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All kinds of animals and plants appear in that country; but when they settle there, feed on its grass, and drink its water, suddenly they are covered by outsides strange to their Form. A human being will be seen there, for example, covered by the hide of a quadruped, while thick vegetation grows on him. And so it is with other species. And that clime is a place of devastation, a desert of salt, filled with troubles, wars, quarrels, tumults; joy and beauty are but borrowed from a distant place. |
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological
Doctrines (Harvard, 1964), p. 269
The cosmic traveller will witness many other marvels as he goes on to visit the seven planets and their inhabitants.
In another of Ibn Sina’s visionary recitals, Risalat al-Tair, ‘Letter of the Bird’, an adept is transformed into a bird and has to fly across the universe in order to find his original home. Again the story is an allegory of the progress of the philosophical initiate. Another philosophical allegory, Salaman wa-Absal (‘Salaman and Absal’), is the story of two princely brothers and of how Absal, the younger, was passionately desired by Salaman’s queen. In order not to yield to her passion or fall victim to her plotting, Absal travelled the world with an army, conquering it in the name of his brother. Eventually, however, on returning to court, he was poisoned by Salaman’s queen. The story is a fable about the progress of the philosophic gnostic and Absal’s death is merely the last stage in the advance to perfect illumination.
'Abd al-Qadir Abu Bakr al-JURJANI (d. 1078), another Persian writing in Arabic, produced Asrar al-Balagha, or ‘Secrets of Eloquence’, a literary treatise which dealt, among other things, with the nature of imagery, the sources of fantasy and transformational powers of comparison and metaphor. Jurjani argued that language was a convention and that words, and indeed metaphors and similes, had no independent meaning, but depended on their placement in a linguistic whole. The relationship between a word and its meaning was essentially arbitrary. Eloquence was a function of construction according to grammatical rules. Jurjani was a highly sophisticated literary theorist, who managed to create a technical vocabulary of secular literary criticism which was distinct from that which had been developed to study figurative language in the Qur’an. Despite the importance of what Jurjani wrote for the critical appreciation of poetry, he was actually chiefly preoccupied with problems posed by the language and text of the Qur’an. For the most part what he wrote was austere and taxing, but in the two passages below he waxes lyrical about the magical properties of eloquence (echoing, perhaps unconsciously, old Jahili notions about the power and nature of poetry).
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Now you must know that by virtue of this method, comparisons are filled with some sort of magic, which is hardly describable in its property…. For this magic reaches, at times, such a degree, that it is capable of converting the misogynist to a flirt, of distracting people from the sorrow caused by their children’s death, of conjuring away the awe of loneliness, of retrieving your lost joy. It bears witness to the intrinsic glory of poetry and brings to light the rank and power it possesses! |
And a little further on, he also observed:
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You know what is the matter with idols and how their adorers are fascinated by them and venerate them. The same is the case with poetry and the images it creates and the novelties it shapes and the meanings it instills into hearts, all of this to the effect that what is motionless and silent appears to the imagination in the shape of the living and speaking, what is dead and deaf in the function of the speaking and eloquent, rational and discerning, and the non-existent and irretrievable as if it were existent and visible. |
Bürgel, The Feather of the Simurgh, p. 57
Following the lead of al-Mu'tazz and others, literary theoreticians worked on expounding the kinds of rhetorical figures and tropes which might be found in poetry – for example: jinas meant using in close proximity two words having the same root letters, but with different meanings; tibaq referred to two words with opposite meanings in the same line; or husn al-ta'lil meant ingenious assignment of cause; iham was a double entendre in which the more improbable sense of the word was the correct word. Jurjani’s comments on the magical effects of language came in a work which was devoted exclusively to the rhetoric of poetry. This was the case with almost all medieval Arabic literary criticism; it dealt only with poetry. According to the cultured Vizier Ibn 'Abbad, ‘Prose is scattered hither and thither like flying sparks, but poetry will last as long as graven stone.’
