Early Islamic Poetry and Poetics [Reprint ed.] 0860787206, 9780860787204

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
General Editor’s Preface
Introduction
1. Oral Composition in Pre-Islamic Poetry • James T. Monroe
2. Structuralist Interpretations of Pre-Islamic Poetry: Critique and New Directions • Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych
3. Islamic Kingship and Arabic Panegyric Poetry in the Early 9th Century • Stefan Sperl
4. The Poetic Coterie of the Caliph al-Mutawakkil (d. 247 H.): A Contribution to the Analysis of Authorities of Socio-Literary Legitimation • J.E. Bencheikh
5. The Uses of the Qasida: Thematic and Structural Patterns in a Poem of Bashshar • Julie Scott Meisami
6. ‘Abbāsid Praise Poetry in Light of Dramatic Discourse and Speech Act Theory • Beatrice Gruendler
7. Revisiting Layla al-Akhyaliya's Trespass • Dana Sajdi
8. Time and Reality in Nasib and Ghazal • Renate Jacobi
9. Heterotopia and the Wine Poem in Early Islamic Culture • Yaseen Noorani
10. Sensibility and Synaesthesia: Ibn al-Rūmī’s Singing Slave-Girl • Akiko Motoyoshi
11. Name and Epithet: The Philology and Semiotics of Animal Nomenclature in Early Arabic Poetry • Jaroslav Stetkevych
12. Guises of the Ghul: Dissembling Simile and Semantic Overflow in the Classical Arabic Nasib • Michael A. Sells
13. From Primary to Secondary Qasidas: Thoughts on the Development of Classical Arabic Poetry • M.M. Badawi
14. Toward a Redefinition of ‘Badī?’ Poetry • Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych
Index

Citation preview

THE FORMATION OF THE CLASSICAL ISLAMIC WORLD

General Editor: Lawrence I. Conrad Volume 37

Early Islamic Poetry and Poetics

THE FORMATION OF THE CLASSICAL ISLAMIC WORLD General Editor: Lawrence I. Conrad 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Byzantium on the Eve of Islam The Sasanian East on the Eve of Islam The Arabs and Arabia on the Eve of Islam The Life of Muhammad The Expansion of the Early Islamic State The Articulation of Islamic State Structures Problems of Political Cohesion in Early Islam Arab-Byzantine Relations in Early Islamic Times The Turks in the Early Islamic World Patterns of Everyday Life Production and the Exploitation of Resources Manufacturing and Labour Trade and Exchange in Early Islam Property and Consumption in Early Islamic Society Cities in the Early Islamic World Nomads and the Desert in the Early Islamic World Society and Individual in Early Islam Muslims and Others in Early Islamic Society The Christian Communities in the Early Islamic World The Jewish Communities of the Early Islamic World Archaeology and Early Islam Early Islamic Numismatics and Monetary History Early Islamic Art and Architecture The Qur'an: Style and Contents The Qur'an: Formative Interpretation The Development of Islamic Ritual The Formation of Islamic Law Hadith: Origins and Development Early Islamic Historiographical Traditions Early Islamic Theology Eschatology and Apocalyptic in Early Islam Early Islamic Visions of Community Shi'ism: Origins and Early Development Kharijite Movements in Early Islam The Emergence of Islamic Mysticism The Early Islamic Grammatical Tradition Early Islamic Poetry and Poetics Early Arabic Prose Literature The Rise of Islamic Philosophy The Rise of Arab-Islamic Medicine The Exact Sciences in Early Islam Magic and Divination in Early Islam Education and Learning in the Early Islamic World The Early Islamic Manuscript Tradition Early Islamic North Africa The Formation of al-Andalus I The Formation of al-Andalus II The Modern Study of Early Islam

Averil Cameron Shaul Shaked Frank E. Peters Uri Rubin Fred M. Donner Fred M. Donner R. Stephen Humphrey Michael Bonner C. Edmund Bosworth David Waines Michael G. Morony Michael G. Morony A.L. Udovitch Baber Johansen Hugh Kennedy Hugh Kennedy to be announced Robert E. Hoyland Sidney H. Griffith David Wasserstein Donald Whitcomb Michael Bates Jonathan Bloom Andrew Rippin Andrew Rippin Gerald Hawting Wael B. Hallaq Harold Motzki Lawrence I. Conrad Josef van Ess Wilferd Madelung Wadad al-Qadi Etan Kohlberg Ridwan al-Saiid Bernd Radtke Ramzi Baalbaki Suzanne Stetkevych Fedwa Malti-Douglas Everett Rowson Lawrence I. Conrad Jamil Ragep Emilie Savage-Smith Claude Gilliot Jan Just Witkam to be announced Manuela Marin M. Fierro/J. Samso Lawrence I. Conrad

THE FORMATION OF THE CLASSICAL ISLAMIC WORLD

General Editor: Lawrence I. Conrad Volume 37

Early Islamic Poetry and Poetics edited by Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych

|3

Taylor & Francis Group

First published 2009 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition copyright © 2009 Taylor and Francis, and Introduction by Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych. For copyright of individual articles refer to the Acknowledgements. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN 9780860787204 (hbk) British Library CIP Data Early Islamic poetry and poetics. - (The formation of the classical Islamic world ; 37) 1. Islamic poetry, Arabic - History and criticism I. Stetkevych, Suzanne Pinckney 892.71009

US Library of Congress Control Number 2009920430

THE FORMATION OF THE CLASSICAL ISLAMIC WORLD-37

CONTENTS Acknowledgements

vii

General Editor's Preface

xi

Introduction 1. Oral Composition in Pre-Islamic Poetry James T. Monroe 2.

Structuralist Interpretations of Pre-Islamic Poetry: Critique and New Directions Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych

3. Islamic Kingship and Arabic Panegyric Poetry in the Early 9th Century Stefan Sperl 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

xiii

1

55

79

The Poetic Coterie of the Caliph al-Mutawakkil (d. 247 H.): A Contribution to the Analysis of Authorities of Socio-Literary Legitimation J.E. Bencheikh

95

The Uses of the Qasida: Thematic and Structural Patterns in a Poem of Bashshar Julie Scott Meisami

121

Abbasid Praise Poetry in Light of Dramatic Discourse and Speech Act Theory Beatrice Gruendler

143

Revisiting Layla al-Akhyaliya's Trespass Dana Sajdi

157

Time and Reality in Nasib and Ghazal Renate Jacobi

201

Heterotopia and the Wine Poem in Early Islamic Culture Yaseen Noorani

219

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CONTENTS

10. Sensibility and Synaesthesia: Ibn al-Rumi's Singing Slave-Girl Akiko Motoyoshi

241

11. Name and Epithet: The Philology and Semiotics of Animal Nomenclature in Early Arabic Poetry Jaroslav Stetkevych

271

12. Guises of the Ghul: Dissembling Simile and Semantic Overflow in the Classical Arabic Nasib Michael A. Sells

307

13. From Primary to Secondary Qasidas: Thoughts on the Development of Classical Arabic Poetry MM. Badawi

343

14. Toward a Redefinition of 'Bad?' Poetry Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych

375

Index

405

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The chapters in this volume are taken from the sources listed below. The editor and publishers wish to thank the authors, original publishers or other copyright holders for permission to use their material as follows: CHAPTER 1: James T. Monroe, "Oral Composition in Pre-Islamic Poetry", Journal of Arabic Literature 3 (Leiden, 1972), pp. 1-53. Copyright © 1972 by E. J. Brill, Leiden, Netherlands. CHAPTER 2: Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, "Structuralist Interpretations of Pre-Islamic Poetry: Critique and New Directions", Journal of Near Eastern Studies 42 (Chicago, 1983), pp. 85-107. Copyright © 1983 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. CHAPTER 3: Stefan Sperl, "Islamic Kingship and Arabic Panegyric Poetry in the Early 9th Century", Journal of Arabic Literature 8 (Leiden, 1977), pp. 20-35. CHAPTER 4: Translation of: J.E. Bencheikh. "Le cenacle poetique du calife al-Mutawakkil (m. 247): Contribution a Panalyse des instances de legitimation socio-litteraires", Bulletin d'etudes orientates 29 (Damascos, 1977), pp. 33-52. Translation by Philip Simpson. Copyright © 2009 by Ashgate Publishing Ltd. CHAPTER 5: Julie Scott Meisami, "The Uses of the Qasida: Thematic and Structural Patterns in a Poem of Bashshar", Journal of Arabic Literature 16 (Leiden, 1985), pp. 40-60. CHAPTER 6: Beatrice Gruendler, "Abbasid Praise Poetry in Light of Dramatic Discourse and Speech act Theory", in Verena Klemm and Beatrice Gruendler (eds.), Understanding Near Eastern Literatures: A Spectrum of Interdisciplinary Approaches (Wiesbaden, 2000), pp. 57-69. Copyright © 2000 Reichert Verlag, Wiesbaden. CHAPTER 7: Dana Sajdi, "Revisiting Layla al-Akhyaliya's Trespass", in Marie Hammond and Dana Sajdi (eds.), ^Transforming Loss into Beauty': Essays on Arabic Literature and Culture in Honor of Magda al-Nowaihi (Cairo, 2008), pp. 185-228. Copyright © 2008 by The American University in Cairo Press. CHAPTER 8: Renate Jacobi, "Time and Reality in Nasib and Ghazal", Journal of Arabic Literature 16 (Leiden, 1985), pp. 1-17.

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CHAPTER 9: Yaseen Noorani, "Heterotopia and the Wine Poem in Early Islamic Culture", International Journal of Middle East Studies 36 (Tucson, 2004), pp. 345-66. Copyright © 2004 Cambridge University Press. CHAPTER 10: Akiko Motoyoshi, "Sensibility and Synaesthesia: Ibn al-Rumi's Singing Slave-Girl", Journal of Arabic Literature 32 (Leiden, 2001), pp. 1-29. Copyright © 2001 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden. CHAPTER 11: Jaroslav Stetkevych, "Name and Epithet: The Philology and Semiotics of Animal Nomenclature in Early Arabic Poetry", Journal of Near Eastern Studies 45 (Chicago, 1986), pp. 89-124. Copyright © 1986 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. CHAPTER 12: Michael A. Sells, "Guises of the Ghul: Dissembling Simile and Semantic Overflow in the Classical Arabic Nasib", in Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych (ed.), Reorientations: Arabic and Persian Poetry (Bloomington & Indianapolis, 1994), pp. 130-64. Copyright © 1994 Indiana University Press. All rights reserved. CHAPTER 13: M.M. Badawi, "From Primary to Secondary Qasidas: Thoughts on the Development of Classical Arabic Poetry", Journal of Arabic Literature 11 (Leiden, 1980), pp. 1-31. CHAPTER 14: Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, "Toward a Redefinition of 'Bad?' Poetry", Journal of Arabic Literature 12 (Leiden, 1981), pp. 1-29. Copyright © 1972 by E.J. Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands. Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.

PUBLISHER'S NOTE The pagination of articles originally published in English has been maintained for this volume. In articles translated into English, the original pagination has been indicated in the text in bold-face type.

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GENERAL EDITOR'S PREFACE Since the days of Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921), generally regarded as the founder of Islamic studies as a field of modern scholarship, the formative period in Islamic history has remained a prominent theme for research. In Goldziher's time it was possible for scholars to work with the whole of the field and practically all of its available sources, but more recently the increasing sophistication of scholarly methodologies, a broad diversification in research interests, and a phenomenal burgeoning of the catalogued and published source material available for study have combined to generate an increasing "compartmentalisation" of research into very specific areas, each with its own interests, priorities, agendas, methodologies, and controversies. While this has undoubtedly led to a deepening and broadening of our understanding in all of these areas, and hence is to be welcomed, it has also tended to isolate scholarship in one subject from research in other areas, and even more so from colleagues outside of Arab-Islamic studies, not to mention students and others seeking to familiarise themselves with a particular topic for the first time. The Formation of the Classical Islamic World is a reference series that seeks to address this problem by making available a critical selection of the published research that has served to stimulate and define the way modern scholarship has come to understand the formative period of Islamic history, for these purposes taken to mean approximately AD 600-950. Each of the volumes in the series is edited by an expert on its subject, who has chosen a number of studies that taken together serve as a cogent introduction to the state of current knowledge on the topic, the issues and problems particular to it, and the range of scholarly opinion informing it. Articles originally published in languages other than English have been translated, and editors have provided critical introductions and select bibliographies for further reading. A variety of criteria, varying by topic and in accordance with the judgements of the editors, have determined the contents of these volumes. In some cases an article has been included because it represents the best of current scholarship, the "cutting edge" work from which future research seems most likely to profit. Other articles—certainly no less valuable contributions—have been taken up for the skillful way in which they synthesise the state of scholarly knowledge. Yet others are older studies that—if in some ways now superseded—nevertheless merit attention for their illustration of thinking or conclusions that have long been important, or for the decisive stimulus they have provided to scholarly discussion. Some volumes cover themes that have emerged fairly recently, and here it has been necessary to include articles from outside the period covered by the series, as illustrations of paradigms and methodologies that may prove useful as research

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develops. Chapters from single author monographs have been considered only in very exceptional cases,and a certain emphasis has been encouraged on important studies that are less readily available than others. In the present state of the field of early Arab-Islamic studies, in which it is routine for heated controversy to rage over what scholars a generation ago would have regarded as matters of simple fact, it is clearly essential for a series such as this to convey some sense of the richness and variety of the approaches and perspectives represented in the available literature. An effort has thus been made to gain broad international participation in editorial capacities, and to secure the collaboration of colleagues representing differing points of view. Throughout the series, however, the range of possible options for inclusion has been very large, and it is of course impossible to accommodate all of the outstanding research that has served to advance a particular subject. A representative selection of such work does, however, appear in the bibliography compiled by the editor of each volume at the end of the introduction. The interests and priorities of the editors, and indeed, of the General Editor, will doubtless be evident throughout. Hopefully, however, the various volumes will be found to achieve well-rounded and representative syntheses useful not as the definitive word on their subjects—if, in fact, one can speak of such a thing in the present state of research—but as introductions comprising well-considered points of departure for more detailed inquiry. A series pursued on this scale is only feasible with the good will and cooperation of colleagues in many areas of expertise. The General Editor would like to express his gratitude to the volume editors for the investment of their time and talents in an age when work of this kind is grossly undervalued, to the translators who have taken such care with the articles entrusted to them, and to Dr John Smedley and his staff at Ashgate for their support, assistance and guidance throughout. Lawrence I. Conrad

INTRODUCTION Early Islamic Poetry and Poetics Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych

Classical Arabic poetry, as I use the term here, covers the period beginning with the earliest traceable Arabic poems, dating as far back as ca. 500 CE to the consolidation of the High Abbasid court poetry, in the mid- to late fourth/tenth century. Its foundations lie in the rich oral tradition of pre-Islamic tribal and court poetry, above all as presented in the preeminent Arabic poetic form, the polythematic qasfda, or ode. This poetry expressed and preserved the values of the warrior aristocracy most majestically in its full tripartite form, consisting of nasib (erotic or elegiac prelude), rahil (desert journey) and gharad (the 'goal' of the qasfda, most often: madf/i, praise of a ruler;/afc/ir, personal and tribal boast; /lijd', satire or invective; or, with somewhat varying structure, ritha3, elegy for the fallen warrior), but also in variants and in qitac (fragments). Transmitted through traditional channels of poetic practitioners into the Islamic period, the qasfda established itself as the dominant poetic genre of the Islamic court. The Umayyad and early Abbasid eras witnessed not only the establishment of the qasfda as the political and courtly Islamic genre par excellence, but also the emergence of monothematic derivative and minor genres: the khamriya (wine poem), the tardiya (hunt poem), the zuhdiya (ascetic poem), but, above all, the ghazal (love lyric). Further developments distinctive of the Abbasid period were the zahriya (flower and related garden and meadow poems), and self-standing descriptive poems gathered under the rubric of wasf (description).1 1 By 'Classical' in this volume I refer to Arabic poetry beginning in the pre-Islamic period (ca. 500-622 CE), and including the Islamic period (1 H/622 CE-41/661), the Umayyad period (41/661132/750), and the first part of the 'Abbasid era, from 132/750 through the fourth/tenth century. I term the third-fourth/ninth-tenth centuries the High 'Abbasid period. The periodization of Arabic poetry and its terminology are subject to some variation. Many of the authors referred to in this volume use somewhat different terminology, including 'Medieval' for what I have termed Classical or 'Abbasid. I have limited coverage to the 'high' tradition of qasid poetry to the exclusion of the traditionally lesser valued rajaz verse, especially of the Umayyad period, and other popular, often strophic, verse forms. Descriptive surveys of the various Arabic poetic genres and their development are available, for example, in the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, ed. A.F.L. Beeston et al. (Cambridge, UK, 1983); and Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: 'Abbasid Belles Lettres, ed. Julia Ashtiany et al. (Cambridge, UK, 1990); and Renate Jacobi, 'Dichtung' in Helmut Gatje, ed., Grundrifi der arabischen Philologie, Band 2: Literaturwissenschaft (Wiesbaden, 1987) 7-63; Roger Allen, The Arabic Literary Heritage: The Development of its Genres and Criticism (Cambridge, UK, 1998). A comprehensive study of compositional and stylistic techniques that reviews scholarship on both the Arabic and Persian traditions is Julie Scott Meisami, Structure and Meaning in Medieval Arabic and Persian Poetry: Orient Pearls (Surrey, 2003). A major bibliographical resource for

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INTRODUCTION

Of all these forms, the qasida and the ghazal were destined to be the most productive, influential, and long-lasting of the Arabic, then more broadly Middle Eastern and Islamic, literary forms. The ghazal, which we perhaps think of more as a Persian poetic form, seems to have separated itself off from the nasib section of the qasida into a distinctive literary genre in the Umayyad period. The qasida, however formative and formidable its Jahili exponents, assumed its most generative later form in the bipartite nasib-madih panegyric ode of the high Abbasid period. In the late and post-classical periods, both the qasida and the ghazal became dramatically productive literary forms in virtually all of the Islamicate literatures, notably Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Swahili, whether in their classical form, or transmuted into the mystical verse of the Sufis or the devotional praise poetry to the Prophet (madih nabawi) that flourished in the post-classical period. Within the Arabic tradition, they set the stage for the late classical poetic flowering of al-Andalus. The present volume on Poetry and Poetics attempts to present those scholarly works that have come to stimulate and define our current understanding and appreciation of classical Arabic poetry. Building on the foundational works of earlier generations of scholarship, the last 35 years have seen the field of classical Arabic poetry branch out in a variety of critical and methodological directions. This introductory essay is intended to survey, rather than critique, this generation of work, to give some idea of the major trends, and to anticipate the directions of future work.2 The 1970s witnessed the beginning of several formative trends in the development of the field of classical Arabic poetry. One was a shift away from traditional Orientalist or Near Eastern studies—based on a largely textual approach to a wide range of humanistic fields—religion, history, philosophy, literature—toward a more disciplinary focus. At the same time, the 1970s through 1980s was a period of self-consciousness and self-examination concerning the relationship between Western scholarship and Arabic literature. Initiated with Jaroslav Stetkevych's 1969 essay, Arabism and Arabic Literature: Self-View of a Profession', it reached its highpoint in the responses to the 1978 publication of Edward Said's landmark, Orientalism, the full cultural and political implications of which are beyond the scope of the present essay.3 This reorientation resulted pre-1970s scholarship is Fuat Sezgin. Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, Band II: Poesie bis ca. 430 H. (Leiden, 1975). 2 Given the limited space allotted to this introduction, I cannot hope to include all the relevant scholarship nor cover all the significant issues. I have chosen what seem to me to be important and original essays that are representative of what I consider to be the major trends and developments in the field of classical Arabic poetry over the last 35 years with the aim of giving a coherent, rather than all-inclusive, overview. I hope the bibliography will help compensate for omissions in this essay. For further readings and bibliography, see the references in note 1. 3 Jaroslav Stetkevych, 'Arabism and Arabic Literature: Self-View of a Profession', Journal of Near Eastern Studies 27 (1969): 145-56; Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978). For reevaluations of

INTRODUCTION

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in the attempt to engage classical Arabic literary scholarship more fully in the Western literary and humanistic tradition and, concomitantly, a tendency to follow current Western trends. Above all, it meant that Arabic literary studies had to rise to the challenge of presenting classical Arabic poetry to a new, and potentially much broader, literary and critical audience. As these new directions were by no means followed by all scholars, it might be tempting to divide recent studies of classical Arabic poetry into conservative and progressive schools. I have, nevertheless, found it more fruitful to look at a continuum along which valuable and influential critical work of varying types has been produced.

