though he had no more success than he would have had had he attempted to legislate against the weather). Nevertheless, there could be other factors besides propriety, which sometimes led poets not to name an individual woman in a poem. When an Umayyad princess, Ramla, asked ‘Umar ibn Rabi’a who he was writing his poetry for, he replied: Tor no particular one. I am a poet, who likes to make gallant songs and to praise female beauty.’ Ramla found such literary generalizing quite disgraceful and called the poet ‘a scoundrel’.
Evidently the Hejazi poets did not monopolize the theme of love. The Umayyad court poets, including Akhtal, Jarir and Farazdaq, also composed verses on the subject of love. There was also a rival school of desert poets who devoted themselves to the intensely serious theme of chaste and doomed love. In the early period, the leading poets of this school came from the tribe of the Banu ‘Udhrah. A saying amongst these tribesmen was, ‘When we love we die.’ They also liked to cite a saying attributed to the Prophet: ‘He who loves and remains chaste, never reveals his secret and dies, dies the death of a martyr.’ JAMIL ibn ‘Abdallah ibn Ma’mar al-Udhri (c. 660–701) wrote a poem in which he woke his sleeping companions to ask, ‘Does love kill a man?’ ‘Yes,’ they replied, ‘it breaks his bones, leaves him perplexed, chased out of his wits.’ Jamil was the acknowledged leader of the Udhrite school of poetry. Most of the little that is known about his life concerns his legendary love for Buthaynah. As a young man he sought to marry Buthaynah, a young woman who belonged to the same tribe. However, her parents refused their consent and married her off to someone else. Even after her marriage to another, Jamil and Buthaynah continued to have intense secret meetings. It is reported that on one occasion Jamil asked Buthaynah for the reward that was due to him for the love poems he had addressed to her, and when she asked him what he meant, he replied that he was referring to ‘the thing that normally happens between lovers’. Buthaynah refused him, but he then claimed that he was pleased; if she had agreed to his proposal, he would have had to have killed her with his sword, for ‘if you granted it to me, I knew that you would grant it to others also’. He died in Egypt, exiled from his love.
‘You have grown old, Jamil! your youth is spent!’ I said, ‘Buthaynah, don’t say that!
Have you forgotten our days in Liwa, and in Dhawi ‘l-Ajfur?
Did you not see me more, when we were in Dhu Jawhar?
When we were neighbours? Do you not remember?
And I young and soft-skinned, trailing my train behind me,My hair black as the raven’s wing, perfumed with musk and amber,
That was changed by the vicissitudes of time, as you well know!
But you! Like the marzuban’s pearl, still a young girl,We were neighbours once, sharing the same playground. How did I grow old and you did not?’
Salma K. Jayussi (trans.), in Beeston et al. (eds.), The Cambridge
History of Arabic Literature: Arabic Literature to
the End of the Umayyad Period, p. 426
COMMENTARY
The red tint of the hair would have come from the use of henna, which was often used to conceal greying hairs.
A marzuban is a Persian governor of a frontier province.
Akhtal once described the effect of wine in these terms: it creeps through the frame like ants crawling through drifted sand.’ The subject matter and imagery of love poems overlapped with those of poems devoted to the subject of wine-drinking, as one of the commonest themes of the latter genre was the celebration of the beauty of the cup-bearer (who was customarily a beardless boy). The consumption of alcohol is of course forbidden by the Qur’an. It is therefore a cultural paradox that medieval Arab (and Persian and Turkish) poets produced a large quantity of verse, known generically as kbamriyya, which was devoted to wine, drunkenness, drinking-parties, wine cups and cup-bearers. Some casuists argued that the Qur’anic ban (most forcefully expressed in sura 5, verse 90) applied only to wine made from dates, as grapes were hardly known in the Hejaz in the Prophet’s lifetime. Others argued that the ban only applied to the wine fermented from grapes and not to nabidh, which was made from dates. Yet others argued that the consumption of alcohol was allowed for medicinal reasons. Some pleasure-lovers did not trouble with casuistry: they simply resolved to enjoy themselves first and repent later. The tenth-century poet Ma’arri cited a certain Abu Uthman al-Mazini who, when reproached for his wine-drinking, replied, i shall give it up when it becomes the greatest of my sins.’