Abu al-Faraj produced what was in effect an encyclopedia of Arabic poetry. 'Ali ibn al-Husayn ABU AL-FARAJ al-Isfahani (897–c. 967) was born in Isfahan in south-western Persia. Although he had Umayyad ancestors, Isfahani was in fact a Shi'ite. (The Shi'ites traditionally hated the Umayyad caliphs for the deposition of 'Ali and the slaughter of his two sons, Hasan and Husayn.) Another curious thing about Abu al-Faraj is that he used to wear clothes without washing them, until they fell to bits. Despite this unprepossessing habit, he found Buyid patrons in Baghdad and later worked in Aleppo under the patronage of the Arab Emir Sayf al-Dawla al-Hamdani (reigned 945–67).
Abu al-Faraj’s 24-volume compilation, the Kitab al-Aghani, or ‘Book of Songs’, dealt in the first instance with a group of 100 poems set to music, chosen in the previous century by a group of professional musicians, including Ibrahim al-Mawsili, for the Caliph Harun al-Rashid. Here poems were classified as songs, according to the singing styles of old Baghdad which were used to deliver them. However, Abu al-Faraj went on to consider other poems that had been set to music and, more important, he provided such a huge amount of anecdotal background information about all the selected pieces and their authors that his anthology really doubles as both a biographical dictionary and a cultural history of the Arab world from pre-Islamic times until the end of the ninth century. (Abu al-Faraj has been quoted in an earlier chapter as a source on the life and poetry of the Umayyad prince Walid.) One of the leading features of the Kitab al-Aghani was its stress on tarab, a kind of ecstatic loss of self-control, as the ultimate goal of music and poetry. In the stories of The Thousand and One Nights, audiences regularly tear their clothes or faint away in response to the singing of poetry. According to one of the authorities (al-Hutai’ah) cited in the Aghani, ‘Music is one of the talismans of coition.’ Abu al-Faraj’s book, which was extraordinarily popular and well memorized, was born out of a kind of antiquarian impulse and it promoted formal and archaic virtues in poetry.
Sayf al-Dawla al-Hamdani, for whom al-Faraj worked, had lands in northern Syria that marched alongside those of the Byzantine empire, against which he waged jihad (holy war). He was also a major literary patron and his victories against the Byzantines (when they happened) were loyally commemorated by his pensioned war-poets. The occasional defeats might also be transformed by literary art into victories. Apart from Isfahani, Ibn Nubata, Mutanabbi, Kushajim, the grammarian Ibn Jinni and the philosopher Farabi were among the pensioned scholars and encomiasts at Sayf al-Dawla’s court. The poet Abu Firas was his kinsman.
Abu Yahya IBN NUBATA (946–84), who is supposed to have studied poetry under Mutanabbi, preached sermons at Sayf al-Dawla’s court. Many of them were in support of Sayf al-Dawla’s war against the Byzantines. Praise of God and the Prophet, the Last Judgement and fear of God, as well as the practice of jihad, were among his leading themes. Ibn Nubata’s example encouraged the new style saj' Muslim pulpit oratory lent itself to saj' and it was perhaps influenced by Christian use of rhymed prose in their sermons. Sermons were collected, written down and studied by literary men. Ibn Nubata was a master of khutba, or liturgical oratory. Muslim sermons were usually quite short and, unlike Christian sermons, they were not attached to the explication of some particular scriptural text. It was normal to open with praise and thanks to God. However, what follows is the main section of one of Ibn Nubata’s sermons, which is a passage of moral exhortation.
Mez, The Renaissance of Islam, pp. 321–2
(The passage in quotation marks comes from the Qur’an.)
Abu’l-Tayyib Ahmad ibn Husayn al-MUTANABBI (915–65) was born in Kufa. He acquired the name, which means ‘would-be prophet’, early on in his life in the 930s, when he had preached to the Bedouin in the Syrian desert and had tried to set up a new religion there with himself as its prophet. Subsequently he settled for becoming a poet, perhaps the greatest poet of his age. From 948 onwards he spent nine years in the literary service of Sayf al-Dawla in Aleppo. (Later, he was to write under the patronage of the Buyid Emir 'Adud al-Dawla in Shiraz.) Mutanabbi always liked to present himself as the equal of his patron and was skilful at praising himself at the same time as he praised his patron. There is a marvellous swagger to his fakhr, for example:
I have tasted the bitter and the sweet of affairs
And walked over the rough and smooth path of days.