Poetry I: Form and Function of the Qaslda: Ritual, Ceremonial, and Performance Dimensions Three major developments occurred in the 1970s. First was the recognition and appreciation of the orality of the pre-Islamic poetic tradition. Although it had been generally known and accepted that Jahili poetry was orally preserved and passed down by transmitters (ruwat), and that the process of collection and setting down in writing (tadwin) did not take place until the second and third Islamic centuries, there was no appreciation of what this meant in terms of process of composition, poetic form, authorship and, above all, authenticity. D.H. Margoliouth's and Taha Husayn's controversial claims that the Jahili tradition was nothing but a massive fabrication dating from the early Islamic centuries had neither been accepted nor entirely effectively refuted. Against this background, James T. Monroe's 1972 study, 'Oral Composition in pre-Islamic Poetry' (Chapter 1), presents the systematic application of Milman Parry and Albert Lord's theory of oral-formulaic composition principles, to demonstrate both the orality and authenticity (as understood in orality theory) of the pre-Islamic corpus. Particularly important is Monroe's comparison of the percentage of formulae in pre-Islamic (about one third) as opposed to poets dating to the 'modern', Abbasid and neo-classical periods (less than one tenth). Michael Zwetter's 1978 monograph, The Oral Tradition of Classical Arabic Poetry, while addressing more broadly issues of transmission and commentary, also presents the Lord-Parry theory as it applies to pre-Islamic poetry.4 Although other scholars have not repeated these formulaic analyses of texts, the new understanding of the notions of authenticity, stability traditional Orientalist approaches and attitudes toward classical Arabic poetry, see Edward Said, 'Islam, the Philological Vocation, and French Culture', pp. 53-72 and Jaroslav Stetkevych, 'Arabic Poetry and Assorted Poetics', pp. 103-24 in Malcolm H. Kerr, ed. Islamic Studies: A Tradition and Its Problems. Seventh Giorgio Levi Delia Vida Biennial Conference 1979 (Malibu, CA, 1980); and Michael Sells, 'The Qasida and the West: Self-Reflective Stereotype and Critical Encounter', Al-cArabiyya 20 (1987): 307-24. 4 Michael Zwettler, The Oral Tradition of Classical Arabic Poetry: Its Character and Implications (Columbus, Ohio, 1978).

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vs. variation of the text, authorship, composition, and transmission, and the differences between 'oral' and 'written' poetry that Monroe and Zwettler established form the foundation for most later scholarship in pre-Islamic poetry.5 A further development grounded in Monroe's work (among it his work on Andalusian poetry), is his proposal, within the context of his discussion of the oral-formulaic nature of pre-Islamic poetry, that the prevalence of 'ring composition' noted in other oral traditions should suggest its applicability to pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. He proposes such an A-B-C-C'-B'-A pattern in the motival structure of the nasib-rahil complex of the Mu'allaqa of Labid and in the nasib of the Mu'allaqa of Imru3 al-Qays.6 This last point brings us to a second major development of the 1970s: the influence of Structuralist theories of poetic form. The Structuralists' attempt to define an overarching poetic structure through identifying the binary oppositions within the poem was crucial in moving Arabic literary studies away from the 'atomistic' approach, which claimed that the relationship of lines in a qasida was like 'orient pearls at random strung'—that is that there really was no poetic structure. Up until this time, even scholars who did not explicitly address the issue of poetic form limited their discussions largely to rhetorical figures, or to images of a few lines, or to connecting devices between the parts of the poem. Furthermore, attempts to understand classical Arabic poetry were largely channeled through the classical Arab critics, whose rhetorical focus did not address modern issues of structure, formal unity, and so on.7 Added to this was a widespread anxiety that the polythematic qasida did not exhibit 'organic unity' in the Coleridgean sense, and might therefore not measure up to Western aesthetic standards. Whatever the limitations of Structuralism, the studies of the Mu'allaqas of Labid and Imru3 al-Qays published by Kamal Abu-Deeb and Adnan Haydar in the mid- to late 1970s must be given their due for turning the direction of classical Arabic poetic studies from its narrow focus on constituent elements, and its constraint by the concerns of the classical Arab critics, to a broader focus on the structure of the Arabic poem, and the meaning and variations of that structure.8 Furthermore, Structuralist studies demonstrated that Coleridgean 5 See, for example, Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual (Ithaca, NY, 1993); James E. Montgomery, The Vagaries of the Qasldah: The Tradition and Practice of Early Arabic Poetry (Warminster, UK, 1997); Hassan al-Banna clzz al-Dln, Al-Shicriya wa-l-Thaqafa: Majhum al-Wacy al-Kitabi wa-Malamihih fl l-Shicr al-cArabi al-Qadim (Casablanca, 2003); dealing more broadly with the phenomenon is Gregor Schoeler, The Oral and the Written in Early Islam (London, 2006). 6 Monroe, 'Oral Composition', 43, note 2. (Chapter 1) 7 For this approach, see G.J.H. van Gelder, Beyond the Line: Classical Arabic Literary Critics on the Coherence and Unity of the Poem (Leiden, 1982). 8 Abu-Deeb, Kamal, 'Towards a Structural Analysis of Pre-Islamic Poetry', InternationalJournal of Middle East Studies 6 (1975): 148-84; and 'Towards a Structural Analysis of Pre-Islamic Poetry (II): the Eros Vision', Edebiydt I (1976): 3-69; Haydar, Adnan, 'The Mu'allaqa oflmru' al-Qays: Its Structure and Meaning', Parts 1 & 2 Edebiydt 2 (1977): 227-61 and 3(1978): 51-82.

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'organic unity' was not a necessary or universal measure of coherent poetic structure. One critical response to this development was my 1983 essay, 'Structuralist Interpretations of pre-Islamic Poetry' (Chapter 2), which takes Abu-Deeb's and Haydar's studies as a starting point, to propose, in light of the recent revival of van Gennep's theories of the rites of passage, that the tripartite rite of passage pattern might make a more effective tool for understanding the tripartite qasida than the binary opposition of the Structuralists. Above all, after the many casual references to the pre-Islamic qasfda's ritual function in tribal society, which were never quite specified, the van Gennepian model provided a form to match those functions, and a suggestion of what those ritual functions might be. Thus the three thematic sections of the qasidah—the nasib (abandoned campsite, tribal departure); the rahil (desert crossing); and the final fakhr (tribal boast) or madih (praise of patron)—are interpreted as analogous to the Separation, Liminality, and Reaggregation phases of the rites of passage. As a corollary to this, variant poetic forms take on a structural logic as deviations of a ritual pattern.9 Also ultimately grounded in the Structuralist studies is Stefan Sperl's 1977 essay, 'Islamic Kingship and Abbasid Panegyric' (Chapter 3). In it he interprets the dominant court panegyric form of the Abbasid period onward, the bipartite nasib-madih structure, in what he terms strophe and antistrophe, the sort of draught-fertility imagery of ancient kingship—quite like Haydar's lack/lackliquidation structure for the pre-Islamic ode.10 The lost mistress of the nasib embodies the failure of the poet and the polity, whereas the caliph, like his ancient Mesopotamian antecedents, embodies the prosperity and fertility of the realm. His introduction of concepts of cosmic power, divine appointment, and sacerdotal kingship into the study of classical madih (praise poetry) were formative for further studies of this genre. Although Structuralism in its purest form had a limited role to play in interpreting classical Arabic poetry, it turned the direction of literary studies toward engaging the full text of the qasida as a coherent poetic structure and statement, and in so doing paved the way for further studies that, in violation of strict Structuralist dictates, introduced scholarship on ancient Near Eastern myth and ritual, sacrificial and seasonal fertility patterns, to the interpretation of classical Arabic poetry. 9

For example, the Sacahk, or brigand poets, of pre-Islamic Arabia come to be interpreted in light of Douglas and Turner's formulations of the 'permanent liminal entity', and their formally truncated ra/uZ-dominated poems understood as a rite of passage manque. Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, 'The Sucluk and his Poem: A Paradigm of Passage Manque', Journal of the American Oriental Society 104 (1984): 661-78; and S. Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak. 10 Sperl expands this approach within a more extensive stylistic framework in Stefan Sperl, Mannerism in Arabic Poetry: A Structuralist Analysis of Selected Texts (3rd Century AH/9th Century AD-5th Century AH/llth Century AD) (Cambridge, U.K., 1989).

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A third development with roots that can be traced to the 1970s is the introduction of a socio-historical dimension into the interpretation of the Arabic poem. Quite at odds with the Structuralist dictate of limiting discussion and analysis to the text alone, this trend allowed for the interpretation of Arabic poems in light of their socio-historical function—not merely as background or introductory material, but as key to understanding the purpose and meaning—and ultimately the structure—of them poem. Jamel Eddine Bencheikh's 1977 essay, The Poetic Coterie of the Caliph al-Mutawakkil' (Chapter 4) does not attempt to analyze any poetic texts, but describes how caliphal politics, pleasure, and whim shaped the competitive court atmosphere in which poets performed and presented their wares. He stresses likewise the extent to which the socio-cultural system of the Arab-Islamic court favored stability and repetition over individuality and novelty. If he seems, in light of more recent studies that recognize the emergent and unpredictable as well as the reiterative aspects of ritual, to have underestimated the extent to which master court poets manipulate poetic form and language to negotiate court politics, and the extent to which the classical forms perpetuate a system of values, he nevertheless provides a sense of the cultural and literary mise-en-scene of classical Arabic, especially Abbasid, court poetry. So, too, his 1975 essay, 'Les Musiciens et la poesie', provides a foundation for understanding the relation of music and poetry in the early Abbasid era.11 Related to this development, my 1979 essay, 'The Abbasid Poet Interprets History', examines selected poems by Abu Tammam in their political and historical context to demonstrate how the court poet uses the panegyric qasida to transmute contemporary politico-military events into perduring myths of Arab-Islamic dominion thereby to buttress the legitimacy of the ruler. The use of the court qasida to incorporate current events into mythic expression of teleological history, which I have termed 'Islamic manifest destiny', and to negotiate and substantiate legitimate rule is further developed in my 1991 book, Abu Tammam, and my 2002 book, Poetics of Islamic Legitimacy.12 These two avenues, the formal analysis of poetic structure and the sociocultural contextualization of the poem, have lead to a rich development in the study of the qasida as a vehicle for politico-cultural expression. For example, Julie Scott Meisami's 1985 essay, 'The Uses of the Qasida' (Chapter 5), combines Sperl's strophe-antistrophe model with the chiastic structure of ring composition, as 11

Jamel Eddine Bencheikh, 'Les musiciens et la poesie: les ecoles d'Ishaq al-Mawsili (m. 225 H.) et d'lbrahlm Ibn al-Mahdl (m. 224 H.)', Arabica 22 (1975): 114-52. 12 See Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, 'The 'Abbasid Poet Interprets History: Three Qasldahs by Abu Tammam', Journal of Arabic Literature 10 (1979): 49-65; Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, Abu Tammam and the Poetics of the 'Abbasid Age (Leiden, 1991); Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, The Poetics of Islamic Legitimacy: Myth, Gender, and Ceremony in the Classical Arabic Ode (Bloomington & Indianapolis, 2002).

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proposed by Monroe, to argue for the coherent and compelling construction of the panegyric ode, in this case by the early Abbasid poet Bashshar ibn Burd, both at the rhetorical and structural levels, which, in turn, is geared to its moral, aesthetic, and political functions. A further step in the contextualization of the qasida in its socio-cultural setting is the interpretation of the poet-patron relationship in terms of ritual exchange. Following Marcel Mauss's formulation concerning the use of gift exchange to establish social as well as economic relations, and to negotiate and compete for rank and status, my two essays, 1994, 'Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Redemption' and 1996, Abbasid Panegyric and the Poetics of Political Allegiance', proposed that the exchange of poem for prize between poet and patron is the enactment of and paradigm for the relation between subjects and ruler, and the panegyric qasida itself as an expression of allegiance and legitimacy; conversely, the hija3 then conveys illegitimacy and constitutes, in a performative sense, the abrogation of allegiance.13 Building on these trajectories as well is the work of Beatrice Gruendler in her several works on the Abbasid court poetry, represented here by her 2000 essay, 'Abbasid Praise Poetry in Light of Dramatic Discourse and Speech Act Theory' (Chapter 6). As in her 1996 study, 'Ibn al-Rumi's Ethics of Patronage', and more extensively in her 2003 book, Medieval Arabic Praise Poetry, she has systematically introduced performance and performative theories into her analysis of how the master poet manipulates the politics and poetics of the poet-patron relationship. In structural terms, she has proposed for panegyrics such as those of Ibn al-Rumi that conclude with the poet's metapoetic statements, whose theme she defines as the patronage relationship, to add to Sperl's strophe-antistrophe paradigm a third element, which she terms 'metastrophe'. Within this context she proposes that the panegyric ode presents the mutual duties and rights of benefactor and protege in what amounts to a formulation of an 'ethics of patronage'.14 Ibn al-Rumi's poetry is likewise the subject of Robert C. McKinney's 2004 book, The Case of Rhyme versus Reason, in which he incorporates the theoretical approaches of the past generation of Arabic poetry scholarship—historicist, ritual-structural, and poet-patron relations—in a magisterial interpretation of what he terms 'the micropoetics of the macro-qasfda' of the poet's 282-line qasida 13 Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, 'Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Redemption: Mufaddaliyah 119 of cAlqamah and Banat Sucad of Kacb ibn Zuhayr' in eadem, ed. Reorientations: Arabic and Persian Poetry (Indianapolis & Bloomington, 1994) 1-57; Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, ''Abbasid Panegyric and the Poetics of Political Allegiance: Two Poems of al-Mutanabbl on Kafur' in Stefan Sperl and Christopher Shackle, eds. Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1996) 1:35-63; 2:92-105. 14 Beatrice Gruendler, 'Ibn al-Rumi's Ethics of Patronage', Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review 3 (1996): 104-60; Beatrice Gruendler, Medieval Arabic Praise Poetry: Ibn al-Rumi and the Patron's Redemption (London & New York, 2003).

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commemorating his patron Ibn MakhlacTs quashing of the black slave Zanj rebellion. Along somewhat different lines, in his 1993 book, Zephyrs of Najd, Jaroslav Stetkevych introduces a comparative literary and interarts approach to enrich our understanding of the tripartite qasida form and, within it, the role of the elegiac nasib, which is the main topic of the book. Beginning with Ibn Qutaybah's well known classical description of the tripartite panegyric ode, J. Stetkevych first interprets the qasida as rhetorical and epideictic strategy. There follows an exploration of the qasida form, not merely as a sequence of themes, but as a sequence of moods; this he achieves through his comparison of the tripartite qasida with the sonata-form of classical Western music. Finally he introduces Western literary analogues to the ternary archetype of the qasida to introduce literary counterparts to the van Gennepian rites of passage.15 Other recent work is developing these trends further. For example, Dana al-Sajdi, in her 2008 essay, 'Revisiting Layla al-Akhyaliya's Trespass' (Chapter 7), demonstrates, through a gender-based reading of Layla al-Akhyaliya's panegyric qasida to the Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, how the poetess ingeniously realigns traditional identifications of the male persona of the tripartite ode to appropriate for a female voice the traditionally, indeed exclusively, male role of court panegyrist. Raymond Farrin in his 2003 essay, The Poetics of Persuasion', follows James Monroe in employing ring composition for the analysis, here of the full structure, of a poem by Abu Tammam, while at the same time exploring the ostracized poet's subtle manipulation of the tripartite panegyric form to negotiate his reinstatement in the patron's good graces.16 In his 2004 essay, 'Praise for Murder?', Samer Mahdy Ali brings a wealth of recent scholarship involving ritual, performance, and court patronage to interpret al-Buhturi's two celebrated and controversial poems: his ritha3 to the murdered Caliph al-Mutawakkil and his madih to his son-murderer-successor, al-Mustansir, in terms of the tripartite poem as a rite of passage, a transfer of allegiance, and rite of restoration of divinely appointed authority.17 In sum, perhaps the most important critical result of this gradually evolving focus on the structure and function of the poem has been a dramatic revision of our appreciation of the dominant poetic form of Islamic court poetry, the panegyric qasida. Long disparaged as nothing but sycophantic flattery in exchange for material gain, studies of its ritual structure, mythical dimensions, ceremonial function, and socio-historical context have revealed its complex 15 Jaroslav Stetkevych, The Zephyrs ofNajd: The Poetics of Nostalgia in the Classical Arabic Nasib (Chicago, 1993) 1-49. 16 Raymond K. Farrin, 'The Poetics of Persuasion: Abu Tammam's Panegyric to Ibn Abl Du'ad', Journal of Arabic Literature 34 (2003): 221-51. 17 Samer M. Ali, 'Praise for Murder? Two Odes by al-Buhturl Surrounding an Abbasid Patricide' in Beatrice Gruendler and Louise Marlow, eds., Writers and Rulers: Perspectives on Their Relationship from Abbasid to Safavid Times (Wiesbaden, 2004) 1-38.

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literary, aesthetic, religious, political, moral, and economic roles as a multifaceted means of expression and negotiation. Appearing about midway in this course of development, both as a response to recent developments and as an impetus to future work, is the 1996 two-volume collection of studies and translations edited by Stefan Sperl and Christopher Shackle, Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa.18 Based on papers presented at a 1993 conference in London, the volumes trace the origins and development of the qasida from its roots in pre-Islamic Arabia to its linguistic and geographic spread throughout the Islamic world. Poetry II: The Ghazal and the Lesser Genres On the whole the ghazal has received less critical attention within Arabic poetic studies than the qasida. A large part of this may be that the Arabic ghazal, like the other lesser genres now under discussion, is a monothematic lyric that is far more accessible to Western literary sensibilities and therefore presents less of a critical and interpretative challenge than the polythematic panegyric qasida. On the other hand, whereas recent studies of the qasida, as presented above, have provided us with a much clearer understanding of the crucial role in Arab and further Islamic court culture, I do not think that modern scholarship has yet achieved a comparable understanding of the dynamics of the ghazal. Just how and why did this little step-child of the qasida in the classical Arabic period transform into the mystical Sufi ghazal of the later Arabic tradition and, further, develop into a major mystical and political, as well as lyrical, genre in the other Islamicate literatures, notably Persian and Ottoman? Although these transformations took place later than the period covered in the present volume, it seems that, with literary historical hindsight, their roots should be detectable. Nevertheless, substantial work has been done in the emergence, variation, and stylistic developments of the ghazal and related lyrical forms. A key question regarding the ghazal is the relation, both historical and poetic, of this free-standing love-lyric to the nasib, the amorous prelude to the polythematic qasida, which it so closely resembles. Renate Jacobi has tackled this issue, and with it the issue of the change in sensibilities and aesthetics between the pre-Islamic and Umayyad periods in her 1985 essay, 'Time and Reality in Nasib and GhazaV (Chapter 8). Although her assessments of Jahili versus Islamic perceptions of reality and, in line with traditional Orientalists, of Jahili poetry as largely objective description of nature should be revised in light of more recent scholarship, the distinction she demonstrates between nasib and ghazal 18 Stefan Sperl and Christopher Shackle, eds., Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa. Vol. 1: Classical Traditions and Modern Meanings. Vol. 2: Eulogy's Bounty, Meaning's Abundance: An Anthology (Leiden, 1996).

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is crucial to our understanding of Arabic poetic genres. Comparing the motifs and rhetorical structures of an 'Udhri, that is, chaste, Bedouin, ghazal to their counterparts in Jahili nasib passages she has revealed the crucial thematic, structural, and therefore socio-psychological, differences between the nasib of the polythematic qasfda, which serves as a psychological point of departure for the socially or tribally determined trajectory toward social integration, participation and responsibility, as opposed to the self-contained ghazal, in which the poet quite explicitly refuses to move psychologically or poetically beyond his love obsession. Further pursuing the major issues addressed in Jacobi's essay and a substantive contribution to the scholarship of the Arabic ghazal is Thomas Bauer's 1998 book, Liebe und Liebesdichtung, which examines historically and thematically the mentalite that formed the Arabic love poem, and its mode of literary expression. His work further pursues the history of 'mentalites', not merely from the pre-Islamic nasib to Umayyad ghazal, but also the subsequent developments in the relationship between society and the individual in the Abbasid period and its expression through stylistic developments in the ghazal.19 More recently, a major project on the ghazal, following the model of Sperl and Shackle's collection of essays tracing the origins, development and spread of the qasfda, has appeared. Edited by Thomas Bauer and Angelika Neuwirth, Ghazal as World Literature I: Transformations of a Literary Genre (2005) contains studies on the development and varieties of ghazal in classical Arabic literature, including its mudhakkar and mu'annath types; its mystical transformations; responses to the ghazal in modern Arabic literature; its transposition to Urdu and Hebrew literatures; Persian and Ottoman ghazal', and finally Goethe's attempts to appropriate the ghazal form.20 Another free-standing genre is the khamriya, or wine poem, that appears to have emerged in the early Abbasid period from the wine descriptions and bacchic passages of the pre-Islamic polythematic qasfda and to have taken form most famously in the hands of Abu Nuwas. A comprehensive study of the wine poem and its relation to the classical Arabic poetic tradition has been provided by Philip Kennedy in his 1997 book, The Wine Song.21 A further development is Yaseen Noorani's 2004 essay, 'Heterotopia and the Wine Poem' (Chapter 9), which examines the ironic and parodic aspects of the khamriya as a 'transgressive' literary form that reveals in its apparent inversion of societal values the underside of 'normative selfhood'. This allows us to perceive the khamriya and other 19

Thomas Bauer, Liebe und Liebesdichtung in der arabischen Welt des 9. und 10. Jahrhunderts: Eine literatur- und mentalitdtsgeschichtliche Studie des arabischen Gazal (Wiesbaden, 1998). 20 Thomas Bauer and Angelika Neuwirth, eds., Ghazal as World Literature I: Transformations of a Literary Genre (Beirut, 2005). 21 Philip Kennedy, The Wine Song in Classical Poetry: Abu Nuwas and the Arabic Literary Tradition (Oxford, 1997).