Wine had frequently been celebrated in Jahili verse. Also, the Sasanian Persian rulers, whose empire the Arab Muslim armies occupied in the seventh century, had presided over a cult of drunkenness at court and heavy drinking was one of the attributes of a Persian gentleman. Some at least of the Umayyad caliphs and princes seem to have regarded themselves as heirs to this boozy tradition, though they usually caroused at private banquets away from the eyes of the pious. According to Jahiz’s Book of the Crown, the Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (reigned 685–705) used to get drunk once a month, so drunk that he could not tell whether he was in the air or in water. Thus, the caliph claimed, i seek to clarify my spirit, strengthen my memory and purify the seat of my thought.’ (Then he cleansed himself of the sinful alcohol by throwing it all up.)
WALID ibn Yazid, who became caliph briefly in 743-4 as Walid II, was the most notorious of these princes. He was also a noted poet, musician and composer. He expected to become caliph on his uncle Hisham’s death, but in the meantime he spent his leisure in desert palaces where he hunted, drank, gambled, listened to his favourite singers and composed verses for them to sing. There is an unmistakable air of braggadocio in the works of this libertine poet.
And all cunts on a lion’s brow.
Then only the liberal would drink
And only the brave make love.
Hamilton, Walid and His Friends, p. 20
Don’t pass it to the left.
Pour first for him, and then for him,
You of the silver lute.
Dark wine long aged in earthen jars,
Sealed up with camphor, spice and pitch.
So my hereafter’s sure: no fire for me! I’ll teach
The folk to ride an ass’s pizzle!
Tell him who looks for heaven to run along to hell!
Hamilton, Walid and His Friends, p. 122
COMMENTARY
These verses, like many of Walid’s compositions, were sung to him by members of his retinue.
That merchants carried up from Ascalon.
The smallest mote is clear; an ample jug
Shields it from finger’s touch. And as it’s poured
The bubbles gleam as lightning in the south.
Hamilton, Walid and His Friends, p. 164
Walid’s caliphate lasted a matter of months, before a rebellion forced him to flee. He was cornered in a place in the Syrian desert, where he died fighting. His head was sent to the new caliph in Damascus. The golden age of khamriyya poetry came later, under the ‘Abbasid caliphs, but Walid’s verses provided a model for such later libertines as Abu Nuwas. However, it is worth bearing in mind that some of Walid’s more outrageous verses may have been posthumously foisted on him by enemies of the Umayyad dynasty.
ABU DHU‘AYB al-Hudhali (d. 649?) was a younger contemporary of the Prophet. He composed poetry about bees and honey, as well as on the grander themes of love and the instability of fate. He is best known for his gentle, melancholy poems of lament – especially for his poem on the death of his sons, all of whom had died within a year of one another. This poem belongs to the genre of ritha, or lamentation.
my body hangs, a mantle on a broom;
with wealth enough to ease all pain
I turn at night from back to belly
side after side after side.
Who put pebbles on my couch when my sons died?
I tried but could not shield
them well enough from fate
whose talon-grip
turns amulet to toy.
Thorns tear out my eyes. I lie,
a flagstone at the feet of Time
all men wear me down
but even those my pain delights
envy that I cannot cringe
at fortune’s spite.
‘Lament for Five Sons Lost in a Plague’, trans. Pound,
Arabic and Persian Poems (1970), p. 30
COMMENTARY
Omar Pound has translated only the opening lines of Abu Dhu’ayb’s lament. For a full translation and excellent commentary, see Jones, Early Arabic Poetry, vol. 2, pp. 203–24. The poet goes on to present three gripping scenes of hunting and battle whose realistic imagery is used to illustrate the theme of inevitable doom. In a typical ritha, the poet receives news of death, then relates events leading up to it, delivers a eulogy of the deceased and offers consolatory wisdom.
It is a curious feature of literary life in the Umayyad period that more poetry was composed on the subject of love than on Islam or warfare. However, the ascetic poet al-Tirimmah ibn Hakim al-Ta’i (66o?–728?), who was born in Syria but settled in Kufa, fought as a warrior for the faith. Much of the poetry he wrote celebrated the Muslims’ jihad, or holy war, conducted against the Byzantines in the region to the north of Syria. Subsequently he became a teacher. He was esteemed by later poets in ‘Abbasid Baghdad as a transmitter of rare words in his poetry.
if death be near
don’t take me off
on a couch of silk,
let me die ambushed
in a water-course
with men
all serving
Allah’s ends around,
my head slashed off
my flesh worthy
and hovering kite,
my bones soon blasted
dry and white.