I have come to know all about time. It cannot produce
Any extraordinary word or any new action.
Franz Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of
Knowledge in Medieval Islam (Leiden, 1970), p. 277
Or take his most famous line:
In 965 Mutanabbi was traversing a wilderness when he was confronted by robbers. He was about to flee, when one of his servants said, ‘What about those famous lines of yours, “I am known to night and horses and the desert, to sword and lance, to parchment and pen”?’ The poet turned and fought and was killed.
The following short verses have a less lethal swagger.
Shame kept my tears away
but’s brought them back again.
My veins and bones seep through the skingraining her iv’ry face
with lines anew.Unveiling shows pale veil beneath
as woman’s Rhetorick
of inlaid gold and pearlin filigree marks cheek
and jowl.Her night of hair she parts in three
(to make for me four nights of one?);
pale moon reflects her day of face,that she and I may double see
as one.2
I was born to feel close
to others,but return me to my youth
and I would live again
all its tears and sorrow.3
Live where you will,
acquire virtue and knowledge, for
the fuller man is he who says:
This is what I am,
not ‘My father was so-and-so’.
Pound, Arabic and Persian Poems (1970), pp. 64–5
Abu Firas was Mutanabbi’s younger rival. ABU FIRAS al-Harith ibn Sa’id al-Hamdani (932–68) was the son of a Greek slave mother and the cousin of the Emir Sayf al-Dawla. He was employed by Sayf al-Dawla as a governor and general; at the age of sixteen he became governor of Manbij. Despite Sayf al-Dawla’s trust in him, other members of the Hamdanid clan sneered at his half-caste origins and Abu Firas was provoked to respond in an early poem as follows:
The furthest in kinship are the furthest from injuring me, the nearest kin are the closest to harming me.
Much of Abu Firas’s early poetry was devoted to boasts about his lineage and his prowess. He also commemorated the frontier war against the Byzantines in verse, but in doing so observed conventions that went back to Jahili times. One modern critic of Abu Firas’s poetry has justly observed that ‘one who is not conversant with the facts will find it impossible to make out from his poems that Syrians and Greeks, Muslims and Christians fought in such large numbers and with the most perfect military equipment of the age. They might equally be dealing with the petty warfare of two Bedouin tribes.’ In 962 Abu Firas, on a hunting expedition outside Manbij, was captured by a Byzantine force dispatched by Nicephorus II Phocas. Abu Firas was taken in chains to Constantinople:
But when a man’s allotted day comes, no land or sea can shelter
him.
Abu Firas spent four years as a captive in Constantinople, from where he wrote melancholy poems mingled with boasting:
We either take the throne in this world or, failing that, the tomb.
Although most of his poems were written before his captivity, the Rumiyyat, the ‘Byzantine Poems’, are his best-known works. Some of the Rumiyyat poems are addressed to Sayf al-Dawla, and beg the ruler to put up his ransom. (This was an age when it was common to conduct diplomatic and business correspondence in verse.) A few unflattering poems were dedicated to his captors. Other poems were addressed to his mother and other people. The Rumiyyat consists for the most part of poems of lament and entreaty, recollecting lost loves, lost friends and lost homeland. Abu Firas deplores the triumph of his enemies at the Aleppan court, and above all he laments his unbridgeable distance from his mother. As a prisoner-poet he can be compared to the soulful Charles of Orleans, captured at Agincourt and imprisoned in the Tower of London.
What follows is the elegy he composed in prison on learning of the death of his mother. His mourning for her death is inextricably tangled with mourning for his own plight.
Mother of the captive (may your grave be refreshed by rain), he is perplexed, unable to stay or go,
Mother of the captive (may your grave be refreshed by rain), to whom can the bearer of the good news of the ransom go?
Mother of the captive, now that you are dead, for whom will his locks and hair be grown?
When your son travels by land or sea, who will pray for him and seek God’s protection for him? …
You have faced the calamities of Fate with no child or companion at your side;
The darling of your heart was absent from the place where heavenly angels were present.