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forms of transgressive poetry, such as those that fall under the rubric of mujun (obscene or ribald) poetry, as literary reflections that ultimately complement, rather than contradict, the societal values and normative psychological patterns of the dominant qasida form.22 Similarly, the emergence of the free-standing hunt-poem, the tardiya, in the late Umayyad period has long been recognized. In a series of essays begun in the 1990s, Jaroslav Stetkevych has attempted a more refined interpretation and analysis of its origins and development. Of particular note is his demonstration within the tripartite pre-Islamic qasida of two thematically and structurally distinct types of hunt: one is that of the 'wretched hunter' with his bow and hounds, which occurs in the onager and oryx panels of the rahiJ; the other is the 'heroic hunt' of the poet-hero on horseback that is a major theme of the final fakhr section of the poem.23 This thematic and structural distinction forms the basis for his subsequent studies on the emergence of the free-standing tardiya in the Umayyad period and its development as a courtly genre.24 In his 1974 study, Arabsiche Naturdichtung, Gregor Schoeler carefully traces the far more circuitous route by which the free-standing zahmya, rabi'iya, and rawdiya (flower, spring, and meadow or garden poems) emerged from the varied motival and thematic elements and structural roles that flower and garden description played in the development of Arabic poetry.25 From pre-Islamic through Abbasid times, such description could be found as parts of the nasib or the madih of the panegyric qasfda, as part of the bacchic atmosphere of the khamriya, and so on, but flower and garden poetry only attained full free-standing generic status with the Aleppan al-Sanawbari in the fourth/tenth century. Its fullest blossoming came later, of course, in al-Andalus. In terms of stylistics, Schoeler introduces the comparison of the ornate rhetoricism, especially of Abu Tammam's badfc-style descriptions of spring gardens to European Mannerism (see below). While Schoeler's study is largely historical, descriptive, and meticulously rhetorical, he is not unaware of the symbolic and metaphorical relations that dictate the juxtaposition, for example, of the spring garden description and the praise of the patron. Subsequent works, such as those of Stefan Sperl, Michael Sells, and Jaroslav Stetkevych, provide structural-semantic 22 Further on these topics see Julie Scott Meisami, 'Abu Nuwas and the Rhetoric of Parody', in Heinrichs and Schoeler, Festschrift Ewald Wagner zum 65. Geburtstag, Band II: Studien zur arabischen Dichtung (Stuttgart, 1994) 246-57; and 'Arabic Mujun Poetry: the Literary Dimension', in F. de Jong, ed. Verse and the Fair Sex: Studies in Arabic Poetry and the Representation of Women in Arabic Literature (Utrecht: 1993) 8-30. 23 Jaroslav Stetkevych, 'The Hunt in the Arabic Qasidah: The Antecedents of the Tardiyyah', in J.R. Smart, ed. Tradition and Modernity in Arabic Language and Literature (Surrey, 1996) 108-18. 24 Jaroslav Stetkevych, 'The Hunt in Classical Arabic Poetry: From Mukhadram Qasidah to Umayyad Tardiyyah', Journal of Arabic Literature 30 (1999): 108-27. 25 Gregor Schoeler, Arabische Naturdichtung: Die Zahriyat, Rabi'iyat und Raudiyat von ihren Anfdngen bis as-Sanaubari: Eine gattungs-, motiv- und stilgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Beirut/ Stuttgart, 1974).

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frameworks for the further symbolic, archetypal, metaphorical, and comparative interpretation of the garden and spring meadow in terms of fertility and the prosperity of the realm, an analogue of the beloved, the 'lost garden', and so on.26 Finally there is the complicated issue of wasf (description), which can refer to the descriptive passages of conventional elements within the poem or qasfda (the beloved, the she-camel, the poet's horse, and so on) or, particularly from the Abbasid period onward, to usually short, often epigrammatic, free-standing lyric poems that describe a particular object or scene, what Johann-Christoph Burgel has termed 'ekphrastic epigrams'.27 Akiko Motoyoshi in her 2001 essay, 'Sensibility and Synaesthesia' (Chapter 10) brings a wide range of recent scholarship within the field of Arabic literature and from ekphrastic and more broadly interarts theory to bear on her interpretation of Ibn al-Rumi's qasfda-length description of a singing slave-girl. Drawing on scholarship on Arab music and its social milieu and performance practices, Western literary studies of ekphrasis and synaesthesia, in addition to work such as that of Jaroslav Stetkevych and Michael Sells, she demonstrates the hybridity of this poem that combines surface wasf lyricism with a suggested qasfda substructure and that is ultimately metapoetic, not merely descriptive, in intent. Motoyoshi's use of ekphrastic and interarts theory is further developed and applied to Arabic poetry ranging from the Jahiliyya to al-Andalus in her 2004 book, Description in Classical Arabic Poetry.28 In addition to deepening our appreciation of the free-standing monothematic genres, their distinctive poetics and historical development, the overall effect of the last generation of studies of what I have termed the 'lesser' genres, particularly in light of the advances in our structural studies of the qasida itself, has been to develop a sense of their (often subordinate) relation to the dominant qasida themes and structures. They have come to be understood, not as arbitrary genres, but rather as forms that evolved from and revolve within the larger sphere of the qasfda and bear both semantic and formal ties, whether synecdochic, antithetic, or metaphoric, to the qasfda and the dominant societal values that it embodies, expresses, and preserves.

Poetics: Language, Rhetoric, Style, Motifs, and Themes While the trajectory traced above has focused on the analysis and interpretation of the relation between the formal structure and socio-political function of the 26 See, respectively, Sperl, 'Islamic Kingship' (Chapter 3); Sells 'Guises of the GhuV (Chapter 12); J. Stetkevych, Zephyrs ofNajd, ch. 5, 'In Search of the Garden', 168-201. 27 Johann-Christoph Burgel, Die ekphrastischen Epigramme des Abu Talib al-Ma'mum: Literaturkundliche Studie uber einen arabsichen Conceptisten (Gottingen, 1966). 28 Akiko Motoyoshi Surni, Description in Classical Arabic Poetry: Wasf, Ekphrasis, and Interarts Theory (Leiden, 2004).

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qasfda, and the emergence and nature of the ghazal and the lesser classical genres that inhabit the qasfda-dominated poetic world, other studies have contributed to our understanding of classical Arabic poetry in terms of philology, rhetoric, stylistic developments, and the exploration of individual motifs and themes.29 In this regard, Jaroslav Stetkevych's 1986 essay, 'Name and Epithet' (Chapter 11), explores the phenomenon of animal nomenclature in early Arabic poetry, whereby poets refer obliquely and epithetically to those objects which have the greatest symbolic valency—that is the she-camel, and, to a lesser extent, the oryx, the onager, the horse, and the sword. He proceeds to argue that those subjects in the qasfda that possess and are expressed by the most epithets are arguably the most archaic elements of the Arabic poetic tradition—in other words, that the study of epithet-bearing elements may reveal the pre-history of the qasfda. In a later essay, his 1994 'Toward an Arabic Elegiac Lexicon' J. Stetkevych offers an etymological, symbolic, and comparative exploration of key words that appear regularly in the abandoned campsite motif of the classical nasfb, such as dor (abode), rabc (spring encampment), and so on, to uncover what Egyptian critic Mustafa Nasif has termed, 'the myth behind the word'.30 In his 1994 examination of similes of the beloved in the early Arabic nasfb, 'Guises of the GhuV (Chapter 12), Michael Sells refutes the traditional Orientalist claim that the language of the early Arabic qasfda is primarily objectively descriptive by demonstrating that the description of the beloved is only apparently an objective simile, but actually possesses metonymic, metaphoric, and synaesthetic dimensions. He argues that these descriptions are what he terms the 'dissembling simile', that they exhibit 'semantic overflow', and that the primary referent of these similes is not the beloved, but a symbolic analogue of the beloved, the lost garden. This, in turn, allows for and explains the extension, elaboration, and digression of the simile that typify early Arabic poetry. M.M. Badawi in his 1980 study, 'From Primary to Secondary Qasidas' (Chapter 13) adapts C.S. Lewis's distinction between primary (for example, Homer) and secondary (for example, Milton) epic as a basis to trace and interpret the formal and stylistic developments in Arabic poetry from the pre-Islamic to the High Abbasid period. Identifying the ritual tribal fakhr of the Jahiliyyah as 'primary' 29 Although I have included a number of studies on classical Arabic literary criticism and on the development of rhetorical terminology, I have for the most part limited the present essay to works that take poetry itself, rather than classical literary criticism (naqd al-shicr) as their primary sources. Arabic rhetoric (balaghah), however essentially involved with poetry, in the Islamic tradition came to be intimately bound up with the study of Quranic language, particularly as regards the issues literal and figurative language (al-haqiqa wa-l-majaz) and of i'jaz al-Qur'an (the inimitability of the Qur'an). The fields of both rhetoric ('ilm al-balaghah) and rhetorical figures (cilm al-badic) reached maturity in the late classical period (fifth/eleventh and sixth/twelfth centuries) and flourished in the post-classical era. 30 Jaroslav Stetkevych, 'Toward an Arabic Elegiac Lexicon: The Seven Words of the Nasib', in Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, ed., Reorientations: Arabic and Persian Poetry (Bloomington & Indianapolis, 1994) 58-129.

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and the court panegyric of the Abbasid period as 'secondary', he offers an analysis of Arabic stylistic developments in a comparative context. Of note is his application of Alexander Pope's and Dr Johnson's conception of'wit' and the style of English metaphysical poetry to achieve a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the distinctive highly rhetorical badfc style of the High Abbasid panegyrists and the 'conceited' style of later Abbasid descriptive verse. His focus on al-madhdhab al-kaldmi as what Kratchkovsky has termed 'dialectical mannerism' and its relation to Muctazilite modes of thinking relates closely to my ideas, below. Rhetorical stylistic developments are likewise the subject of my 1981 essay, 'Toward a Redefinition of Badfc' (Chapter 14) which deals on a rhetorical and linguistic level with what Badawi discusses in his 'From Primary to Secondary Qasidas'. Adopting a cultural-historical approach, my study argues that the rhetorically ornate bad£c style of the High Abbasid period is not merely the result of an idiosyncratic infatuation with rhetorical devices, as traditionally claimed, but rather the result of the development at that period of the analytical sciences, among them linguistics, that unlocked the generative principles of syntax and morphology. Reflecting the spirit of the Muctazilite era in which it first flourished, badfc poetry embodied and expressed what I have termed the broader significance of al-madhhab al-kalami, that is, a self-consciously creative, conceptual, and dialectical approach to linguistic expression, that is qualitatively, not merely quantitatively, distinct from the poetry of the ancients. These two studies take their place among a number of related critical approaches to the same historical phenomenon, that is, the increasingly rhetorically ornate and 'conceited' style of the Abbasid period that we associate with bad£c. Johann-Christoph Burgel, Wolfhart Heinrichs, Gregor Schoeler, and Stefan Sperl31 have, along with M.M. Badawi, introduced such European terms as Conceptism (from the Italian concetto, conceit, intricate or far-fetched metaphor), Mannerism, Gongorism, Metaphysical 'wit', and so on. The discussion of stylistic developments in Arabic poetry in terms of cognate developments in the European tradition has proven especially useful in providing a Western aesthetic handle for this rhetorically ornate poetry that tends to be inimical to the Romantic and Modernist sensibilities of most Western readers. A couple of important issues wait to be adequately addressed. One is a convincing comparative periodization of Arabic poetic styles. In the Western tradition, Mannerism, for example, is understood only with reference to Classical and Baroque. If the badfc poetry of the third/ninth to fourth/tenth centuries is labelled Mannerist, then what precisely are we terming Classical, and is there an Arabic Baroque? Further, what 31

See Wolfhart Heinrichs, ' "Manierismus" in der arabischen Literatur', in Friedrich Max Meier and Richard Gramlich, eds., Islamwissenschaftliche Abhandlungen Fritz Meier zum sechzigsten Geburtstag (Wiesbaden, 1974) 118-28; Schoeler, Arabische Naturdichtung, esp. his chapter on Abu Tammam, 89-101; Sperl, Mannerism, esp. 155-80 and refs., p. 155.

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do we do with the increasingly, no-longer-novel bad£c-ism of the post-classical period—fifth/eleventh-thirteenth/nineteenth centuries—which clearly looked to the High Abbasid bad£c poetry as its 'Classicism'. These are complex and intriguing literary and cultural historical questions which we have only begun to address. A further step would be to move beyond comparative literary history to interarts theory to discuss the stylistic history of Arabic poetry in terms of the Classical/Renaissance, Baroque, and Mannerist styles in the plastic arts. Another approach to classical Arabic poetics is found in studies that focus on individual themes or motifs. These vary in topic and approach. Hasan al-Banna c lzz al-Dm's 1988 study, Al-Tayf wa l-Khayal, offers a multifaceted historical, philological, structural, and interpretative study of the motif of the phantom of the poet's beloved who visits him by night.32 In a similar manner, with increased emphasis on the semiotics of its structural location within the qasfda, he explores the za'&in, the motif of the women departing in camel howdahs, in his 1998 book, Shi'riyat al-Harb and related 1994 essay, 'No Solace for the Heart',33 where his structural analyses reveal that when this motif predominates in the nasfb, and there is no rahil section, the qasfda will normally be a battle ode. Likewise, his 2003 book on literary consciousness (al-wacy al-kitabi), Al-Shi'riyah wa-l-Thaqafah, although grounded in orality and literacy studies, traces the history of writing as a poetic motif, particularly in the ruined encampment theme of the nasfb, in both oral pre- and early Islamic poetry and in later written poetry.34 Another study devoted to a particular theme is Thomas Bauer's 1992 two-volume study, Altarabsiche Dichtkunst, which takes as its subject the onager episode of the classical qasfda.35 He sets out, together with a large corpus of translated examples, a detailed historical and descriptive account of the diction and motifs of this major theme of the classical rahil. A counterpart to this is Jaroslav Stetkevych's 2002 essay, 'In Search of the Unicorn', which takes as its subject the two contrasting themes, the solitude of the oryx and the earthy sexuality of the onager, to explore their complementary symbolic and archetypal associations.36 Adopting a broadly interpretative and comparativist approach is Jaroslav Stetkevych's 1993 book, The Zephyrs ofNajd, which examines, in what he terms 32

Hasan al-Banna clzz al-Din, Al-Tayf wa-l-Khayal fi l-Shi'r al-'Arabi al-Qadim. Cairo, 1988. This is the published version of his 1978 Master's thesis of the same title from Ayn Shams University, Egypt, on which Renate Jacobi's 1990 article, 'The Khayal Motif in Early Arabic Poetry', Oriens 32 (1990): 50-64, draws heavily (regrettably without reference). 33 Hasan al-Banna clzz al-Din, Shi'riyat al-Harb cind al-cArab qabl al-Islam: Qasidat al-Zaca3in Namudhajan, 2d ed. (Riyadh, 1998); Hassan El-Banna Ezz el-Din,' "No Solace for the Heart": The Motif of Departing Women in the Pre-Islamic Battle Ode', in S. Stetkevych, ed. Reorientations, 165-79. 34 c lzz al-Din, Al-Shicriya wa-l-Thaqafa: Mafhum al-Wacy al-Kitabi. 35 Thomas Bauer, Altarabsiche Dichtkunst: Eine Untersuchung ihrer Struktur und Entwicklung am Beispiel der Onager episode, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1992). 36 Jaroslav Stetkevych, 'In Search of the Unicorn: The Onager and the Oryx in the Arabic Ode', Journal of Arabic Literature 33 (2002): 79-130.

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'the poetics of nostalgia', the motival elements of the abandoned encampment theme so essential to the elegiac mood of the nasib. The study includes, for example, the literary historical trajectory from archaic nasib to mystical ghazal, the evocative effects of toponymy, the comparison of the Najd of Arabic poetry with the Greek Arcadia, and the uncovering of an 'Arab pastoral'. These varied studies of poetics, that is to say the inner workings of the poem, have provided both the underpinnings for and the counterpart to the overall movement in the past generation of classical Arabic poetry scholarship, that is, the effort to discover the form and function of the qasida and its related subordinate genres. Moreover, even those studies that focus quite narrowly on specific elements of diction, rhetorical devices, themes and motifs are themselves engaged, or are engaged by the reader, in the broader issues of form and function. At the same time, these studies, like the studies of qasfda, ghazal, and the lesser genres, offer a full spectrum, ranging from those that limit their concerns to purely Arabic textual matters, to those that engage Arab-Islamic cultural and political history, and further to those that introduce comparative literary and interarts approaches. Conclusion The past generation of scholarship in classical Arabic poetry has unlocked, at the macropoetic level, the generative secrets of poetic form, of the qasida in particular and of the ghazal and lesser genres as well, and has revealed how poetry was intimately integrated into the social, moral, political, economic, and religious workings of the Arab Islamic polity. At the micropoetic level, extensive and varied studies of the poetic lexicon, style, rhetorical structures, individual motifs and themes have provided us with a much clearer understanding of how individual poets found their own voices within their rich poetic tradition and manipulated its diction and formal conventions to address contemporary concerns and express contemporary ideas. Finally, although classical Arabic poetry has not been fully or adequately integrated into comparative literary studies nor into the current understanding of 'world literature', the comparative component in recent studies and the introduction of contemporary theories, ideas, and methods into scholarship in the field has set the stage for such developments. The direction of future studies in classical Arabic poetry will no doubt be determined by many as yet unforeseen or unfathomed theoretical, political, demographic, technological, and economic factors. In terms of the present trajectory of the field, we can anticipate further work in close readings of texts that go beyond detailed paraphrasis to involve critically and culturally informed interpretation of their rhetorical, structural, and performance aspects. Cumulatively, such works should lay the foundation for richer and more culturally

INTRODUCTION

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integrated studies of Arabic literary history. At the same time, we can expect to see an acceleration of the current trend in classical Arabic literary studies to cross disciplinary boundaries into cultural history, anthropology, folklore, performance studies, comparative literature, and interarts theory.