‘Lord of the Throne’, trans. Pound,
Arabic and Persian Poems (1970), p. 34
Jahili and Umayyad poetry survived in anthologies put together in later centuries. The new Arab garrison town of Kufa was a leading centre for the collection and memorizing of poetry. Before being written down, poetry owed its survival to rawis like Hammad al-Rawiyya (695–772). Hammad was esteemed by the Umayyad caliphs as the memory of the Arabs. He was expert on Arab genealogy and history and, above all, on poetry. He is said to have recited 2,990 qasidas by pre-Islamic poets when Walid ibn Yazid put his knowledge to the test. However, there were darker aspects to Hammad’s career. He was fond of getting drunk and discussing heretical opinions. He is said to have started out in life as a thief, but was converted to poetry when he stumbled across a volume of verses in a house he had broken into. He was not reliable as a transmitter of other people’s poetry. Hammad and other early rawis certainly pastiched Jahili poetry on occasion; Hammad has already been mentioned as the potential forger of the Lamiyyat, which is traditionally ascribed to Shanfara. Some contemporaries thought there was something suspicious about the vast range of Hammad’s alleged knowledge of pre-Islamic poetry. According to one source, Hammad claimed that much of his extraordinary knowledge of poems which no one else knew about was due to his possession of a volume of poems which had been written down in pre-Islamic times and which had been found buried under the Lakhmid White Palace at Hira. This sounds like a convenient alibi for literary forgery. One should note that early forgeries by Hammad and others tended to be produced for reasons that were not primarily literary. As al-Jumahi noted in his Tabaqat, ‘when the Arabs began to review the recitation of poetry and the historical record of battle-days and glories, some tribes found that their tribal poets had produced little verse and that their exploits had gone unrecorded. Thus a group of such tribes with few exploits and little verse, wishing to catch up with other tribes with a richer heritage, forged verse and ascribed it to their poets’ (Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period, Cambridge, 1994, p. 102).
Relatively little prose of real literary interest has survived from this period. Much of what has survived was produced by administrators and political orators. ‘ABD AL-HAMID ibn Yahya, known as al-Katib, ‘the Scribe’ (d. 750), produced what is arguably the earliest surviving literary prose. He was secretary to the last Umayyad caliph, Marwan II (reigned 744-50). For a time a powerful figure at court, ‘Abd al-Hamid was executed by a political opponent. Three of ‘Abd al-Hamid’s epistles survive. What follows is an extract from his rather sententious Epistle to the Secretaries, Risala il al-Kuttab:
Franz Rosenthal (trans.), in lbn Khaldun’s
‘The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History’,
2nd edn. (London, 1958), vol. 2, pp. 30–31
COMMENTARY
The content of ‘Abd al-Hamid’s epistle is particularly noteworthy, for he seeks in it to elevate the rank of secretary and to magnify his duties and qualities. Under the Umayyads’ successors, the ‘Abbasids, the scribes were indeed to become the chief students and disseminators of an Arab secular culture. Clearly ‘Abd al-Hamid’s letter was intended for public dissemination. It was common for letters to be addressed to notional or fictional addressees. The rhythms of ‘Abd al-Hamid’s Arabic suggest that this composition, like so much Arabic literature, was written to be read aloud. Unlike the poets of the age, he was not keen on recherche vocabulary. This sort of chancery high style, together with advocacy of the necessity of scribes to possess a good general knowledge, provided the foundations of a wider literary culture known as adab (on which more in the next chapter). ‘Abd al-Hamid’s style was fairly ornate and verbose. However, in the light of later developments in literary prose, and especially in the epistolary genre, his prose would come to seem relatively plain and unadorned, for his successors among the bureaucrats and scribes sought to outdo one another in the floweriness of their prose. Finally, ‘Abd al-Hamid’s use of parallelism and saj' is also worthy of note. The revelation of the Qur’an and the Prophet’s denunciation of the utterances of the kahins had led, among other things, to the temporary decline in popularity of the rhymed prose rhythms of saj' A later essayist, Jahiz, suggested that when the heathen soothsayers were banned, so too was the rhymed prose which they employed. Its use by ‘Abd al-Hamid and other bureaucrats did much to restore its fortunes.