May you be mourned by every day that you fasted patiently through the noonday heat;
May you be mourned by every night you remained wakeful until bright dawn broke;
May you be rnourned by everyone oppressed and fearful to whom you gave shelter when there were few indeed to do so;
May you be mourned by every destitute and poverty-stricken man whom you made rich when there was little marrow left in his bones.
Mother, how long a care have you suffered with no-one to help you …
Mother, how often did good news of my approach come to you, but was forestalled by your untimely death;
To whom can I complain, in whom confide, when my heart is overwhelmed by its sorrows?
By what prayer of woman shall I be shielded? By the light of what face shall I gain comfort?
A. El Tayyib (trans.), in Ashtiany et al. (eds.), The Cambridge
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-SANAWBARSI (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.
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 delightAnd 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 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.
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 al-Husayn 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.
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 library 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 freethinker 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 Risalat al-Sahil wa al-Shabij, ‘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.
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.
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:
An equally elaborate and typically gloomy set-piece is devoted to the commonplace that all beasts must die:
Nor are the eyes of misfortune closed to the speckled ostrich, who goes without shoes and sandals, who drinks neither at watering-place nor channel, and is satisfied with colocynth and marjoram …
D. S. Margoliouth (trans.), The Letters of Abu ’l-'Ala of Ma'arrat
al-Nu’man (Oxford, 1898), pp. 54, 121-6
COMMENTARY
Ma'arri continues in the same vein for quite a bit longer.
Sahm is the name of a plant and mard is a form of fruit of the arak (a type of palm).
The name Kaswar derives from the verb qasara, meaning ‘to break’.
Sumi is the name of a spring.
Shih and ala are forms of wormwood.
Ma'arri’s best-known as well as most interesting work, the Risalat al-Ghufran, ‘The Epistle of Forgiveness’, is in prose, probably written in 1033. It is a vision of the afterlife, though he probably did not believe in such a thing, except perhaps for animals, for he thought that animals suffered so much in this life that there must be recompense for them elsewhere. Ma'arri constructed his version of Paradise on the basis of taking the text of the Qur’an extremely literally. The notional pretext of his book was a dispute with a friend of his, a minor Aleppan littérateur called Ibn al-Qarih, who was alleged to have expressed some harsh judgements about the immorality of certain pre-Islamic poets and their consequent fate in the afterlife. Ma'arri’s book is cast in the form of a letter to Ibn al-Qarih. This need not be taken too seriously; the letter-to-a-friend was a conventional device which served as an excuse for the production of literature. Thus it was that in another letter purportedly written to Ibn al-Qarih, Ma'arri had to say why he was explaining certain terms of whose meaning Ibn al-Qarih would be perfectly aware: ‘You certainly do not need such an explanation, but I fear that this letter may fall into the hands of a dull youth in his teens and that the vocabulary being strange to him, may form a shackle and bring him to a dead stop.’
To return to the Risalat al-Ghufran; in it Ma'arri has Ibn al-Qarih die and go to Paradise. There he has many discussions on philology and poetry (for this was Ma'arri’s and Ibn al-Qarih’s notion of Paradise). Ibn al-Qarih also conversed with houris and saw the Tree of Houris. After a tour of Paradise, Ibn al-Qarih was granted an overview of Hell (which is located in the bottom of a volcano) and then an interview with Iblis. Ibn al-Qarih talked about scholarship, but ‘A bad profession,’ rejoined Iblis. ‘Though it may afford a bare livelihood, it brings no comfort to one’s family and surely it makes the feet stumble. How many like thee has it destroyed!’ Ibn al-Qarih then went on to make a tour of Hell. Sadly, many of the most famous Jahili and Islamic poets seemed to have ended up there, including Imru’ al-Qays, Antara, Tarafa, Shanfara, Ta’abbata, Akhtal and Bashshar ibn Burd. (Bashshar, the blind poet, has his eyes opened in order to intensify his sufferings.) Apart from poets, Hell seems also to have been packed with philologists. Given that Ma'arri had purportedly set out to demonstrate the limitlessness of divine mercy, it is curious that his crowd of poets and philologists in Hell would rather seem to confirm Ibn al-Qarih’s initial prejudice. However, perhaps the point was to make Ibn al-Qarih feel sorry for the poets he so summarily consigned to the flames of torment. Al-Khansa’ (see Chapter 1) was one of the few first-rank poets to be encountered in Paradise.