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Abu-Deeb, Kamal, 'Towards a Structural Analysis of Pre-Islamic Poetry', International Journal of Middle East Studies 6 (1975), 148-84. Towards a Structural Analysis of Pre-Islamic Poetry (II): the Eros Vision', Edebiydt, 1 (1976), 3-69. Ali, Samer M., 'Praise for Murder? Two Odes by al-Buhturi Surrounding an Abbasid Patricide', in Gruendler and Marlow, Writers and Rulers (Wiesbaden, 2004), 1-38. Allen, Roger, The Arabic Literary Heritage: The Development of Its Genres and Criticism (Cambridge, 1998). Badawi, M.M., 'From Primary to Secondary Qasidas: Thoughts on the Development of Classical Arabic Poetry', Journal of Arabic Literature 11 (1980) 1-31. (Chapter 13) 'The Function of Rhetoric in Medieval Arabic Poetry: Abu Tammam's Ode on Amorium', Journal of Arabic Literature 9 (1978), 43-56. Bauer, Thomas, Altarabsiche Dichtkunst: Eine Untersuchung ihrer Struktur und Entwicklung am Beispiel der Onagerepisode, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1992). Liebe und Liebesdichtung in der arabischen Welt des 9. und 10. Jahrhunderts: Eine literatur- und mentalitdtsgeschichtliche Studie des arabischen Gazal (Wiesbaden, 1998). 'Wie fangt man eine Qaside an? Formelhafte und nichtformelhafte NasibEinleitungsverse', Zeitschrift fur arabische Linguistik 25 (1993), 50-75. Bauer, Thomas and Angelika Neuwirth, eds. Ghazal as World Literature I: Transformations of a Literary Genre (Beirut, 2005). Bencheikh, J.E. [Jamel Eddine], 'Le cenacle poetique du calife al-Mutawakkil (m. 247): Contribution a 1'analyse des instances de legitimation socio-litteraires', Bulletin d'etudes orientales 29 (1977), 33-52. (Chapter 4) 'Les musiciens et la poesie: les ecoles d'Ishaq al-Mawsili (m. 225 H.) et d'Ibrahim Ibn al-Mahdi (m. 224 H.)', Arabica 22 (1975), 114-52. — Poetique arabe, precedee de: Essai sur un discourse critique (Paris, 1975). Blachere, Regis, Histoire de la litterature arabe des origins a la fin du XVe siecle du J.-C. 3 vols. (Paris, 1952, 1964, 1966).

xxxii

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brookshaw, Dominic P., 'Palaces, Pavilions and Pleasure-Gardens: The Context and Setting of the Medieval Majlis\ Middle Eastern Literatures 6 (2003), 199-223. Burgel, Johann-Christoph, '"Die beste Dichtung ist die lugenreichste": Wesen und Bedeutung eines literarischen Streits des arabischen Mittelalters im Lichte komparatistischer Betrachtung', Oriens 23-4 (1974), 7-102. Die ekphrastischen Epigramme des Abu Talib al-Ma'muni: Literaturkundliche Studie uber einen arabsichen Conceptisten (Gottingen, 1966). Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: 'Abbasid Belles Lettres, ed. Julia Ashtiany et al. (Cambridge, 1990). Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, ed. A.F.L. Beeston et al. (Cambridge, 1983). Cantarino, Vicente, Arabic Poetics of the Golden Age: Selections of Texts Accompanied by a Preliminary Study (Leiden, 1975). Ezz El-Din, Hassan El-Banna, '"No Solace for the Heart": The Motif of Departing Women in the Pre-Islamic Battle Ode', in S. Stetkevych, Reorientations, 165-79. [see, clzz al-Dm, Hassan al-Banna] Farrin, Raymond K., 'The Poetics of Persuasion: Abu Tammam's Panegyric to Ibn Abi Du'ad', Journal of Arabic Literature 34 (2003), 221-51. Gatje, Helmut, ed. Grundrifi der arabischen Philologie, Band 2: Literaturwissenschaft (Wiesbaden, 1987). Gelder, G.J.H. van, Beyond the Line: Classical Arabic Literary Critics on the Coherence and Unity of the Poem (Leiden, 1982). The Bad and the Ugly: Attitudes Towards Invective Poetry (Hija3) in Classical Arabic Literature (Leiden, 1988). 'The Terrified Traveller: Ibn al-Rumi's Anti-RahiV, Journal of Arabic Literature 27 (1996), 37-48. Gruendler, Beatrice, ''Abbasid Praise Poetry in Light of Dramatic Discourse and Speech Act Theory', in Klemm and Gruendler, Understanding Near Eastern Literatures, 157-70. (Chapter 6) 'Ibn al-Rumi's Ethics of Patronage', Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review 3 (1996), 104-60.

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Medieval Arabic Praise Poetry: Ibn al-Rumi and the Patron's Redemption (London & New York, 2003). Gruendler, Beatrice and Louise Marlow, eds. Writers and Rulers: Perspectives on Their Relationship from Abbasid to Safavid Times (Wiesbaden, 2004). Grunebaum, Gustave E. von, ed. Arabic Poetry: Theory and Development (Wiesbaden, 1973). Themes in Medieval Arabic Literature, ed. Dunning S. Wilson (London, 1981). Hamori, Andras, On the Art of Medieval Arabic Literature (Princeton, NJ, 1974). Haydar, Adnan, 'The Mu'allaqa oflmru* al-Qays: Its Structure and Meaning', Parts 1 & 2 Edebiydt 2 (1977), 227-61 and 3 (1978), 51-82. Heinrichs, Wolfhart, 'The Hand of the North Wind: Opinions on Metaphor and the Early Meanings of Isti'ara in Arabic Poetics', Abhandlungenfur die Kunde des Morganlandes 44 (1977) no. 2. 'Isti'arah and Bad? and their Terminological Relationship in Early Arabic Literary Criticism', Zeitschrift fur Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften 1 (1984), 180-211. — '"Manierismus" in der arabischen Literatur', in Friedrich Max Meier and Richard Gramlich, eds. Islamwissenschaftliche Abhandlungen Fritz Meier zum sechzigsten Geburtstag (Wiesbaden, 1974), 118-28. — 'Literary Theory: The Problem of its Efficacy', in von Grunebaum, Arabic Poetry, 18-69. 'Muslim b. al-Walid und Badic', in Heinrichs and Schoeler, Festschrift Ewald Wagner, 211-45. 'Poetik, Rhetorik, Literaturkritik, Metrik und Reimlehre', in Helmut Gatje,

Grundrifi der arabischen Philologie, 179-207. 'Rose versus Narcissus: Observations on an Arabic Literary Debate', in Reinink and Vanstiphout, eds. Dispute Poems and Dialogues in the Ancient and Mediaeval Near East (Louvain, 1991), 179-99. Heinrichs, Wolfhart and Gregor Schoeler, eds. Festschrift Ewald Wagner zum 65. Geburtstag. Bd. 2: Studien zur arabischen Dichtung (Beirut/Stuttgart, 1994). c

lzz al-Dm, Hasan al-Banna, Al-Shicriya wa-l-Thaqafa: Mafhum al-Wacy al-Kitabi wa-Maldmihih f i l-Shicr al-cArabi al-Qadim (Casablanca, 2003).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

— Shi'riyat al-Harb cind al-cArab qabl al-Islam: Qasidat al-Za'&in Namudhajan. 2d ed. (Riyadh, 1998). — Al-Tayfwa-l-Khayalfi

l-Shicr al-'Arabi al-Qadim (Cairo, 1988).

[see Ezz El-Din, Hassan El-Banna] Jacobi, Renate, 'Dichtung', in Gatje, Helmut Grundrifi der arabischen Philologie, 7-63. 'Ibn al-Muctazz: Dair cAbdun: A Structural Analysis', Journal of Arabic Literature 6 (1975), 35-56. 'Time and Reality in Nasib and GhazaV, Journal of Arabic Literature 16 (1985), 1-17. (Chapter 8) Studien zur Poetik der altarabischen Qaside (Wiesbaden, 1971). Kennedy, Philip, The Wine Song in Classical Poetry: Abu Nuwas and the Arabic Literary Tradition (Oxford, 1997). Kerr, Malcolm H., ed. Islamic Studies: A Tradition and Its Problems, Seventh Giorgio Levi Delia Vida Biennial Conference 1979 (Malibu, CA, 1980). Klemm, Verena and Beatrice Gruendler, eds. Understanding Near Eastern Literatures: A Spectrum of Interdisciplinary Approaches (Wiesbaden, 2000). McKinney, Robert C., The Case of Rhyme versus Reason: Ibn al-Rumi and his Poetics in Context (Leiden & Boston, 2004). 'Ibn al-Rumi's Contribution to the "Nautical Rahil" Tradition: The Expression of Meaning through Form and Structure', Journal of Arabic Literature 29 (1998), 95-135. Meisami, Julie Scott, 'Abu Nuwas and the Rhetoric of Parody', in Heinrichs and Schoeler, Festschrift Ewald Wagner, 246-57. 'Arabic Mujun Poetry: The Literary Dimension', in F. de Jong, ed. Verse and the Fair Sex: Studies in Arabic Poetry and the Representation of Women in Arabic Literature (Utrecht, 1993), 8-30. Structure and Meaning in Medieval Arabic and Persian Poetry: Orient Pearls (London & New York, 2003). 'The Uses of the Qasida: Thematic and Structural Patterns in a Poem of Bashshar', Journal of Arabic Literature 16 (1985), 40-60. (Chapter 5) Mir, Mustansir and Jarl Fossum, eds. The Literary Heritage of Classical Islam: Arabic and Islamic Studies in Honor of James A. Bellamy (Princeton, NJ, 1993).

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Monroe, James T., 'Oral Composition in Pre-Islamic Poetry', Journal of Arabic Literature 3 (1972), 1-53. (Chapter 1) Montgomery, James, The Vagaries of the Qasidah: The Tradition and Practice of Early Arabic Poetry (Warminster, UK, 1997). Motoyoshi [Sumi], Akiko, 'Reality and Reverie: Wine and Ekphrasis in the 'Abbasid Poetry of Abu Nuwas and al-Buhturi', Annals of the Japan Association for Middle East Studies 14 (1999), 85-120. 'Sensibility and Synaesthesia: Ibn al-Rumi's Singing Slave-Girl', Journal of Arabic Literature 32 (2001) 1-29. (Chapter 10) [see Sumi, Akiko Motoyoshi] Neuwirth, Angelika, Birgit Embalo, Sebastian Gunther, and Maher Jarrar, eds. Myths, Historical Archetypes, and Symbolic Figures in Arabic Literature: Towards a New Hermeneutic Approach—Proceedings of the International Symposium in Beirut, June 25th-June 30th, 1996 (Beirut [Stuttgart], 1999). Noorani, Yaseen, 'Heterotopia and the Wine Poem in Early Islamic Culture', International Journal of Middle East Studies 36 (2004), 345-66. (Chapter 9) Ouyang, Wen-chin, Literary Criticism in Arabic-Islamic Culture: The Making of a Tradition (Edinburgh, 1997). Said, Edward, 'Islam, the Philological Vocation, and French Culture', in Kerr, Islamic Studies: A Tradition and Its Problems, 53-72. Orientalism (New York, 1978). Sajdi [al-Sajdi], Dana, 'Revisiting Layla al-Akhyaliya's Trespass', in Marie Hammond and Dana Sajdi, eds., 'Transforming Loss into Beauty': Essays on Arabic Literature and Culture in Honor ofMagda al-Nowaihi (Cairo, 2008), pp. 185-208. (Chapter 7) 'Trespassing the Male Domain: The Qasidah of Layla al-Akhyaliyyah', Journal of Arabic Literature 31 (2000), 121-43. Schoeler, Gregor, Arabische Naturdichtung: Die Zahriyat, Rabi'iyat und Raudiyat von ihren Anfdngen bis as-Sanaubari: Eine gattungs-, motiv- und stilgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Beirut/Stuttgart, 1974). 'On Ibn al-Rumi's Reflective Poetry: His Poem about Poetry', Journal of Arabic Literature 27 (1996), 22-36. — The Oral and the Written in Early Islam (London, 2006).

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Sells, Michael A., "'Along the Edge of the Mirage": The Mufaddaliyyah of al-Mukhabbal as-Sacdi, an Interpretation', in Mir and Fossum, Literary Heritage, 119-36. 'Guises of the Ghul: Dissembling Simile and Semantic Overflow in the Classical Arabic Nasib\ in S. Stetkevych, Reorientations, 130-64. (Chapter 12) 'Like the Arms of a Drowning Man: Simile and Symbol Worlds in the Naqa Section of Bashama's Hajarta Umama', in Heinrichs and Schoeler, Festschrift Ewald Wagner, 18-41. The Qasida and the West: Self-Reflective Stereotype and Critical Encounter', Al-'Arabiyya 20 (1987), 307-24. Serrano, Richard, Neither a Borrower Nor a Lender Be: Forging Traditions in French, Chinese and Arabic Poetry (Oxford, 2002). Sezgin, Fuat, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, Band II: Poesie bis ca. 430 H. (Leiden, 1975). Smart, J.R., ed. Tradition and Modernity in Arabic Language and Literature (London, 1996). Sperl, Stefan, 'Islamic Kingship and Arabic Panegyric Poetry in the Early 9th Century', Journal of Arabic Literature 8 (1977), 20-35. (Chapter 3) Mannerism in Arabic Poetry (Cambridge, UK, 1989). Sperl, Stefan, and Christopher Shackle, eds. Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa. Vol. 1: Classical Traditions and Modern Meanings. Vol. 2: Eulogy's Bounty, Meaning's Abundance: An Anthology (Leiden, 1996). Stetkevych, Jaroslav, 'Arabic Poetry and Assorted Poetics', in Kerr, Islamic Studies: A Tradition and Its Problems, 103-24. 'Arabism and Arabic Literature: Self-View of a Profession', Journal of Near Eastern Studies 27 (1969), 145-56. 'The Hunt in the Arabic Qasidah: The Antecedents of the Tardiyyah', in Smart, Tradition and Modernity, 108-18. — 'The Hunt in Classical Arabic Poetry: From Mukhadram Qasidah to Umayyad Tardiyyah', Journal of Arabic Literature 30 (1999), 108-27. — 'Name and Epithet: The Philology and Semiotics of Animal Nomenclature in Early Arabic Poetry', Journal of Near Eastern Studies 45 (1986), 89-124. (Chapter 11)

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'In Search of the Unicorn: The Onager and the Oryx in the Arabic Ode', Journal of Arabic Literature 33 (2002), 79-130. 'Toward an Arabic Elegiac Lexicon: The Seven Words of the Nasib\ in S. Stetkevych, Reorientations, 58-129. The Zephyrs ofNajd: The Poetics of Nostalgia in the Classical Arabic Nasib (Chicago, 1993). Stetkevych, Suzanne Pinckney, ''Abbasid Panegyric and the Poetics of Political Allegiance: Two Poems of al-Mutanabbi on Kafur', in Sperl and Shackle, Qasida Poetry, 1:35-63; 2:92-105. 'The 'Abbasid Poet Interprets History: Three Qasidahs by Abu Tammam', Journal of Arabic Literature 10 (1979), 49-65. — Abu Tammam and the Poetics of the 'Abbasid Age (Leiden, 1991). — The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual (Ithaca, NY, 1993). — 'Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Redemption: Mufaddaliyah 119 of 'Alqamah and Banat Su'ad of Kacb ibn Zuhayr', in S. Stetkevych, Reorientations, 1-57. The Poetics of Islamic Legitimacy: Myth, Gender, and Ceremony in the Classical Arabic Ode (Bloomington & Indianapolis, 2002). 'The Su'luk and his Poem: A Paradigm of Passage Manque', Journal of the American Oriental Society 104 (1984), 661-78. 'Structuralist Interpretations of Pre-Islamic Poetry: Critique and New Directions', Journal of Near Eastern Studies 42 (1983), 85-107. (Chapter 2) 'Toward a Redefinition of "Bad?" Poetry', Journal of Arabic Literature 12 (1981), 1-29. (Chapter 14) Stetkevych, Suzanne Pinckney, ed. Reorientations: Arabic and Persian Poetry (Bloomington & Indianapolis, 1994). Sumi, Akiko Motoyoshi, Description in Classical Arabic Poetry: Wasf, Ekphrasis, and Interarts Theory (Leiden, 2004). [see Motoyoshi, Akiko] Wagner, Ewald, Abu Nuwas: Eine Studie zur arabischen Literatur der fruhen 'Abbasidenzeit (Wiesbaden, 1965).

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Grundzuge der klassischen arabischen Dichtung: Vol. 1: Die altarabische Dichtung; Vol. 2: Die arabische Dichtung in islamischer Zeit (Darmstadt, 1987-88). Zwettler, Michael, The Oral Tradition of Classical Arabic Poetry: Its Character and Implications (Columbus, OH, 1978). The Poetics of Allusion in Abu l-cAtahiya's Ode in Praise of al-Hadi', Edebiyat n.s. 3 (1989), 1-29.

1

ORAL COMPOSITION IN PRE-ISLAMIC POETRY* James T. Monroe

THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY The authenticity of pre-Islamic poetry is hardly a problem of recent formulation, for as early as cAbbasid times effort was expended by Arab philologists in sorting out the authentic from the forged. Although we may smile today, we can hardly refrain from applauding the objective rigor of the critic al-Jumahl for having branded as spurious those ancient Arabic poems attributed to the peoples of c Ad and Thamud^The medieval Arabic tradition, in possession of far more material for study than is available to us at present, proceeded with exemplary caution and restraint in so ticklish a matter. But in 1925 a frontal attack was launched, which claimed to show that all or practically all pre-Islamic poetry had been forged in Islamic times. The call to battle was sounded simultaneously yet independently by the Egyptian scholar Taha Husain and the British Orientalist D. S. Margoliouth. The former cut the Gordian knot by the publication of his book Fi sh-shi^r al-jdhili (cOn Pre-Islamic Poetry'),2 and two years later he summed up his position that the general mass of what we call Cpre-Islamic' literature had nothing to do with the preIslamic period, but was simply fabricated after the coming of Islam... * Abbreviations: A = c Antara; Alq = cAlqama; IQ = Imru 3 al-Qais; L = Labid; M = The Mufaddaliyydt\ M = Mu^a/laqa\ N = Nabigha adh-Dhubyam; T = Tarafa; Z = Zuhair. References: 1 References to A, Alq, IQ, N, T, and Z are quoted from: W. Ahlwardt (ed.); The Divans of the Six Ancient Arabic Poets (London, 1870). (IQ, 128, 20, 19) = Irnru' al-Qais, Divans, p. 128, no. 20, 1. 19; (A, M, 5) = cAntara, Mu^allaqa, 1. 5. 2 References to Labid are quoted from: Labid, Dlwan^ ed. Dar Sadir (Beirut, 1966). (L, 114, 38, 14) = Labid, Divan, p. 114, no. 38, 1. 14. 3 References to M are quoted from: Al-Mufaddal ibn Muhammad ad-Dabbi, The Mufaddaliyyat: An Anthology of Ancient Arabian Odes, ed. Charles J. Lyall (Oxford, 1921), vol. I. (M, 180, 63) = Mufaddaliyyat, p. 180, 1. 63. 4 A single vertical stroke before a formula indicates the beginning of the first hemistich (/). A single vertical stroke after a formula indicates the end of the second hemistich. Two vertical strokes at the end of a formula indicate the end of the first hemistich (//). Two vertical strokes at the beginning of a formula indicate the beginning of the second hemistich. When no vertical strokes are marked, the formula occupies an internal position in the hemistich. 1 Amjad Trabulsi, La critique poetique des arabes jusqtfau Ve siecle de PHegire (XI* siecle dej. C.) (Damascus, 1956), p. 65. 2 (Cairo, 1925).

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"what you read as being the poetry of Imru5 al-Qais or Tarafa or Ibn Kulthum or cAntara is not the work of these men at all; it is merely the fabrication of 'transmitters', or the forgery of Bedouins, or the manufacture of grammarians, or the pretence of story-tellers, or the invention of commentators and traditionists and theologians." * What then were the reasons given for this extraordinary and wholesale forgery of individual and collective anthologies, to say nothing of scattered fragments too numerous to count? According to Taha Husain the Meccan tribe of Quraish, in order to win the struggle for power within the nascent Islamic community, had needed authoritative texts to enhance its own prestige, and so it forged a literature in its own dialect as a basis of support for its political ambitions. Devout Muslims, too, sought to prove that Islam had been foreshadowed by pious Arabs who had believed in Allah prior to the revelation. This would account for the occasional references to Islamic doctrine contained in the poems. Likewise the Koran was full of obscure words and allusions to events that were no longer understood by later generations. Rather than admit ignorance of these passages, later commentators adopted the face-saving expedient of inventing lines of poetry to use as loci probantes in support of their personal interpretations. Story-tellers, furthermore, forged 'old' verses and used them to spice their tales in order to enhance their own prestige before gullible audiences. After the expansion of Islam beyond the confines of the Arabian peninsula, the Arabs came into contact with culturally superior subjects. Thereupon they forged a poetic literature to prove to their non-Arab subjects that they too had enjoyed a high level of civilization in their earlier, camel-herding days. The conquered peoples, on the other hand, once admitted to the status of adopted clients in an Arab tribe, became as eager as their conquerors to forge evidence proving the ancient glory of their new masters, partly to curry favor with them, and partly to lord it over their less fortunate unadopted brethren. D. S. Margoliouth had some additional points to make in a now famous article.2 A literary form called 'poetry' (jv&/cr), he argued, must have existed prior to Islam because the Koran refers to it,3 and 1

Taha Husain, Fi l-adab al-jahill (Cairo, 1927), p. 63. "The Origins of Arabic Poetry," Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society^ n.v. (1925), pp. 417-449. 3 Koran 26:224-225. 2

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3

Muhammed was accused of being a poet by his enemies,1 which charge he strongly rejected.2 This would imply that for the pre-Islamic Arabs the word 'poetry' meant the rhymed prose of the soothsayers and of the Koran rather than the measured verse of later times. This assumption is supported by the fact that unlike other early literatures such as Latin, not one line of poetry is to be found among the abundant pre-Islamic epitaphs and inscriptions. From this evidence it may be assumed that the Koran uses the word cpoet' in the sense of soothsayer. So-called Cpre-Islamic' poetry is uniformly written in the Meccan Quraishite dialect of the Koran, and not in the various tribal dialects of Arabia, whose existence and peculiarities were known to medieval Arab philologists. Also, the poems frequently allude to writing, which would imply that the Quraishites were a literate tribe, whereas Arab tradition would indicate that the poems were orally transmitted. The poetry must then have been preserved either orally or in writing. In the former case, the vehemence with which Muhammad attacked 'poets' would surely have resulted in the suppression and rapid extinction of the professional reciter. If the poems were preserved in writing, use of books is implied, but the Koran specifically accuses the pagan Arabs of possessing neither a book nor writing. Generally speaking, literature evolves from the irregular to the regular, as may be observed in the case of Latin. By analogy, it can be assumed that the irregular rhythms of the Koran gave rise to the regular meters of Arabic poetry, and not the reverse. Medieval Arab philologists speak eloquently, too, of the many forgeries perpetrated by transmitters such as Hammad arRawiya and his disciple Khalaf al-Ahmar. The generosity of caliphs in rewarding transmitters of ancient poetry must also have been an irresistible temptation to forge poetry. Pre-Islamic poets, continues Margoliouth, frequently swear by Allah and occasionally they even quote Koranic passages.3 Their thorough knowledge of Islamic customs and doctrine thus reflects negatively on the authenticity of the whole body of poetry. The poems are all in the Koranic dialect of Quraish which could only have been spread throughout Arabia after the rise of Islam as a unifying force. Furthermore, poets such as cAmr ibn Kulthum 1

Koran 37:35. Koran 69:39-43. 3 An example by Zuhair in R. Blachere, Histoire de la litterature arabe des origines a la fin du XVe siecle de J. C. (Paris, 1952), I, p. 176. 2

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betray a general knowledge of Near Eastern geography that is suspicious in an Arabian Bedouin. In his Mu^allaqa cAmr claims to have tasted the wine of Baalbek, Damascus, and Qasirin, and requests to be given that of Andarln, possibly near Aleppo. This leads Margoliouth to comment that "doubtless in the 150 years which this person is supposed to have lived he had time for extensive travels." x The qasida too, exhibits a stereotyped literary structure. This would imply that an original literary prototype must have existed in writing. If so, then why did the Koran not censure this textual source as the root of all the evil it sought to suppress? The reaction to this dual attack on the authenticity of the classical prototype of Arabic poetry caused much ink to be spilled, both in the East and in the West. In a succinct summary of the case for the defense, A. J. Arberry replied point by point to the HusainMargoliouth thesis as follows:2 The Koranic passages cited by Margoliouth are both mistranslated and torn from their proper context. They clearly refer to 'poetry' as measured verse and not to the rhymed prose of the soothsayers. The references in the Koran to the lack of a book and to writing among the pagan Arabs can in no way be construed as referring to poetry. It is clear from the context that they have to do instead with the lack of a holy scripture. On the linguistic side, Arberry points out that there were no metrical epitaphs in Greek before Homer, and that to this very day Arabic epitaphs rarely contain verse. Furthermore, the theory espoused by medieval Arab philologists that the Arabic of the revelation derived from the speech of Quraish has been rejected by recent linguists. Instead, it is now thought that side by side with the tribal dialects there existed a specialized literary language used as a koine for intertribal affairs. This dialect, which was more lofty and dignified than normal speech, was used both by the Prophet and by pre-Islamic poets because it gave greater currency to their ideas. While it contained elements and borrowings from the different tribal dialects, it was essentially an artificial, literary language for use on solemn occasions. It was formerly maintained, furthermore, that the poetic texts called Cpre-Islamic? had originally cited the name of the pagan goddess al-Lat, which had been replaced by its metrical equivalent Allah by later generations of pious transmitters. 1 2

Op. tit., p. 443.