Men of the pen did not monopolise eloquence (balagha). ‘Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law who became caliph, is traditionally regarded as the first master of eloquent oratory and sermons attributed to him were often cited as examples for emulation. Arab soldiers and statesmen also proved themselves to be masters of the rhetorical possibilities of their language. (Sometimes such mastery is really somewhat suspicious and one wonders if words have not been put in their mouths by later historians.) When the Arab general ‘Amr ibn al-‘As (d. 663) conquered Roman Egypt for Islam and occupied Alexandria, he reported back to the Caliph ‘Umar, I already sore spot. The have taken a city of which I can only say that it contains 4,000 palaces, 4,000 baths, 400 theatres, 1,200 greengrocers and 40,000 Jews.’ When Caliph ‘Umar asked about the feasibility of a naval expedition against Cyprus, ‘Amr replied discouragingly: ‘The sea is a boundless expanse, whereon great ships look tiny specks; nought but the heavens above and waters beneath; when calm the sailor’s heart is broken; when tempestuous, his senses reel. Trust it little, fear it much. Man at sea is an insect on a splinter, now engulfed, now scared to death’ (George F. Hourani, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times, Princeton, N.J., 1995, pp. 54–5).
AI-HAJJAJ ibn Yusuf, who was governor in Iraq from 694 until 713, outdid even his famous predecessor. When he arrived in rebellious Kufa in 694, he veiled his face and secretly made his way to the town’s main mosque. Only when he had ascended the mosque’s pulpit did he cast off the veil and begin speaking. He started with a couplet from a poet, Suhaym ibn Wathil:
I am he that scattereth the darkness and climbeth the heights:
As I lift the turban from my face, ye shall know me!
He continued (in rhymed prose):
|
O people of al-Kufah! I see before me heads ripe for the harvest and the reaper; and verily I am the man to do it. Already I see the blood between the turbans and the beards. |
The Prince of the True Believers has spread before him the arrows of his quiver and found in me the cruellest of all arrows, of sharpest steel and strongest wood. I warn you, if you depart from the paths of righteousness, I shall not brook your carelessness, nor listen to your excuses. You Iraquis are rebels and traitors, the dregs of dregs! I am not a man to be frightened by an inflated bag of skin, nor need anyone think to squeeze me like dry figs! I have been chosen because I know how to act. Therefore beware, for it is in my power to strip you like bark from the tree, to pull off your branches as easily as one pulls off the branches of the selamah tree, to beat you as we beat the camels which wander away from the caravans, and grind you to powder as one grinds wheat between mill-stones! For too long you have marched along the road of error. I am Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, a man who keeps his promises, and when I shave I cut the skin! So let there be no more meetings, no more useless talk, no more asking: ‘What is happening? What shall we do?’ | |
Sons of prostitutes, learn to look after your own affairs … Learn that when my sword once issues from its scabbard, it will not be sheathed, come winter, come summer, till the Prince of True Believers with God’s help has straightened every man of you that walks in error, and felled every man of you that lifts his head! |
Robert Payne, The Holy Sword (London, 1959)5 pp. 121–2
The version given here was translated from a belles-lettristic history by al-Mas‘udi (on whom see Chapter 5), but such was the fame of Hajjaj’s minatory address from the pulpit that it was also anthologized by Tabari, Jahiz, Ibn Qutayba, Qalqashandi, and many other historians and anthologists. The eloquent Hajjaj was a much hated man. He had started out in life as a schoolmaster. (Schoolmasters enjoyed a low status, in literature at least, and they were satirized in, among other works, The Thousand and One Nights.) Subsequently Hajjaj attained notoriety as a faithful and incorruptible, but brutal, servant of the Umayyads. Nevertheless, some part of his pedagogical background stayed with him; he seems to have been obsessed with the purity of the Arabic language and he was the leading patron of the study of grammar in Iraq. He also presided over important innovations in the way Arabic was written, as secretaries under his direction introduced vowel signs in a script which hitherto had only registered consonants. The innovation of diacriticals in order to distinguish certain otherwise identically shaped consonants one from another was also ascribed to him. Moreover, the sanguinary Hajjaj was also the patron of Jarir, Farazdaq and Akhtal, among other poets.
In general, it is striking how little difference the coming of Islam at first made to Arabic literature. The poets stayed with such traditional pre-Islamic topics as fated doom, lovesick yearning and tribal boasting. The great Muslim religious poems were produced in later centuries.