In the second part of the Risalat al-Ghufran, Ma'arri rather loses the structure of his book and spends a lot of time exploring the nature of heresy and atheism, though there are many digressions on such matters as the hard life of scholars, the religious convictions of Abu Nuwas, lucky and unlucky names, metempsychosis, and women’s ability to judge poetry. Ma'arri’s fantasy had presented the afterlife as one big literary salon. The conversational exchanges with the dead are lively. Paradise and Hell are vividly evoked. Nevertheless, the overall flavour of the book is somewhat bleak and pessimistic, just like the rest of Ma'arri’s writings. The usual contempt for pleasure, for wine, women and song, comes through.
Despite the interest of its contents, the Risalat is likely to be hard going for a modern reader. What follows is one of the more accessible and self-contained passages, though some of Nicholson’s translation is conjectural. A banquet at which poetry was recited and debated has just finished. The Shaikh is, of course, the protagonist, Ibn al-Qarih.
After this the Shaikh, wishing to satisfy his curiosity concerning the creation of houris, was led by an angel to a tree called ‘The Tree of the Houris’, which was laden with every sort of fruit. ‘Take one of these fruits,’ said the guide, ‘and break it.’ And lo! there came forth therefrom a maiden with large black eyes, who informed the Shaikh that she had looked forward to this meeting four thousand years ere the beginning of the world …
Now the Shaikh was fain to visit the people of the Fire, and to increase his thankfulness for the favour of God by regarding their state, in accordance with His saying (Kor., xxxvii, 49–55). So he mounted on one of the horses of Paradise and fared on. And after a space he beheld cities crowned with no lovely light, but full of catacombs and dark passes. This, an angel told him, was the garden of the 'Ifrits who believed in Muhammad and are mentioned in the Suratu’l-Ahkaf and in the Suratu’l-Jinn. And lo! there was an old man seated at the mouth of a cave. Him the Shaikh greeted and got a courteous answer. ‘I have come,’ said he, ‘seeking knowledge of Paradise and what may perchance exist among you of the poetry of the Marids.’ ‘Surely,’ said the greybeard, ‘you have hit upon one acquainted with the bottom of the matter, one like the moon of the halo, not like him who burns the skin by filling it with hot butter. Ask what you please.’
‘What is your name?’ ‘I am Khaishafudh, one of the Banu Sha'saban: we do not belong to the race of Iblis, but to the Jinn, who inhabited the earth before the children of Adam.’ Then the Shaikh said: ‘Inform me concerning the poetry of the Jinn: a writer known as al-Marzubani has collected a good deal of it.’ ‘All this is untrustworthy nonsense,’ rejoined the old man. ‘What do men know of poetry, save as cattle know about astronomy and the dimensions of the earth? They have only fifteen kinds of metre, and this number is seldom exceeded by the poets, whereas we have thousands that your litterateur never heard of’ …
Now the Shaikh’s enthusiasm for learning made him say to the old man, ‘Will you dictate to me some of this poetry? In the transitory world I occupied myself with amassing scholarship, and gained nothing by it except admittance to the great. From them, indeed, I gained pigeon’s milk in plenty, for I was pulling at a shecamel whose dugs were tied … What is your kunya, that I may honour you therewith?’ ‘Abu Hadrash,’ said he; ‘I have begotten of children what God willed.’ ‘O Abu Hadrash,’ cried the Shaikh, ‘how is it that you have white hair, while the folk of Paradise enjoy perpetual youth?’ ‘In the past world,’ said he, ‘we received the power of transformation, and one of us might, as he wished, become a speckled snake or a sparrow or a dove, but in the next world we are deprived of this faculty, while men are clothed in beautiful forms. Hence the saying, “Man has the gift of hila and the Jinn that of haula.” I have suffered evil from men, and they from me.’ Abu Hadrash then related how he struck a young girl with epilepsy, ‘and her friends gathered from every quarter and summoned magicians and physicians and lavished their delicacies, and left no charm untried, and the leeches plied her with medicines, but all the time I never budged. And when she died I sought out another, and so on like this, until God caused me to repent and refrain from sin, and to Him I render praise for ever.’