A. J. Arberry, The Seven Odes: The First Chapter in Arabic Literature (London, 1957), pp. 228-254.

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5

More recent investigations have suggested, however, that Allah may in fact have been known to the pre-Islamic Arabs. The verse by cAmr containing place names outside the Arabian peninsula, as Arberry shows, was already rejected as spurious by the medieval commentator Tibrlzi, but even if the latter's opinion is not accepted, the verse may be considered a mere poetic exaggeration. If the poets were the spokesmen of paganism, Margoliouth had asked, then who preserved and transmitted their poems after paganism was blotted out by Islam? Arberry maintains that Islam has always sat lightly upon the Bedouins. After the initial fervor of conversion to the new religion had died down, they soon reverted to their old ways. The art of poetry could not simply have disappeared, otherwise from whom would the early Islamic poets have learned it? The Bedouins, lukewarm Muslims though they may have been, were not so rash as to flaunt the old gods in the face of pious Muslims, and gradually the names of the idols were replaced by that of Allah. Such is the present state of affairs with regard to the problem of the authenticity of pre-Islamic poetry, according to Arberry's exposition. While some of the points raised by Taha Husain and Margoliouth have been answered satisfactorily, others continue to arouse nagging doubts that have left their mark on all subsequent studies. Generally speaking a stalemate has been reached. Those scholars objecting to the Husain-Margoliouth thesis have at times argued their case brilliantly, but they have so far failed to provide an overall theoretical explanation of the nature of pre-Islamic poetry. They have been handicapped by the lack of a suitable critical method with which to solve the problem on an objective basis convincing enough to be acceptable to scholarly consensus. The references to Islamic doctrines found in the ancient poets, who could not possibly have known Islam, appear to have already disturbed medieval Arab scholars. Living as they did in an age of faith, and thus attributing scientific validity to the miraculous, they solved the problem by the 'Methuselaean' expedient of attributing improbably long lives to the poets. In this way the latter could be brought conveniently within the pale of Islam and given ample time to revise and correct their poetry in the light of the new faith and its teachings. Half-legendary biographies of the poets thus developed and it was claimed, for example, that Zuhair met the Prophet when he was a centenarian; that Labid lived over 120 years

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and died a Muslim; that both Harith ibnHilliza and cAmr ibnKulthum lived to the overripe age of 150 years.1 Modern critics, relying on a positivistic approach, have not only rejected these stories as fabulous inventions, but, as we have seen, have occasionally gone to the extreme of rejecting the whole corpus of poetry along with the biographies of the poets. Thus both the medieval and the modern approaches have failed to come to grips with the problem. If the corpus was forged at all, common sense would tell us that it must have been forged in imitation of an earlier model now lost to us, and that this model would necessarily have had to be authentic, since it is inconceivable that a whole literature should have arisen from scratch. Sensing this fact, more moderate scholars such as R. Blachere have suggested with a far greater degree of plausibility that even if our present body of pre-Islamic poetry was all or partially forged, it must reflect, in all probability, the style and ideals of an earlier and authentic model.2 Supposedly false poems must therefore express the spirit of the Jahiliyya in general, even though they may have been composed in later time. Faute de mieux, this is the view generally accepted today by most scholars. But if this is so, how then are we to distinguish the true from the false? To this question criticism has so far provided no reliable answer. Above all, it can be sensed that many of the arguments advanced on either side smack of the study, while the compromise solution is based on probabilities and leaves too many questions unanswered. Too often partisans of either side pick out certain historical facts in support of their arguments, to the exclusion of others that might possibly yield opposite results. Furthermore, these arguments are largely based on external evidence, while those based on internal evidence too often use what are, after all, primarily literary texts, as sources for historical data, without taking into account the inner laws of composition and structure of a poem. Thus a new and different approach is needed; one based on the study and analysis of pre-Islamic poems themselves in the light of current literary theory. It is time for the literary critic to attempt a solution of the problem on the basis of what literary historians have discovered. Without a prior working-hypothesis which is ultimately confirmed by the results of investigation, no study can be carried out successfully. 1 2

Ibid.', Margoliouth, op. cit. Blachere, op. cit., pp. 184-186.

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7 7

This paper will therefore begin on the assumption that pre-Islamic poetry was an oral poetry. It will attempt to prove this on the basis of internal and external evidence, and will apply a contemporary theory of oral literature to it. Finally, it will contrast the orality of pre-Islamic poetry with the literate nature of later, Islamic, poetry. THE PARRY-LORD THEORY OF ORAL POETRY It would hardly be an exaggeration to state that the techniques peculiar to oral poetry and used by oral poets to compose regular verse have come to be understood far more closely during the past thirty years than in all the time that has elapsed since the rise of Aristotelian criticism in Ancient Greece. The discovery of, and advances in, the study of the oral technique of composition are chiefly due to the investigations conducted by Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord. Parry first applied the concept oftheformu/a to the study of Homer and came to the conclusion, today generally accepted, that Homer was an oral poet.1 To corroborate his thesis he then turned to a living tradition of oral epic poetry, namely the one preserved and cultivated by illiterate Yugoslavian singers. It was hoped that new insights applicable to Homeric studies could be discovered by focusing attention on the singer and his method of composition, studied in the laboratory of a still living oral tradition. With the help of Lord, Parry showed that orally composed poetry is clearly distinguishable from written poetry.2 The literate poet in every age and culture has time to elaborate and polish his ideas before setting them down in their definitive form. Furthermore, his reading public is once-removed from him. In contrast, the oral poet composes during the very act of performance, that is to say, he improvises, and he must do so very swiftly indeed if he is to retain the audience that is immediately in front of him. In order to achieve this remarkable feat of producing regular verses extempore and without the use of memory, the oral poet is not entirely lacking in technical resources, for he draws upon a vast repertory of traditional formulas which he has previously mastered and which he strings together at lightning speed 1 Milman Parry, JJEpithete traditionelle dans Homer e (Paris, 1928); Les for mules et la metrique d'Homere (Paris, 1928); "Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making I: Homer and the Homeric Style," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, XLI (1930), pp. 74-147; "Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral VerseMaking II: The Homeric Language as the Language of an Oral Poetry/' HSCP, XLIII (1932), 1-50; The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. Adam Parry (Oxford, 1971). 2 See especially, A. B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass., 1964).

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to produce regular lines of poetry ; he sings in a specialized language of which the smallest separable unit is not the individual word, but the formula, defined by Parry as "a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea." x The stock of formulas in any oral tradition is elaborated during the course of centuries by the slow process of trial and error. Those that prove to be of greater use to the poet in expressing what he needs to say outlast the less useful ones so that slowly, by a process of natural selection, a traditional stock of collectively known formulas is elaborated and adopted. The application of these findings to ancient or medieval literatures has proved to be most illuminating. In a poem the circumstances of whose composition are today lost to us, the repetition of a significant number of formulas or formulaic phrases and constructions is a sure indication that it was orally composed, whereas a general lack of formulaic repetition indicates its written origin. In other words, oral poetry is almost entirely formulaic, whereas written poetry is not. An oral poem has no fixed text until it is written down from a composer's dictation. Before this moment, its 'text' circulates from mouth to mouth, never being retold wrord for word or line for line in exactly the same way. It can be lengthened or abridged; some of its elements may be suppressed and new ones added to it with each performance; it can be entirely reworded. The poem thus exists in a fluid state and is recreated with each new performance. Neither does the oral poet memorize the poems of his more experienced mentors, nor does he even memorize his own songs. Conscious memorization thus plays no part in the technique of the oral poet. Instead, the process of learning how to compose orally entails mastering a repertory of themes, motifs, plots, proper names, and formulas. With the aid of these the apprentice slowly begins to elaborate poems of his own in regular verse. Since this process is a slow one, it often occurs that older and therefore more experienced singers are better artists than young men. But although a good poet may be more skillfull in handling the collective repertory of formulas, the body of material he relies upon is essentially the same as that used by the mediocre poet. The poet thus applies a pre-existent repertory shared with his generation and inherited from the earlier generations that constitute the tradition. 1

Parry, "Studies I," p. 80; Lord, op. tit., p. 30.

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9

In this respect, his language is an artificial, specialized poetic diction rising above dialect differences, and it is intelligible to all the people of the different regions or tribal groupings that make up the cultural group. Since this poetic diction is based on formulas inherited from the past and stabilized by metrical requirements, it tends to be far more conservative than the surrounding spoken dialects with which it coexists. Some formulas will only fit the meter in particular dialect variants, and these will be preserved like fossils in the poetic language long after the dialect they were borrowed from has ceased to be spoken. Formulaic diction thus abounds in archaisms and references that occasionally are not even understood by the poet and his audience. This is a theory of the nature of oral poetry, but it is also the result of long and painstaking research conducted by Parry and Lord among Yugoslavian bards. It has subsequently been applied successfully (and thus confirmed) to other oral literatures, mostly of the Indo-European group,2 but never to Arabic literature. The purpose 1

Jan Vansina, De la tradition orale: Essai de methode historique, Musee Royal de 1'Afrique Centrale: Annales, Serie in 8°, Sciences Humaines, XXXVI (Tervuren, 1961), pp. 43-44. 2 Anglo-Saxon: Donald K. Fry (ed.), The Beowulf Poet: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1968); Francis P. Magoim Jr., "The OralFormulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry," Speculum, XXVIII (1953), pp. 446-467. English: James H. Jones, "Commonplace and Memorization in the Oral Tradition of the English and Scottish Popular Ballads," Journal of American Folklore, LXXIV (1961), pp. 91-113. French: Joseph Duggan, "Formulas in the Couronnement de Louis" Romania, LXXXVII (1966), pp. 315-344; A Concordance of the CHANSON DE ROLAND (Columbus, 1969); Tatiana Fotitch, "The Chanson de Geste in the Light of Recent Investigations of Balkan Epic Poetry," Linguistic and Literary Studies in Honor of Helmut A. Hat^feld, ed. Alessandro S. Grisafulli (Washington D. C, 1964), pp. 149-162; Eugene Vance, "Notes on the Development of Formulaic Language in Romanesque Poetry," Melanges offerts a Rene Cro^et, ed. Pierre Gallais and Yves-Jean Ride (Poitiers, 1966), I, 427-434. Gaelic: James Ross, "Formulaic Composition in Gaelic Oral Literature," Modem Philology, LVII (1959), pp. 1-12. Greek: W. E. McLeod, "Oral Bards at Delphi," Transactions of the American Philological Association, XCII (1961), pp. 317-325; Michael N. Nagler, "Towards a Generative View of the Oral Formula," TAPA, XCVIII (1967), 269-311; James A. Notopoulos, cc The Homeric Hymns as Oral Poetry," American Journal of Philology, LXXXIII (1962), 334-368; Joseph A. Russo, "A Closer Look at Homeric Formulas," TAPA, XCIV (1963), pp. 235-247; "The Structural Formula in Homeric Verse," Yale Classical Studies, XX: Homeric Studies, ed. G. S. Kirk and Adam Parry (New Haven and London, 1966), pp. 219-240. Hebrew: William Whallon, "Formulaic Poetry in the Old Testament," Comparative Literature, XV (1963), pp. 1-14; "Old Testament Poetry and Heroic Epic," Comparative Literature, XVIII (1966), 113-131.

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of this paper is therefore to examine the formula in pre-Islamic poetry with a view to shedding light on the problem of authenticity. EXTERNAL EVIDENCE FOR THE ORAL NATURE OF PRE-ISLAMIC POETRY The idea that the poets of pre-Islamic times were illiterate is not a new one.1 Medieval Arab critics relied on oral transmission by Bedouin informants in writing down and collecting their poems. But although the orality of the transmission they were recording was quite obvious to them, their literate habits of mind blinded them to the significance of this fact, nor were they aware of the techniques of oral composition. They were obsessed with the desire to establish the 'original text' of a given poem, and when different informants came up with differing versions, instead of asking themselves what were the reasons for the discrepancies, they developed a general distrust of informants and often rejected as spurious those poems transmitted by what they considered to be disreputable transmitters.2 In the eighth and ninth centuries A. D., the partisans of the urbanized anti-Arab group known as the Shucubiyya observed that in Hittite: I. McNeill, "The Meter of the Hittite Epic," Journal of Anatolian Studies, XIII (1963), pp. 237-242. Norse: Lars Lonnroth, "Hjalmar's Death-Song and the Delivery of Eddie Poetry," Speculum, XLVI (1971), 1-20. Spanish: J. M. Aguirre, "Epica oral y epica castellana: tradicion creadora y tradicion repetitiva," Romanische Forschungen, LXXX (1968), pp. 13-41; Bruce A. Beatie, "Oral-Traditional Composition in the Spanish Romancero of the Sixteenth Century," Journal of the Folklore Institute, I (1964), pp. 92-113; A. D. Deyermond, "The Singer of Tales and Medieval Spanish Epic," Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, XLII (1965), pp. 1-8; L. P. Harvey, "The Metrical Irregularity of the Cantar de Mio Cid" BHS, XL (1963), pp. 137-143; Ian Michael, "A Comparison of the Use of Epic Epithets in the Poema de Mio Cid and the Libro de Alexandre" BHS, XXXVII (1960), pp. 32-41; Ruth H. Webber, Formulistic Diction in the Spanish Ballad, University of California Publications in Modern Philology, XXXIV: 2 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1951), pp. 175-278. Toda: Murray B. Emeneau, "Oral Poets of South India: The Todas," Journal of American Folklore, LXXI (1958), pp. 312-324; "Style and Meaning in an Oral Literature," Language, LXII (1966), pp. 323-345; Toda Songs (Oxford, 1971). 1 See the Arabic tradition according to which the poet Tarafa and his uncle Mutalammis, also a poet, are depicted as illiterates, in R. A. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (London, 1907), p. 108. There is, of course, no guarantee of the story's authenticity, but it should be noted that the notion that a great pre-Islamic poet was illiterate did not appear unusual to the medieval commentators who recorded the tale. 2 Blachere, op. cit., pp. 118-120.

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public speeches and recitations of poetry the desert Arabs had the uncouth habit of brandishing bows and staffs for emphasis and perhaps as a rhythmic aid.1 This custom was viewed by the Shucubiyya as a sign of backwardness, but it acquires particular significance when compared to the recorded fact that such aids were used by poets, soothsayers, and prophets in pre-Islamic times.2 Rhythmic aids are essential to the composition of oral poetry, and Lord has observed that when the Yugoslavian singer is deprived of his musical accompaniment he loses his beat and begins to produce irregular lines that are half in prose and half in verse.3 In deriding this custom, the Shucubiyya fortunately recorded it for our use. Al-Jahiz (d. A. D. 869), who presumably had witnessed recitations of Arabic poetry by Bedouins, in his defense of the Arabs against the adverse charges made by the Shucubiyya, distinguishes clearly between literate and oral composition: The Persians may have good orators but their eloquence is always the result of long thought, deep study and counsel. It is founded in literary scholarship, so that the successor always builds upon the efforts of his predecessors and the last man always uses the fruit of all previous thinking. It is quite different amongst the Arabs. Their eloquence is spontaneous, extempore, as if the result of deep inspiration. It is produced without effort or deep study, without exercise of reason and without the aid of others. The speaker prepares to speak or recite a verse, on the day of battle, or when watering the beasts; as soon as he concentrates his thoughts on the subject of his speech the concepts and words just flow from his mouth as if by themselves. Nor did the old Arab poets endeavour to preserve their speeches or transmit [them] to their children. The Arabs had no knowledge of writing and their art was inborn and not acquired. To speak well was so natural to everyone that it was not necessary to write down the work performed or to make it the subject of study and tradition; just as the examples of their predecessors were not available to them. Thus only that which a man had involuntarily remembered was ever transmitted; it is but a small part of the great mass which is known only to him who counts the drops in the clouds and knows the number 1 "The staff is used for beating rhythm, spears for fighting, sticks for attack, bows for shooting, but there is no relation between speaking and the staff, and none between an address and a bow." Apud Ignaz Goldziher, "The Shu c ubiyya," Muslim Studies, ed. and trans. S. M. Stern (London, 1967), I, p. 156. Cf. ibid., p. 159. 2 These rhythmic aids were used in particular by al-Harith ibn Hilliza and Nabigha, as well as by the Prophet. See ibid., p. 156, n. 4. Cf. Blachere, op. tit., vol. II, p. 357. 3 Lord, op. tit., pp. 126-127.

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of the grains of sand. Of this any Shu'ubite might convince himself if he but came to the dwelling places of the true Arabs.1

Fortunately for the modern investigator, the oral tradition of pre-Islamic poetry has not died out. Fifteen centuries after the age of Imru 5 al-Qais it is still alive in Arabia and has been studied, if only sporadically, by contemporary scholars. If more field work has not been done, it is partly because modern Orientalism has inherited a curious preconception from the middle ages. Medieval critics had reasoned that only those works in the classical cArabiyya (i.e. the pre-Islamic koine of poetry) were to be considered literature. Folkpoetry not in the cArabiyya was consequently regarded as sub-literary and unworthy of the serious critic's attention. As centuries went by and the poetic koine slowly changed, its divergence from the classical norms became more evident, and it was relegated to oblivion. Although this attitude has continued to persist even in Western circles, there are signs that times are changing. Certainly the following statement by R. B. Serjeant announces a welcome and long overdue change of perspective in modern scholarship: "In the 20th century it is time to take classical, pre-Islamic or early Islamic verse to Arabia for explanation and commentary, and see what results can be obtained from this method of approach, which should, of course, always be used with caution. One would in many cases obtain a more valid explanation of a verse than that provided by an c Abbasid grammarian." 2 The observations made today in Arabia not only confirm those of al-Jahiz, but also illuminate the Arab poet's method of oral composition. Although none of the scholars who have conducted field research seem to have been familiar with the Parry-Lord theory, their numerous observations coincide with it in every respect. The poems so far collected, chiefly from the northern, central and southern regions of Arabia, belong to a tradition generally believed to descend from pre-Islamic poetry.3 This tradition today uses basically the same meters common to ancient poetry, if one makes allowance for the linguistic transformations that have taken place during the 1

Apud Goldzihet, op. tit., pp. 160-161. R. B. Serjeant, South Arabian Poetry: I Prose and Poetry from Pladramawt (London, 1951), p. 3, n. 2. 3 Op. £//., pp. 3, 8, 13, 57; Albert Socin, Diwdn aus Central-Arabien, Abhandlungen der philologisch-historischen Classe der koniglich sachsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaft, XIX (Leipzig, 1901), p. 46. 2

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course of 1500 years.1 The language of the poems is a near-classical koine understood even by the illiterate,2 and descending directly from the ancient poetic koine.3 It exists alongside the regional and tribal dialects, and allowing for slight differences of pronunciation, it is readily comprehensible to audiences throughout Arabia.4 The poets who employ this koine are largely illiterate.5 The act of composing a poem, today as in ancient times, is expressed by the phrase qilt (never katabf] al-qasida (CI uttered [not CI wrote'] a poem').6 The poetry is composed extempore and is rarely written down. Instead, the poet's friends learn fragments of it from him, and when the poems are transcribed this is done from oral dictation.7 In this way the scribe has replaced the ancient ram or 'reciter'.8 The oral poets have no theoretical knowledge of meter. They rely on what observers have described as an instinctive sense of rhythm.9 As in the case of the Yugoslavian poets described by Lord and Parry, when dictation to a scribe slows down the rhythm of recitation, the Arab poet's technique of composition is disturbed; he loses his beat, and metrical irregularities result in his poem. These are usually corrected by the scribe.10 The ideas, sentences, themes, and motifs of this poetry are traditional and belong to a common repertory.11 Modern observers have noted that when poets are accused of 'stealing' each other's verses, as often happens, they have only vague answers to give in their own defense.12 Plagiarism is, of course, a moral concept more appropriate to a written literature than to an oral tradition, which is collective, and has no concept of literary property. The language of the poems contains formulas,13 and the introduction 1

Serjeant, op. tit., pp. 76-85; Socin, op. tit., p. 48. Serjeant, op. tit., p. 8. 3 Loc. tit. 4 Ibid., p. 55. 5 Ibid., p. 8. 6 Alois Musil, The Manners and Customs of the Kwala Bedouins (New York, 1928), 283-284. 7 Blachere, op. tit., p. 87; Musil, op. tit., p. 284; Serjeant, op. tit., p. 57. 8 Blachere, op. tit., pp. 92-93. 9 Serjeant, op. tit., p. 76. 10 Ibid., pp. 12, 76; Harvey, op. tit.; Lord, op. tit., pp. 126-127. 11 Serjeant, ibid., p. 8. 12 Musil, op. tit., p. 284. 13 "Many of the [hunting poems] commence with the phrase 'akfat kalban " Serjeant, op. tit., p. 26. Even a cursory examination of modern Arabian oral poetry reveals the use of many other formulas. For example, a high proportion of odes begin with the expression yd rdkib. 2

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of some of its traditional motifs is at times datable. For example, the coffee-drinking theme has to be fairly modern since the habit was unknown in Arabia during medieval times.1 In the process of transmission the poems are constantly undergoing modifications in vocabulary, number and order of lines.2 No two Bedouins who claim to know the same poem will recite it in exactly the same way. Even the poet will change his own text from one performance to the next and when confronted with earlier and different versions is unable to account for the obvious discrepancies. When this happens, he will appeal to the omniscience of God and declare that all versions are equally good.3 There is thus no 'original text' and a search for one would be a vain endeavour.4 Poets often 'forget' the poems they themselves have composed, thus betraying that they have not relied on memory in the first place.5 In the rather fluid situation of oral performance the poets are often obliged to end their poem rapidly when they sense that their audience is becoming impatient or bored. Because of this the ends of poems tend to be more unstable and to vary more than the beginnings.6 The poets delight in using rare words similar to the gharib of ancient times. Some of these are dialect forms or archaisms fossilized in the poetic koine and not even understood by the poet using them. More scrupulous poets will, however, not hesitate to substitute a familiar for an unfamiliar word.7 The poems are chanted in a monotonous tone to the accompaniment oftherabab, but the different parts of the poem are clearly distinguishable from one another. The first words are blurted out, the next are half swallowed, and the end is uttered in a falsetto.8 Parry and Lord also found that Yugoslavian singers use different melodies for different sections of the poem. The purpose of this is to keep alive the audience's 1

Ibid., p. 13. Cf. G. E. von Grunebaum, "Zur Chronologic der friiharabischen Dichtung," Orientalia, ser. 2, VIII (1939), pp. 328-345. The author attributes the introduction of the formula tabassar khallli hal tara min %aca*inin into pre-Islamic poetry to Muraqqish the younger (b. ca. 500). (See pp. 335-336.) 2 Musil, op. tit., p. 284; Serjeant, op. tit., pp. X, XI; Socin, op. tit., p. 6. 3 Musil, op. tit., 284. 4 Ibid., p. 284. 5 Ibid., p. 284. Cf. the anecdote according to which the pre-Islamic poetess al-Khansa3 was unable to recite a poem she had composed earlier, when asked to do so by the caliph c Umar, but instead, immediately improvised a new poem on the same topic, in Marcel Jousse, Etudes de psychologic Hnguistique: Le style orale rythmique et mnemotechniqm che% les verbomoteurs (Paris, 1925), p. 133. 6 Socin, op. tit., p. 6. 7 Musil, op. tit., p. 284; Serjeant, op. tit., p. X; Socin, op. tit., p. 6. 8 Musil, op. tit., p. 283; Blachere, op. tit., vol. II, p. 357.

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interest. If the poet senses that the audience is getting bored he will break into a new melody to increase the dramatic tension or to announce that the end is drawing near. The melodic dimension of oral poetry helps to explain why so many pre-Islamic poems seem to stop in mid-air rather than coming to a carefully constructed conclusion.1 The text in this case relies heavily on the human voice to impress the hearer. It is composed to be sung and not to be read. INTERNAL EVIDENCE FOR THE ORAL NATURE OF PRE-ISLAMIC POETRY All poetry is based on one form of repetition or another, but the distinctive feature of oral-formulaic poetry, and in this pre-Islamic poetry is no exception, is the high frequency with which certain word combinations, the formulas, are repeated. For the purposes of this study it will be necessary to distinguish between four different categories of repetition: 1. The formula proper. 2. The formulaic system. 3. The structural formula. 4. Conventional vocabulary. To avoid misunderstandings it is emphasized from the outset that the oral-formulaic technique is no rigid, mechanized system reducing the poet to the level of a mere computer, but a highly flexible and delicate instrument worthy of being used by a great artist. The categories listed above merge into one another and can only be defined approximately, and there will always be dubious examples that can be fitted into either of two categories. This classification should therefore be taken only as a convenient means for making certain basic distinctions. 1. The Formula: In the strict sense defined by Parry, the formula includes only verbatim, or nearly verbatim repetitions. Formulas can and do vary in length from two or three words to a whole hemistich or even a whole line: / (afat id-diyaru / cafat id-diyaru

(L, M, 1) (IQ, 144, 45, 10)

1 Lord, op. c//., p. 37. The peculiar way in which Bedouins left their poems in suspense at the end was already noted by medieval Arab critics, who found the habit unsatisfactory and disapproved of it: "There are some Bedouins who end their poems brusquely, leaving the minds of their audience in suspense. Their speech remains unfinished, as though they had never thought about coming to a conclusion." Ibn Rashiq, Kitdb al-^Umda fl sind^at ash-shi^r wa-naqdi-hi^ (Cairo, 1955), I, 160.

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/ li-man talalun /li-man talalun / li-man talalun

(Z, 99, 18, 1) (Z, 91, 15, 5) (L, 123, 39, 1)

// bi-1-jalhataini bi-1-jalhataini

(L, M, 6) (L, 196, 57, 7)

ka-anna-ha // fadanu ka-anna-ha // fadanun

(M, 257, 8) (A, 45, 21, 6)

/ fa-waqaftu fi-ha / fa-waqaftu fi-ha

(M, 827, 6) (A, 45, 21, 6)

dhikra habibin dhikra habibin dhikra habibin

(IQ, M9 1) (IQ, 121, 9, 1) (M, 541, 6)

wa-ahli-ha// wa-ahlu-ha// wa-ahlu-ha // wa-ahlu-ha//

(L, 196, 57, 11) (L, 88, 30, 5) (IQ, 131, 20, 51) (IQ, 152, 52, 19)

/ wa-hana min al-haiyi l-jamlci / wa-hana min al-haiyi l-jamici / wa-qad / wa-qad /wa-qad /wa-qad

aghtadi aghtadi aghtadi aghtadi

wa-t-tairu wa-t-tairu wa-t-tairu wa-t-toiru

fi fi fi fi

(M, 602, 1) (M, 889, 1) wukunati-ha // wukunati-ha // wukunati-ha// wukunati-ha//

(IQ, 196, 2, 1) (IQ, 138, 35, 15) (IQ, 154, 52, 47) (Alq, 104, 1, 19)

/ idha qamata tadauwa'a 1-misku min-huma // / idha qamata tadauwaca 1-misku min-huma //

(IQ, M, 8) (IQ, 124, 17, 7)

/ fa-cada Ida'an baina thaurin wa-na(jatin // /fa- c ada Cida5an baina thaurin wa-na c jatin//

(IQ, M, 61) (Alq, 105, 1, 39)

//ka-mashyil-'adharafil-mula^l-muhaddabi/ // ka-mashyi l-cadhara fl 1-mula'i 1-muhaddabi /

(IQ, 118, 4, 44) (Alq, 105, 1, 32)

/ tahammala ahlu-hu min-hu fa-banu // / tahammala ahlu-ha min-ha fa-banu //

(Z, 99, 18, 2) (Z, 75, 1, 6)

/ zacama 1-humamu wa-lam adhuq-hu anna-hu // / zacama 1-humamu wa-lam adhuq-hu anna-hu //

(N, 10, 23) (N, 10, 24)

/ qifa nabki min dhikra habibin wa-manzili // / qifa nabki min dhikra habibin wa-cirfan //

(IQ, M, 1) (IQ, 160, 65, 1)

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/ wuqufan bi-ha sahbi calaiya matiyya-hum // yaquluna la tahlik asan wa-tajammali / (IQ, M, 5) / wuqufan bi-ha sahbi calaiya matiyya-hum // yaquluna la tahlik asan wa-tajalladi / (T, M, 2) 2. The Formulaic System'. The minor substitutions observed in the last two examples above can be drastically increased, giving rise to formulaic systems.1 These are larger groupings of different formulas related to one another in that they share at least one word in common in the same metrical position. The formulaic system is related to the very important linguistic process of substitution. In everyday spoken language, the number of possible word combinations, although not infinite, is very large indeed and is only restricted by grammatical usage. Oral-formulaic speech is in a sense a second grammar within that of the spoken language. It admits fewer possible word combinations, namely those alone that are useful in producing regular metrical speech. The good oral poet does not, however, merely repeat formulas word for word. If he did so he would soon run out of word combinations to express what he wanted to say. Instead he learns how to substitute words within a formula for others of equivalent rhythmic value. This leads to the creation of new, derivative formulas whose relationship to the original formula, or to others in the system, can often be detected because of the words they share in common and in the same metrical position. It is, of course, not always possible to tell which is the original and which the derivative formula, but in many cases relationships within larger groups are clearly discernible: / y a camru (M, 321, 3) / y a bu'sa (IQ, 121, 9, 1) / ya dhata (M, 886, 1) / y a dara (Z, 99, 18, 1) //bi-d-dari (Z, 97, 17, 2) /la-d-daru (Z, 97, 17, 2) / auda sh-shababa 1-ladhi (M, 226, 3) //inna sh-shababa 1-ladhi (M, 848, 5) / huwa 1-jawadu 1-ladh! (Z, 97, 17, 13) / lau la 1-humamu 1-ladhi (N, 16, 14, 9) // hatta tulaql 1-ladh! (M, 19, 25) // akhna al-Qais's text is formulaic (see Chart I). The majority of the formulas found were either word for word repetitions or formulaic systems. 3. The first ten lines of the Mifallaqa of Labld were then compared with 1157 lines in kdmil, comprising all kdmil poems in Labld's Dlwdn^ in those of six other major pre-Islamic poets (Nabigha, ( Antara, cAlqama, Tarafa, Zuhair, and Imru' al-Qais), and in the wide selection of minor poets from the same period included in the Mufaddaliyjdt. It was discovered that at least 82.12% of Labld's text is formulaic, including a predominance of formulas and formulaic systems (see Chart II). 4. The first ten lines of poem no. 18 by Zuhair in «^r were compared with an 800 line referent in the same meter, including all wdfir poems in Zuhair's Diwdn, in those of Labld, Nabigha, (Antara, Tarafa, c Alqama, and Imru 5 al-Qais, and in the poets included in the Mufaddaliyjdt. Paradoxically, Zuhair, who is depicted by the Arab tradition as having had the habit of composing for four months, asking the advice of other poets for four months, and finally of reciting a single qasida publicly at the end of a year,2 appeared to be 92.59% formulaic, the highest percentage obtained (see Chart III). 5. The first ten lines of poem no. 5 by Nabigha in basit were finally compared with 646 lines in the same meter, comprising all basit 1

For these figures, see Mary Catherine Bateson, Structural Continuity in Poetry: A Linguistic Study of Five Pre-Islamic Arabic Odes (Paris and the Hague, 1970), p. 30. 2 Nicholson, op. cit.y 119.

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poems in Nabigha's Dman, in those of Labid, cAntara, Zuhair, c Alqama, and Imru5 al-Qais (Tarafa had no poems in bastt}9 as well as in the Mufaddaliyjdt poets. The sample by Nabigha proved to be 85.62% formulaic (see Chart IV). It has often been argued against the oral-formulaic theory that formulas are in fact nothing more than those word combinations that are imposed upon the poet by the rigid requirements of meter; in other words, that meter determines the shape of the formulas and not vice-versa. If this were true, then the frequency with which formulas occur in literate and oral texts would be about equal. On the other hand, if we accept the theory that the oral poet uses pre-existent formulas to create meter, whereas the literate poet uses individual words which he then fits into a pre-existent metrical scheme, then we can expect to find a higher formulaic frequency among oral poets than among their literate colleagues. This fact has been established in the case of other literatures. The best way to prove it is to select a poet, or a group of poets, with regard to whose literacy there is no doubt whatsoever, and to determine whether he or they use formulas with as great a frequency as do oral poets. To provide this further check on the validity of our thesis about pre-Islamic poetry, the following steps were therefore taken: 6. The formulas identified in Imru5 al-Qais's M^allaqa, 11. 1-10, by means of 2. above were checked against the work of other Arabic poets to determine the extent to which they constituted a collective formulaic repertory. It was found that these formulas constitute an average of 33.24% of the total text in 574 lines of referent selected at random from other taml poems by pre-Islamic poets (Nabigha, c Antara, Tarafa, Zuhair, Labid, and Imru5 al-Qais),1 but only 9.22% of the text in 348 lines of referent randomly selected from tawil poems by literate poets who lived after the coming of Islam (Abu Nuwas, Mutanabbl, Ibn Zaidun, al-Barudl).2 It was also observed that the coincidences with the modern poets were almost exclusively on the level of structural formulas, and that almost no word for word 1 Referent used: (1) Nabigha: Ahlwardt, Divans, nos. 1, 15, 17. (2) "Antara: Ibid., nos. 4, 7, 8, 9, 15, 24, 26. (3) Tarafa: Ibid., no. 4. (4) Zuhair: Ibid., no. 16. (5) Imru 3 al-Qais: Ibid., nos. 4, 10, 20. (6) Labid, Divan, nos. 4, 18, 44. 2 Referent used: (1) Abu Nuwas, Diwan, ed. Dar Sadir (Beirut, 1962), pp. 21, 28, 200, 242, 244. (2) Mutanabbl, Diwan, ed. R. Dieterici (Berlin, 1861), pp. 660, 672, 284, 327. (3) Ibn Zaidun, Diwan wa-Rasa*il, ed. CAH cAbd al-cA?Im (Cairo, 1957), pp. 261, 152, 158. (4) Al-Barudl: A. J. Ar berry, Arabic Poetry: A Primer for Students (Cambridge, 1965), no. 28.

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formulas and very few formulaic systems found in pre-Islamic poetry occur in the modern poets. 7. Step 6 was repeated with the formulas in kdmil identified in Labid's Mu^allaqa, 11. 1-10, by means of 3. above. It was discovered that these formulas constitute an average of 30.46% of the total text in 325 lines of referent selected at random from other kdmil poems by pre-Islamic poets (Nabigha, cAntara, Tarafa, Zuhair, Imm' al-Qais, Labid; (Alqama was omitted because the small number of lines in kdmil by him made statistical results negligible),1 but again only 9.88% of the text in 299 lines selected from kdmil poems by literate poets (Abu Nuwas, Mutanabbl, Ibn Zaidun, Shauql).2 Again it was found that the literate poets seem to have inherited mainly structural formulas from the pre-Islamic tradition. Thus the statistics for both tawll and kdmil were found to correspond rather closely to one another. The formulaic content of both averages to at least 85.99% of identified formulas in the two samples studied, and these formulas in turn constitute a combined average of about 31.32% of the total work of other pre-Islamic poets sampled, but only 9.64% of the total work of Islamic poets studied. Furthermore, with remarkable consistency, the percentages varied only slightly from poet to poet within each of the two groups (see charts V, VI). The literate poets chosen are representative of at least three different schools ('modern' \muhdath], neoclassical, and contemporary) and styles ranging chronologically from the eighth to the twentieth centuries A.D., and geographically from Baghdad to Cordoba. Clearly then, this consistent difference between pre-Islamic and modern poetry responds not to the stylistic peculiarities of different schools, but to something much deeper, namely to two radically different techniques of composition: the oral-formulaic as opposed to the literate. CONCLUSION AND FURTHER PROBLEMS The combined formulaic average of all the four samples studied is 87.54%, and this figure is valid for 95.38% of all pre-Islamic poetry. 1 Referent used: (1) Nabigha: Ahlwardt, Divans, nos. 7, 10. (2) c Antara: Ibid., nos. 2, 21. (3) Tarafa: Ibid., nos. 1, 8, 17. (4) Zuhair: Ibid., no. 4. (5) Imru> al-Qais: Ibid., nos. 45, 46, 59. (6) Labid, Diwdn, no. 51. 2 Referent used: (1) Abu Nuwas, op. tit., pp. 25, 64, 177, 184, 196. (2) Mutanabbl, op. tit., pp. 191, 594, 732. (3) Ibn Zaidun, op. tit., pp. 184, 343. (4) Shauql: Arberry, op. tit., no. 29.

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37

Taking only the two most commonly used meters, taml and kdmil^ the average is 85.99%, and this is valid for 67.94% of the poetry. The formulas identified in these two meters constitute an average of about 31.32% of the total referent of other pre-Islamic poets, but only 9.64% of the referent of modern, literate poets. A pre-Islamic poet therefore uses slightly over three times as many formulas as a modern poet; i.e., if it were to be assumed that a pre-Islamic poet's work is actually 100% formulaic (although theoretically correct, this assumption cannot be proved owing to the lack of a sufficiently large referent), this would mean that a modern poet's total use of formulaic constructions is somewhat less than 33.33%. To this should be added the important fact that modern poets use significantly less verbatim formulas and formulaic systems than do pre-Islamic poets. Had only these been included in the statistics, the figures would have been proportionately reduced. The three-to-one ratio does, however, agree with findings in other literatures. The formulas used by the pre-Islamic poet belong to a traditional and collective repertory; they fit within larger systems common to all pre-Islamic poets in general, but this is not the case for literate poets. This proves that the pre-Islamic poet worked with an artistic medium based on the formula rather than the individual word. This in turn is a characteristic feature of traditional, oral poetry. The relative lack of individual stylistic differentiation between one pre-Islamic poet and another, in contrast to the unmistakably individual style of a Mutanabbl or an Abu Nuwas, is thus explained by the oralformulaic method of composition. It follows that pre-Islamic poets, who were oral-formulaic artists, composed during the course of improvisation rather than relying upon memory. In contrast, modern poets, being literate, thought out their poems, perhaps even pen in hand, applying the rules of grammar, prosody, and rhetoric in order to invent their own individual stylistic figures (badl^ which differed from poet to poet. Their poems rely over three times as much on their own innovations in style as do those of pre-Islamic poets. Whereas pre-Islamic poets use one another's formulas freely and with a typically oral disregard for the concept of literary property, critics in later times introduce the idea of plagiarism, and literate poets come to be severely judged by its standards. The structural formulas literate poets use are to be explained as the result of conscious or unconscious imitation of their literary heritage within an unusually conservative tradition, but it is

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an artificial usage; it is based on deliberate forethought, on conscious imitation, or on memory, and not on oral-formulaic improvisation. Medieval Arab literary critics insisted that the hallmark of originality in the literate poet was his ability to rephrase traditional literary motifs inherited from pre-Islamic poetry. The literate poet was expected to treat only the ancient themes, preserving the outward form of the qaslda in all its rigidity, but he was not allowed to say the same things in the same words as his predecessors, since this was considered plagiarism.1 Therefore the literate poet learned to create his own personal linguistic patterns and to rely on these rather than on the traditional formulaic repertory used by pre-Islamic poets. Style ceased to be collective, and became individual. Abu Tammam and Mutanabbl were both accused of having invented some of the most sublime lines in Arabic poetry along with some of the most grossly unpoetic ones. For example, in one instance Mutanabbl ended a panegyric with the following exclamation: / lau lam takun min dha 1-wara 1-ladh min-ka hu // c aqimat bi-maulidi nasli-hd hauwa'u / If you had not been of this human kind, which is rather of you, Eve would have been barren of the birth of her offspring.2 The line is in kdmil^ yet it sounds harsh and abrupt, particularly the first hemistich. Upon closer examination that hemistich proves to contain none of the formulas identified in pre-Islamic poetry. Only the second hemistich contains one single structural formula found also in Labld's Mu^allaqa (italicized), and this helps to make the line somewhat smoother toward the end. The abruptness, however, is not the result of inferior workmanship, but rather, it is a deliberate attention-getting device appropriate to the grand finale of a panegyric. Yet the old poetic technique, based on tried and true formulas that had over the centuries proven aesthetically pleasing to the Arab ear (for which very reason they survived in the collective tradition), acted as a safeguard for the poet against the pitfalls of innovative 1 G. E. von Grunebaum, "The Concept of Plagiarism in Arabic Theory," Journal of Near Eastern Studies, III (1944), pp. 234-253. For a literate poet's defense against the accusation of plagiarism see James T. Monroe, Risdlat at-Tawdbi^ wa-^-^awabi*- (^Treatise of Familiar Spirits and Demons*} by Abu ^Amir ibn Shuhaid al-AshjaH al-Andalusi: Introduction, Translation, and Notes, University of California Publications: Near Eastern Studies, XV (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971). 2 Mutanabbl, op. tit., p. 201. Trans, by A. J. Arberry, Poems of al-Mutanabbl (Cambridge, 1967), p. 30.