Then the old man recited a poem describing his past life …
R. A. Nicholson (trans.), Journal of
the Royal Asiatic Society (1900), pp. 692–6
COMMENTARY
In what follows immediately after this passage, Abu Hadrash recites an autobiographical poem, discusses the language of the Jinn, and how in past times the Jinn used to eavesdrop on Heaven and were consequently punished by being pelted with blazing stars.
Houris are the maidens who await men in Paradise. They are so called because they are hur al-'ayn, which means that the whites of their eyes completely surround and strongly contrast with the intense blackness of their irises. According to some authorities, their flesh is so transparent that, even when they are clothed in seventy silken robes, the marrow of their bones is visible. They are always virgin, no matter how often they sleep with men.
The ‘Academy’ in Baghdad must be the Bayt al-Hikma, a library and translation centre, which was established under 'Abbasid patronage in the early ninth century. However, the implication that it was still in business in Ma'arri’s time is surprising. Taufiq must have been a black woman, as ‘al-Sauda’ indicates, but in Paradise she has been transformed into a white-skinned houri. Some women are born houris, and others achieve that state by virtuous living.
A precursor of the image of the Tree of Houris can be found in the writings of a fourth-century Syrian Church Father, St Ephraem, who wrote of vine stocks that in the afterlife would take to their virgin bosoms monks who had remained chaste on earth. The tree which grew human heads, or even whole human bodies, was an immensely popular image with Middle Eastern writers and artists. A popular location for this sort of tree was the distant and mythical island of Waqwaq. There, adventurous travellers were delighted to discover, sex grew on trees.
There are longer versions of the Risalat al-Ghufran than the one studied and translated by R. A. Nicholson. Not only that, but Nicholson produced a bowdlerized version. After the maiden drops off the tree, having been looking forward to meeting Ibn al-Qarih for four thousand years, Ibn al-Qarih prostrates himself on the ground and gives thanks to God for this blessing. He cannot help noticing, however, that the houri in question is a bit thin. No sooner has he had this thought than he looks again, and now he finds that she is excessively amply proportioned and has a bottom the size of a sand-dune. He prays to God to rectify the matter and it is done.
The Qur’anic sura referred to in Ma'arri’s narrative is Sura 37, ‘The Rangers’.
Ifrits and Marids were ranks of powerful jinn. As is evident from Ma'arri’s account, the universe contains both malevolent jinn and virtuous Muslim jinn.
The old man’s merry boast, comparing himself to the aureole round the moon, but not to the man who fills skin with hot butter, loses rather a lot in translation. It depends on a pun on the word haqin, which means both ‘a man who suffers from urine retention’ and ‘a moon having its two extremities elevated and its back decumbent [i.e. lying down]’. Nicholson was a great Arabist, but I cannot guess why he has brought in the filler-of-skins-with-hot-butter at this point in his translation.
Banu Sha'saban means ‘Sons of Decrepitude’.
Muhammad ibn 'Imran al-Marzubani (c. 910–94) was a well-known literary scholar in Baghdad. His Kitab al-Ash'ar al-Jinn, or ‘Poems of the Jinn’, is listed in Ibn al-Nadim’s Fihrist, but like so much else, it has not survived.
The kunya is that part of a person’s name which identifies him or her as being the parent of someone – Abu so-and-so or Umm so-and-so. (See the Introduction for more on personal names in Arabic.)
‘Man has the gift of hila and the Jinn that of haula” The meaning of this is not at all clear. Hila can mean ‘trick’ or ‘artifice’; haula can mean ‘marvel’, or, more likely here, ‘calamity’.
Ma'arri’s Risalat al-Ghufran was written five years after a somewhat similar work by an Andalusian Muslim, Ibn Shuhayd (see Chapter 6). It has been suggested that Ibn Shuhayd’s and Ma'arri’s fantasies about the afterlife were indirectly the inspiration of Dante’s Divine Comedy, though this remains controversial.