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failure. When the oral technique was abandoned with the advent of writing and more reliance was placed on personal inventiveness, an unevenness in the poetic style inevitably resulted. Since modern poets could not attain the high degree of formulaic diction found in pre-Islamic poetry, and in fact dislocated the sound of poetic rhythms for deliberate literary effects, by introducing their own turns of phrase, it necessarily follows that pre-Islamic poetry, on the basis of internal evidence, could not have been forged by literate authors in Islamic times, but that it is authentic, traditional, oral-formulaic poetry. Oral-formulaic poetry in other literatures is known to have had no fixed texts.1 Each poet, each reciter recreates and rephrases a given poem with each performance of it. As centuries go by, and cultural conditions change, a poem may undergo considerable modification, though always retaining a core of identity, based in the case of epic poetry on the plot. The pagan poetry of the Anglo-Saxons uses the same formulaic technique as does Christian Anglo-Saxon poetry of later times, but Christianity censored those references to pagan customs that were felt to be essentially incompatible with Christian society, while tolerating other, more innocuous ones. The pagan tale of Beowulf thus contains Christian themes and elements.2 Likewise, Spanish ballads with Christian themes, preserved today by Moroccan Jews, exhibit a process of 'de-Christianization'.3 In the Iliad, archaic Mycenaean elements, such as the shield of Ajax, are found consorting anachronistically with elements from later, Horn eric times.4 This typical feature of oral poetry, namely the ease with which it absorbs the new while never ridding itself entirely of the old, explains why so many pre-Islamic poems refer to and swear by Allah; why Koranic quotations appear in what are in other respects typically ancient poems. The 1

See the works cited on p. 9, n. 2, for specific literatures. Francis P. Magoun Jr., op. cit. 3 Sarrtuel G. Armistead and Joseph Silverman, "Christian Elements and De-Christianization in the Sephardic Romancero" Collected Studies in Honor of America Castro's 80th Year, ed. M. P. Hornik (Oxford, 1965), pp. 21-38. A case of 'de-Islamization' in Arabic poetry which is rather similar to the Spanish phenomenon occurs when the Hudhaill poet Abu Khirash, in order to taunt the Prophet and the novel Muslim doctrines, deliberately transforms the Islamic formula wa-l-lahu a'-lamu ('God knows best') into wa-l-qaumu a^lamu ('the tribal warriors know best'). See E. Braunlich, "Versuch einer literargeschichtlichen Betrachtungsweise altarabischer Poesien," Der Islam, XXIV (1937), p. 209. 4 Denys Page, History and the Homeric ILIAD (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1959), pp. 232-238. 2

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pre-Islamic poems gradually absorbed Islamic elements during a long process of constant elaboration. They were in a sense 'depaganized'. The Parry-Lord theory of oral-formulaic poetry has until now been applied largely to studies of the epic, that is to say, to relatively long poems of a narrative character, containing a basic story and a plot around which the different themes common to a tradition are organized. In this case the use of the oral-formulaic technique is essential to the poet because the nature of epic compositions is such that they are usually far too long to memorize. In contrast, pre-Islamic poems are lyrical-descriptive; they tell no story, and are relatively short compositions, ranging from a few to a hundred or more lines. Like European ballads and the Toda songs of India, the Arabic poems are short enough to be committed to memory, and it is therefore reasonable to suppose that memory may have played a greater role in their transmission than in that of epic poetry, as the tradition of the ram would seem to indicate. In the case of pre-Islamic poetry it is therefore necessary to make a modification of the Parry-Lord theory. As it has been proved, the high formulaic content of the poems shows beyond a doubt that they were orally composed. On the other hand, the different recensions of individual poems made by Arab philologists, although they contain numerous variant readings for individual words, and although specific lines are often placed in a different order from version to version, are by no means entirely recast or retold in a new sequence of formulas as occurs, in the epic. This feature of pre-Islamic poetry points to a far greater textual stability than is the case with the epic. This stability also occurs according to Lord, in the case of shorter epic poems when they are frequently repeated or resung by a bard. The same is true of the Spanish ballad. In this case the composer eventually ends up by memorizing his poem, but it is necessary to stress that the process of memorization is unconscious and that it occurs only after oral composition of the normal, improvised type. Oral improvisation and memory, in the case of short poems, are therefore not two mutually exclusive opposites, but are connected by the unconscious process whereby a poem gradually becomes stabilized in the mind of the composer. Whether there is memorization or not, it should be stressed that oral-formulaic composition is the normal, indeed the only form of composition available to the illiterate poet, and that it is employed despite differences of form or genre. In medieval Spanish

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poetry it may be observed, for example, that not only the epic, but also the ballad and the lyric are highly formulaic, and that poets frequently use the same formulas in different meters or genres. But when the professional and creative class of jongleurs who knew the art of improvisation died out, the epic died out with them, and only the ballad and the lyric survived because these shorter compositions could be retained in the memories of non-professional performers. In Arabic literature too, the tradition of the ram points in the direction of memorization; of a rhapsodic stage following a truly creative aoidic one, although it is not advisable to stress this point too much, since it is known that rams were not merely memorizers of the poetry they heard from their mentors, but that the relationship was also that of an apprentice poet. Thus Ka c b ibn Zuhair, son and ram of Zuhair ibn Abi Sulma, later became a poet in his own right. One can only suppose that the period of apprenticeship would allow the aspiring poet to acquire the formulaic repertory and technique with which to compose poems of his own. On the basis of internal evidence it can be concluded that preIslamic poetry should on the whole be viewed as authentic as long as it is clearly understood that what has been preserved of it is probably not an exact recording of what a great poet once said, but a fairly close picture of it, distorted by the vicissitudes of an oral transmission in which both memorization and cde-paganization' were operative and further complicated by a tradition of scribal correction. The variants of a given poem should thus be studied by focusing on the history of the poem's transmission and recensions, as recorded by the Arabic tradition. If it is evident that variants in a text are due to different recensions recorded from different informants, then, barring other factors, these variants should all be accepted as valid, since the search for an exact "original text' is a hopeless pursuit in the case of oral poetry. Further studies should be able to provide us with a complete concordance of pre-Islamic formulas, including those used by all poets from this period. Thereafter, it will become necessary to compile individual concordances of the formulaic repertory found in each poet. By comparison of the individual concordances with the general, those formulas most favored by a poet can be distinguished. This in turn can allow us to characterize individual stylistic features in pre-Islamic poetry with some degree of objectivity, and ultimately to distinguish chronological and literary relationships between individuals and schools.

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A third stage of investigation would be to subject poems doubtful of attribution or authenticity to formulaic analysis by comparing them with the general and individual concordances. If a dubious poem shares few formulas in common with those most used by the poet to whom it is attributed, it can be accepted as a likely assumption that it was not composed by him. If its formulaic content turns out to be low, it can further be assumed that it was forged by a literate poet in Islamic times. In the opposite case it can be assumed that it is authentic, and a careful study may even reveal its authorship or the school to which it belongs. This method of analysis has the advantage over those used until now in that it provides a greater measure of scientific objectivity based on internal evidence. The results of such analysis should, of course, always be compared with the facts recorded about the poem by the Arabic philological tradition. For students of Arabic literature, a clearer understanding of how pre-Islamic poetry was composed is hardly irrelevant, since it leads directly to a clearer understanding of its use of themes, motifs, and of the individual poem's literary structure. When Ibn Qutaiba (d. A.D. 889) affirms that a qasida should have three parts (nasib, rahil, and the subject proper), and that the poet should furthermore maintain a proper balance between each part and the next,1 he is echoing ideas derived possibly and indirectly from the principles of Greek rhetoric.2 In fact, however, pre-Islamic poetry does not always observe this rather convenient rule. Many poems have no naslb\ others have no rahll\ the proportion between one theme and the next varies drastically and inconsistently from poem to poem. Even the order is irregular: the Mtfallaqa of Labid introduces nasib elements after the rahil, where they would be out of place according to Ibn Qutaiba's principles, although closer observation reveals that they constitute a final link in a tightly knit ring structure containing two long and digressive extended metaphors typical of oral poetry, 1

Ibn Qutaiba, Muqaddima li-kitdb ash-shi^r iva-sh-shifard*^ ed. and French trans. Gaudefroy-Demombynes (Paris, 1947), p. 14. 2 See Aristotle, Rhetoric, III: 13-14. Poetiis, VIII: 15-36. For the development of this concept in Greek criticism, see G. M. A. Grube, The Greek and Roman Critics (Toronto, 1965). For Arabic, see Amjad Trabulsi, op. cit.\ Wolfhart Heinrichs, Arabische Dichtung und Griechische Poetik: Hd^im al-Qartdjanms Grundlegung der Poetik mit Hilfe Aristotelische Begriffe^ Beiruter Texte und Studien, VIII, Orient-Institut der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft (Beirut, 1969).

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and very appropriate in this instance to the poet's purpose.1 The Mu^allaqa of Imru* al-Qais also structures the nasib in ring form.2 What pre-Islamic poetry really exhibits, therefore, is a rather flexible ordering of themes based entirely on the nature and circumstances of oral composition. The poet, using a fixed traditional repertory of themes, may alter, lengthen, shorten, transpose, or omit themes in response to the audience's interest during the highly unpredictable situation of performance. Thus the criteria used by modern scholarship in reorganizing the sequence of lines in pre-Islamic poems by applying literate standards of logic to them, needs to be revised. The features noted above, all of which are typical of oral poetry in general, are not shared with learned, written poetry. The techniques of composition and delivery thus determine the structure and content of the poem in a larger sense; in this instance, the formulaic technique is closely related to the mode of thematic development. Only by grasping this basic principle of literary criticism is it possible to 1 Ring-composition is a typical feature of oral poetry. See Cedric H. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1958) for its use in Homer. The technique of the extended, digressive metaphor, also a peculiarly oral form of literary embellishment, is carefully analysed by Phillip Damon, Modes of Analogy in Ancient and Medieval Verse, especially chap. 1 "Homer's Similes and the Uses of Irrelevance," University of California Publications in Classical Philology, XV (Berkeley and Los Angeles), p. 269, where he cites several preIslamic examples, including Labid. Cf. Blachere, op. «'/., II, p.442. The ring-composition in Labld's Mifallaqa is introduced in the nasib (1. 16 [references are to Arberry, The Seven Odes, pp. 142-145]) with the mention of the poet's beloved, the lady Nawar. The poet then decides to break with her (1. 20) and to ride away on his camel (1. 22). This introduces the rahil. The camel, in an extraordinarily complex extended metaphor of thirty-two lines, is compared first to a wild ass (11. 25-35), and then to a wild cow (11. 36-52). The poet finally returns to the camel (11. 53-54), and this leads him directly back to his thoughts about Nawar (11. 55-57). The thematic progression could thus be charted as follows: Nawar-camel-(wild ass-wild cow)-camel-Nawar 1 2 3 3 2 1 2 The ring-composition in the nasib of Imru 3 al-Qais's Mi^allaqa takes the form of a series of frivolous love affairs with several different women, all of whom are contrasted with an unnamed beloved (habib] to whom the poet swears eternal love. The tension is therefore between true love and false. The poet begins by invoking this true bdbib (11. 1-6) whom he cannot forget. Then he recalls adventures with Umm al-Huwairith and Umm ar-Rabab (11. 7-9), a party of maidens in Juljul (11. 10-12), Unaiza (11. 13-15), a pregnant woman (11. 16-17), Fatima (It. 18-22), a veiled lady (11. 23-41), and finally he returns to his true habib exclaiming that he cannot forget her, and thus completes the cycle (1. 42);

, ... (Umm al-Huwairith) (Maids of) T T . (Pregnant) ^_ . ( Veiled) , ^M-jUmm ar-Rababj-j Juljul j'Unaiza-j woman (-Fat.ma-} kdy ^-h 1

2

3

4

4

3

2

1

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avoid the two opposite and equally unsophisticated extremes of glorifying pre-Islamic poetry for sentimental reasons as a supreme classical model, or deprecating it as a dull, repetitive, and unoriginal body of literature (both points of view have their schools, adherents, and specialized bibliographies). An understanding of the method of composition and consequently of the structure of pre-Islamic poetry is therefore a positive and basic step toward the ultimate goal of aesthetic appreciation. A poetics derived from the actual oral practice of pre-Islamic poets will reveal more about their poetry than will a literary theory deriving from the principles of literate Greek rhetoricians as these were understood by literate cAbbasid critics, since formal rhetoric was a science totally foreign to the pre-Islamic poets. This is, of course, not to say that they lacked a highly developed and subtle rhetorical technique, but rather that their technique was intuitive; that it was formulaic, and therefore far more appropriate to the oral environment in which they composed than any school-learned rhetoric could have been. SUPPORTING EVIDENCE Only a representative selection of formulaic examples is provided in the following charts. Formulas and formulaic systems are underlined with a solid bar; structural formulas and conventional vocabulary, with a broken bar.

Chart I (Imru> al-Qais, Mifallaqa, 11. 1-10) w

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

-L

| w

J-

— — | w _L — |

w

—

w

qifa nabki min dhikra habibin wa-manzili bi-siqti 1-liwa baina d-dakhuli fa-haumali fa-tudiha fa-1-miqrati lam ya c fu rasmu-ha li-ma nasajat-ha min janubin wa-sham'ali tara bacara 1-ar'ami f! carasati-ha wa-qi'ani-ha ka-anna-hu habbu fulfuli ka-annl ghadata 1-baini yauma tahammalu lada samurati 1-haiyi naqifu hanzali wuqufan bi-ha sahbl calaiya matiyya-hum yaquluna la tahlik asan wa-tajammali wa-inna shifa'i cabratun muharaqatun fa-hal cinda rasmin darisin min mucauwali ka-da'bi-ka min ummi 1-huwairithi qabla-ha wa-jarati-ha ummi r-rababi bi-ma5sali

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45 45

8 idha qamata tadauwaca 1-misku min-huma nasima s-saba ja'at bi-raiya 1-qaranfuli 9 fa-fadat dumucu l-caini min-nl sababatan c ala n-nahri hatta balla dam'iya mihmall 10 ala rubba yaumin la-ka mln-hunna salihin wa-la-siyyama yaumin bi-darati juljuli la / qifa nabki min dhikra habibin wa-cirfan // (IQ, 160, 65,1); /qifi la yakun (T, 66, 10, 2); /qifi wa-ddici-ni (T, 66, 10, 1); / tacazzaita can dhikra suhaiyata (A, 36, 7, 3); /min dhikri laila (IQ, 155, 55, 3); /min dhikri salma (Alq, 111, 13, 3);//dhikra habibin (IQ, 121, 9, 1); li-dhikra habibin (M, 541, 6); habibin bi-hi dda c at// (IQ, 129, 20, 15); habiba l-muwaddaca / (M, 537, 27); fi kulli manzilin// (N, 22, 20, 22); fi kulli manzilin// (M, 745, 9); wa-manzilin// (M, 494, 6). \b bi-mun c araji 1-liwa//(M, 23, 6); fa-1-liwa//(M, 422, 3); fa-1-liwa (Z, 83, 6, 9); baina 1-liwa fa-sarimatin//(IQ, 124, 17, 11); bi-sitari fa-ghurrabi / (Alq, 103, 1, 2); cala s-sitari fa-yadhbuli / (IQ, M, 68); baina yadhbulin fa-riqani / (IQ, 160, 64, 1); baina l-carudi wa-kathcama / (L, 197, 57, 20); baina r-rijami wa-wasitin / (L, 112, 33, 3); baina s-sitari fa-azlama / (M, 105, 8); //min haumalin (M, 442, 2). 2a II sacdanu tudiha (N, 5, 7, 28); / fa-mujtama c u 1-ashraji ghaiyara rasmu-ha // (N, 18, 17, 2); //fa-^arimatin fa-burqati l-ciyarati / (IQ, 121, 10, 1); fa-ghaulin fa-hillitin (IQ, 121, 10, 2); / fa-waqfin fa-sulliyin (L, 181, 52, 2); / fa-raqdun fasaratun (Z, 91, 15, 6); //wa-rasmin cafat (IQ, 160, 65, 1); curriya rasmu-ha// (L, Af, 2); curriyat wa-ta 3 abbadat//(L, 120, 38, 64); cahdi-hi (L, 114, 38, 17); amra-hu // (L, 131, 44, 4); amri-him // (L, 132, 44, 8). 3a /tara bacara l-arDami fi carasati-ha // wa-qicani-ha ka-anna-hu habbu fulfuli / (IQ, 204, 26, 3); / tara 1-fa'ra can mustarghibi 1-qadri Ia3ihan // (Alq, 105, 1, 35); /tara 1-fa'ra fi musta c kidi 1-ardi lahiban// (IQ, 118, 4, 49); / bi-ha l-cinu wa-1ar5amu (Z, M, 3); / min al-bidi ka-1-ar'ami (IQ, 159, 63, 14); / min al-bidi ka-1ar'ami (IQ, 160, 64, 7); // cala carasati d-dari (N, 23, 21, 3); can hajarati-ha // (Alq, 110, 10, 2); fi hajarati-hi // (IQ, 150, 50, 1); an qudhufati-hi // (IQ, 131, 20, 60;) can-qudhufati-hi // (N, 12, 8, 15); fi wukunati-ha // (IQ, 196, 2, 1). 3b fi qicani jasin (T, 69, 13, 2); // c ala lahibin ka-anna-hu zahru burjudi / (T, AT, 12). 4a I ka-anni ghadata 1-baini lamma tahammalu // lada samurati 1-haiyi naqifu hanzali//(IQ, 204, 26, 4); /ka-anni wa-rahli (IQ, 137, 34, 9); /ka-anni warahli (IQ, 141, 40, 11); ka-anna sarata-hu (IQ, 137, 34, 15); / ka-anna sarata-hu (IQ, Af, 56); / fa-fi3na ghadata 1-ghibbi (T, 66, 9, 9); / ka-anni shadadtu r-rahla hina tashadhdharat (N, 23, 21, 9); lamma tahammalu//(L, 117, 38, 40); idh tahammalu // (L, 117, 38, 37). 4b /lada marbati 1-afrasi (M, 694, 5); / lada s-sarhati l-cashsha3i (M, 613, 12); / yazallu nisa3u 1-haiyi (T, 71, 16, 3); / wa-zalla nisa'u 1-haiyi (M, 318, 13); / wakanat fatatu 1-haiyi (M, 349, 4); / wa-nada munadi 1-haiyi (M, 21, 2); / wa-rahat liqahu-1-haiyi (M, 548, 12); / cala rabidhatin (M, 598, 4); //la-ha rabidhatun (M, 338, 12); / min al-waridati 1-ma'i (N, 15, 13, 5); salayatu hanzali (IQ, M, 56). 5a I wuqufan bi-ha sahbi calaiya matiyya-hum // yaquluna la tahlik asan wa-tajalladi / (T, M, 2); / waqaftu bi-rabci d-dari (N, 23, 21, 2); / waqaftu bi-ha (Z, Af, 4); //hifazan cala caurati-hi (T, A/, 99); saburan cala l-cillati (Alq, 105, 1, 30); //sabuqin ila 1-ghayati (Z, 80, 3, 37); li-l-cadhara matiyyati//(IQ, 146, 48, 9); tu c ra matiyyatun // (N, 20, 18, 3); matiyyati (M, 318, 16).

46

EARLY ISLAMIC POETRY AND POETICS 46

ORAL COMPOSITION IN PRE-ISLAMIC POETRY

5b II yufadduna-hu (IQ, 119, 4, 66); / jadiruna (M, 477, 13); / yahuzzuna (M, 177, 54); / yahuzzuna (M, 109, 16); / wa-abligh wa-la tatruk (IQ, 131, 21, 2); / fa-qultu la-hu la tabki caina-ka (IQ, 130, 20, 44); //tafaqadtum la tuqdimuna (M, 113, 25); / bi-waddi-ki ma qumi (M, 476, 11). 6a //wa-kana shifa'an (Alq, 110, 10, 5); // shifa3! damun (L, 212, 62, 5); /ka-anna dima'a (IQ, 142, 40, 37); //yaraina dima'a (L, 116, 38, 29); / ra'aitu dima'an (M, 615, 5); cabratun fa-radadtu-ha / (N, 18, 17, 7). 6b I fa-hal ana mashin (IQ, 130, 20, 55); / wa-hal ana laqin (IQ, 131, 20, 55); / wa-hal huwa ilia (L, 119, 38, 60); cabisin mutaghaddabi / (L, 26, 4, 3); caidhin mutahauwidi / (Z, 81, 3, 40); caridi 1-mutawaqqidi (A, 37, 7, 4); caridin mutawaqqidi / (Z, 81, 3, 41). la cala ummi jundubi // (IQ, 116, 4, 1); lada ummi jundubi / (IQ, 116, 4, 2); ummi taulabi / (IQ, 119, 4, 69); hushashatin nafsihi // (IQ, 154, 52, 59); mithlu l-cuwairi wa-rahti-hi // (IQ, 161, 66, 2); ummu s-sabiyaini (M, 339, 17). Ib / a jarata-na inna (IQ, 196, 3, 2); / a jarata-na inna (IQ, 196, 3, 1); // lijarati-ha (M, 201, 7); /fa-ya jarati (M, 200, 5); //hijaratu ghailin warisatun bituhlubi/ (IQ, 118,4,32). Sa I idha qamata tadauwaca 1-misku min-huma//(IQ, 124, 17, 7); / idha jahadat (N, 23, 21, 9); /idha ghaba (Alq, 106, 2, 4); /idha kana (L, 120, 38, 68); /idha nala (IQ, 129, 20, 17);/idharaba (IQ, 137, 34, 11); min al-miski adhfara / (IQ, 129, 20, 13); ka-1-miski rlhu-ha // (M, 495, 8); min-humu // (N, 17, 15, 6); yahduru d-dam c u min-huma // (Alq, 108, 4, 2); ra'su-hu qad tadauwaca / (M, 532, 14). Sb /wa-rihu sanan (IQ, 129, 20, 13); rihu s-saba (IQ, 141, 40, 13); rlhu s-saba (IQ, 115, 2, 3); raiya 1-mukhalkhali (IQ, M, 28). 9a / fa-ja'at qatufa 1-mashyi (IQ, 139, 38, 9); / wa-jalat cadhara 1-haiyi (T, 66, 9, 7); //fa-qalat yamma 1-lahi (N, 17, 15, 17); / fa-sahhat dumu c i (IQ, 160, 65, 4); // amama jumu c i n-nasi (M, 112, 23); /wa-qala jami c u n-nasi (M, 603, 7); / fa- c addi qarida sh-shicri (M, 180, 63); // fa- inna ghazlra sh-shicri (M, 180, 63); / husamin ka-launi 1-milhi (M, 205, 25); / husamun khafiyyu 1-jarsi (M, 176, 49); / ala abligh dhubyana canm risalatan // (N, 17, 15, 1); / fa-man mublighu 1-ahlafi c anm risalatan // (Z, M9 25); risalatan // (T, 64, 6, 6) risalatan // (T, 68^ 12,' 6); sababatan// (IQ, M, 38); sababatan (M, 135, 20); saqa na c amatin// (IQ, 117, 4, 27); saqa na c amatan // (IQ, M, 54); saqa na c amatan// (IQ, 138, 35, 16). 9b II cala n-nahri min-ha mustahillun wa-damicu (N, 18, 17, 7);/ka-anna dima'a 1-hadiyati bi-nahri-hi// (IQ, 142, 40, 37); hatta jarra (T, 67, 10, 13); hatta daqa (IQ, 124, 15, 2); idha ballat (T, M, 86); balla afrasa-na dama / (M, 113, 24); //hatta balla nahri wa-sadra-hu// (M, 711, 10). 10i-ha // (M, 715, 2) na'uru-ha (L, M, 9). This pattern is, of course, closely related to "ghaulu-ha fa-rijamu-ha" (L, M, 1), and also recurs throughout the poem. 3a /dimanun tala c abat ar-riyahu bi-rasmi-ha//(L, 152,48,4); bacda anlsiha // (A, 41, 19, 3); cadhu-hu bi-amsi-hi // (L, 207, 61, 10); 3b II aqwaina min hijjajin (Z, 81, 4, 1). 4a //khuliqat macaqimu (M, 481, 8); // qana't anamilu (M, 557, 5); / caufa

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1-fawarisi (L, 130, 43, 2); / sakhiba sh-shawaribi (M, 858, 15); // subulu 1-masaliki (M, 596, 11). 5a I min kulli abtaha (L, 154, 48, 22); / min kulli arwaca (A, 34, 2, 8); /min kulli mahfufin (L, M, 13); / min kulli mushtarafin (M, 719, 10); /min kulli mustarkhi (M, 681, 13); / f I ithri ghaniyatin ramat-ka bi-sahmi-ha//(N, 9, 7, 6); / wa-l-clnu sakinatun (L, M, 7); /au raj c u washimatin (L, M, 9). 5b I wa-cashiyyata (L, 158, 48, 46). 6a I wa-jala s-suyulu (L, M, 8); / jalat shu c unu (M, 827, 4); / laciba s-suyulu (M, 55, 8); //sa c du n-nujumi (M, 269, 13); //summu n-nusuri (A, 44, 20, 27). 6b bi-1-jalhataini (L, 196, 57, 7); // fa-camayataini (IQ, 157, 59, 1); fa-sahataini (IQ, 157, 59, 2); //wa-l-am c azani (IQ, 115, 1, 1); / wa-1-harithani (L, 189, 54, 7); // wa-t-tubbacani (L, 189, 54, 7). 8 i hami / (M, 756, 2); min al-baghda'i cum / (M, 834, 15); darra^u khimu / (Z, 99, 18, 13); bi-1-asla'i cunu / (Z, 100, 19, 5); min at-tacda°i junu / (Z, 100, 19, 6). la II fa-la yusda ladaiya wa-la yuda c u / (M, 373, 5); // fa-ma nazura 1-kalamu wa-la shajani / (N, 31, 30, 4); / wa-lam ara mithla (M, 182, 2); / wa-lam ara mithla-ha (M, 182, 3); / wa-lam ara mithla-ha (M, 183, 4); wa-la ahubu / (M, 182, 2); wa-la asidu / (M, 461, 8); wa-la matiru / (T, 64, 7,6); wa-la sanldu / (L, 45, 10, 2). Journal of Arabic Literature, III

4

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lb //sinanun mithla (N, 28, 27, 21); //yamilu idha (A, 38, 11, 11). Sa II fa-inna 1-ghaitha (Z, 100, 19, 14); fl kulli fajrin // (Z, 76, 1, 27); fi kulli rlhin (M, 125, 7); fl kulli yaumin (N, 12, 9, 5); kulla cami / (M, 758, 7). Sb If yaludhu bi-gharqadin (L, 105, 37, 17); / dhakartu bi-hi 1-fawarisa wa-n-nadama / (L, 123, 39, 3); // tabidu bi-hi masayifi 1-hamami / (A, 49, 23, 3); // wa-li-1-lahi l-mu'aththalu wa-l-cadidu / (L, 44, 10, 1); / ala dhahaba 1-muhafizu wa-l-muhaml // (L, 200, 59, 1). 9a I wa-khadhdhala qauma-hu camru bnu camrin // (M, 669, 27); / wakhauwada fahlu-ha (L, 186, 53, 16); / wa-qattaca wasla-ha (M, 6, 8, 3); qauma-na (M, 672, 36); wariqin c alai-ha// (M, 43, 10); barakat c alai-hi// (N, 29, 27, 28); batat calai-hi (M, 65, 3, 12); karrat c alai-him// 'M, 24, 2); karrat c alai-him// (M, 121, 3). ma'qudan calai-him / (M, 621, 23); macsuban calai-hi // (N, 31, 30, 2). 9b II cala athari (Z, 75, 1, 6). See also, 1. 2b. 100 /kama aksu (M, 618, 5); /kama hada (N, 31, 30, 6); / kama kharaja (L, 106, 37, 23); / kama laciba (L, 106, 37, 26); / kama marra (L, 106, 37, 24); /kama suhirat (L, 204, 59, 31); /fa-ma in kana (N, 5, 4, 6); abl-hi // (N, 29, 27, 37). 10£ /idha abzat bi-hi yauman (Z, 84, 8, 5); /idha hawalat (N, 30, 29, 14); //idha hazabat (M, 831, 5); /idha hubisat (M, 343, 5); /idha jamahat (Z, 83, 8, 3); /idha musihat (M, 185, 9); //idha nafadhat-humu karrat c alai-him// (M, 121, 3); / idha tamdi-himu cadat calai-him // (M, 24, 2); /idha ya'suna-ha nashazat calai-him // (M, 758, 12); yauma hisyin // (N, 5, 4, 5); yauma 1-khisami / (L, 200, 59, 1); yauma qalu// (L, 200, 59, 2); yauma tasmu// (A, 52, 27, 3); laila t-tamami/ (L, 202, 59, 14); fl mulajjijatin azumi / (L, 185, 53, 10).

Chart IV (Nabigha, Poem No. 5, 11. 1-10) \^>

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

J_ j \_j \j

_'__

v_x _L

^j\^j

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ya dara maiyata bi-l-^lya^ bi-s-sanadi aqwat wa-tala calai-ha salifu 1-abadi waqattu fi-ha usailanan usa^lu-ha c aiyat jawaban wa-ma bi-r-rabci min ahadi ilia 1-awariyyu Ia5yan ma ubaiyinu-ha wa-n-nu5yu ka-1-haudi bi-1-mazlumati 1-jaladi ruddat caiai-ha aqasl-hi wa-labbada-hu darbu 1-walldati bi-1-mishati fl th-thaMi khallat sabila atiyyin kana yahbisu-hu wa-raffacat-hu ila s-sijfaini fa-n-nadadi amsat khala'an wa-amsa ahlu-ha htamalu akhna calai-ha 1-ladhl akhna cala lubadi fa-caddi camma tara idh la rtija^ la-hu wa-nmi 1-qutuda cala cairanatin ujudi maqdhiifatin bi-dakhlsi n-nahdi bazilu-ha la-hu sarlfun sarlfa l-qacwi bi-1-masadi ka-anna rahll wa-qad zala n-naharu bi-na

EARLY ISLAMIC POETRY AND POETICS ORAL COMPOSITION IN PRE-ISLAMIC POETRY

51 51

yauma 1-jallli cala musta'nisin wa-hadi 10 min wahshi wajrata maushiyyin akaricu-hu tawl i-maslri ka-saifi s-saiqali l-faridl \a / y a hari (Z, 87, 10, 27); / ya clda (M, 2, 1); / bi-d-dari (Z, 17, 17, 2); / l a d-daru (Z, 97, 17, 2); / a min suhaiyata (A, 40, 16, 1); / hallat khuwailatu (M, 268, 2); / qalat sulaima (IQ, 121, 9, 2); cala calya>a mahzumu / (Alq, 113, 13, 50); al-acda>u bi-r-rifadi / (N, 8, 5, 43); cala l-acda>i (M, 240, 23); ila l-acda>i (M, 226, 4); min asma'i masruma // (M, 847, 1); min asma'i ma caliqa / (Z, 84, 9, 1); bi-1-jaradi / (N, 7, 5, 30); bi-1-masadi (N, 6, 5, 8); bi-safadi / (N, 8, 5, 48); bi-z-zabadi/ (N, 8, 5,44); \b //tulqa 1-burudu calai-ha (M, 293, 81); //yarshu t-tijara calai-ha (M, 849, 9); ghadira l-maciku / (Z, 87, 16, 28); ha'ifi 1-bukari / (L, 59, 15, 33); sarimu dh-dhakaru / (L, 57, 15, 12); wahinan khalaqa / (Z, 82, 9, 3); wahinin khalaqin // (Z, 87, 10, 26). 2a I waqaftu usa'ilu-ha naqati // (M, 355, 3); / waqaftu bi-ha usulan ma tabmu // li-sa'ili-ha (M, 837, 3); / waqaftu bi-ha (N, 30, 29, 3); / waqaftu bi-ha (M, 698, 9); / fa-waqaftu fi-ha kai usa'ilu-ha // (M, 827, 6). 2b /urdud yasaran (Z, 87, 10, 28); //anna yasaran (Z, 88, 13, 1); / abligh ziyadan (N, 15, 12, 1); /banat sucadu (M, 442, 1); /banat sucadu (M, 442, 1); aidl n-nacami (A, 41, 17, 2); / mithlu n-nacami (Z, 86, 10, 9); min ahadi / (N, 7, 5, 21); min baladin// (M, 323, 8); min jasadi (N, 7, 5, 37). 3a //ilia d-dawabiha (M, 849, l l ) ; / / s h u m m u l-caranlni (N, 4, 2, 8); // shummu l-caranlni (N, 27, 27, 7); / wa-bi-1-fawarisi (Z, 89, 13, 4);//wa-la s-sanabiki (Alq, 113, 13, 48); / tahwi sanabiku (M, 725, 6); / fa-la D yan ma tabinu rusumu darin (M, 342, 3); / fa-laDyan ma qasartu t-tarfa can-hum (M, 661, 5); tu'arriqu-hu // (N, 4, 2, 9). 3£ nu'yu-ha (M, 743, 4); / wa-1-khailu (N, 27, 26, 12); / la-na aslsun ka-jidhmi 1-haudi haddama-hu // (291, 73). 4a II akhna calai-ha (N, 6, 5, 6); // maddan calai-hi (N, 15, 11, 11); / shucthun c alai-ha (N, 4, 2, 8);/subbat calai-hi (IQ, 121, 8, 2); wa-haiyaja-hu// (Alq, 112, 13, 20); haddama-hu// (M, 291, 73); ghaiyara-hu (L, 57, 15, 12). 4b II fatqa l-cashlrati (M, 689, 5); / khazi t-tarlqati (M, 288, 62); / shakka l-farlsati (N, 6, 5, 15); // can ir-riyasati (Z, 99, 17, 36); / amsat umamatu (M, 25, 1); / waddi c umamata (N, 16, 14, 1). 5a II wa-la sablla (N, 6, 5, 18); / bana l-khalltu (Z, 86, 10, 1); / inna l-khalltu (Z, 84, 9, 1); /raha l-qatlnu (L, 55, 15, l);//marra l-atlyyi (M, 559, 5); kana maktuma / (M, 847, 1); kana min khuluqin// (M, 321, 1); laisa ya c simu-ha// (N, 27, 26, 9); laisa yudriku-hu // (M, 286, 56). Sb cala 1-ashqaini masbulu / (IQ, 121, 8, 2); can id-dafaini taftllu // (M, 274, 20); ila l-kacbaini tahjllu// (M, 276, 26); bi-shaffanin wa-surradi (M, 688, 3). 6a /amsat umamatu (M, 25, l ) ; / a b u siracan wa-amsa (Alq, 109, 9, 1); banat sucadu fa-amsa 1-qalbu ma c muda// (M, 442, 1); /banat sucadu wa-amsa hablu-ha njadama // (N, 25, 23, 1); // wa-amsa hablu-ha (A, 49, 23, 1); / yauma l-wadaci fa-amsa r-rahnu (Z, 84, 9, 2); min ahli-ha aramu / (Z, 97, 17, 3); fahtamalu//(Alq, 111, 13, 4); fa-htazamu / (Z, 98, 17, 21); wa-khtalafu // (M, 724, 2); /bana l-khalltu wa-lam yaVu li-man taraku// (Z, 86, 10, 1). 6b auda sh-shababa l-ladhl (M, 226, 3); //hatta tulaqi 1-ladhi (M, 19, 25); / huwa 1-jawadu l-ladhl (Z, 97, 17, 13); // inna shababa l-ladhl (M, 848, 5). la /fa- c addi (M, 180, 63); / fa- c addi can-ha (M, 270, 8); //habwa l-jawarl tara fl (Z, 84, 9, 15); la anlsa bi-ha // (M, 849, 11); la-fakaka la-hu // (Z, 84, 9, 2); la-kifa'a la-hu (N, 15, 11, 12); la kifaca la-hu (N, 27, 26, 6).

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Ib //fa-nji fazara ila (N, 11, 2, 4); //shadda s-suruja cala (Z, 98, 17, 26); //ilia l-qutucu cala (Z, 86, 10, 8); //inna 1-bala'a cala (IQ, 121, 8, 2); /tabni buyutan cala (L, 59, 15, 3); cala musta'nisin wa-hadi (N, 6, 5, 9). Sa /qarwa'a maqdhufatin bi-n-nahdi yashcafu-ha // (M, 271, 11); // mashdudatan bi-rihali 1-hurati (N, M, 29); // majniinatan (M, 25, 1); // simakhu-ha bi-dakhisi r-rauqi (N, 16,14,11); calimu-hum // (N, 25,23,11); satca'u khadi'atun// (Alq, 112, 13, 28); adma'a khadilatin // (Z, 84, 9, 5); wajna'a najiyatin // (M, 44, 30); zabba'a qaribatin//(A, 41, 17, 3); rakibu-ha / (N, 16; 14; 7); rakibuhu // (Alq, 113, 13, 43). Sb qallli 1-wadqi (M, 242, 28); qarira l-caini (M, 445, 14); //sahla 1-fina'i rahiba l-baci (M, 449, 9); / la-na aslsun (M, 291, 73). 9a / ka-anna caim wa-qad sala s-salilu bi-him// (Z, 97, 17, 8);/ka-anna c ainaiya (Z, 84, 9, 10); /ka-anna fa-ha (L, 56, 15, 9); /ka-anna khurtuma-ha (IQ, 156, 55, 12); //ka-anna quryana-hu (IQ, 155, 55, 10); ka-anna raci-na (M, 29, 10); kaffu 1-walidi la-ha // (Z, 87, 10, 19); yuqa 1-bananu bi-ha // (M, 17, 19). 9£ yauma l-wadaci (IQ, 160, 65, 7); // yauma n-nimarati (N, 16, 14, 2). 10, XVIII, pp. 8-14, notice, XV, p. 148; Waraqa, p. 5. 130 Suburb of Basra, on the Macqil, Buldan, refs. cited. 131 Fihrist, pp. 222-223, mentions the titles of 39 works including, of most interest to us: Kitab munazaratih li-l-Buhturi, Kitab nawadirih wa asharih; Udaba', XVIII, 9 ff. cites 35 titles on the basis of Fihrist. 132 Agh, XXI, p. 57, Akhbar al-Buhturi, p. 88; Muruj, VII, p. 203 ff. 133 Udaba>, XVIII, p. 9.

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J.E. Bencheikh

E. - A Clown at Samarra: Abu l-£Ibar The history of Arabic literature has no shortage of clowns. In a society so anxious to assume the mask of dignity, certain individuals practised clownish antics and undertook to amuse contemporaries only too eager to find an opportunity to laugh while reserving the right to wax indignant. But in their case buffoonery went beyond mere drollery to indulge in true vulgarity; this [comic] excess then came to correct and temper what might otherwise be judged dangerous in the exercise of freedom of expression. Thus Abu Dulama, a friend of senior dignitaries but a black slave, a capable versifier but a cynical scrounger, aggressive and obscene but often ridiculed, could poke fun even at Islam without suffering any adverse consequences. In the case of Abu l-clbar we are dealing with a particular kind of buffoon. First of all because he was an authentic Hashimi, related to the ruling family.134 On the other hand he received a [49] meticulous education and, by general agreement, was an adfb, a man of the highest erudition.135 He began by exercising the poetic profession in a normal manner, but realised he would amount to nothing competing with rivals such as Abu Tammam, al-Buhturi or Abu 1-Simt b. Abi Hafsa.136 He then chose the way of humq, folly and senseless conduct to some, but what we for our part would be more likely to call the art of burlesque. He is thus seen, in the gardens of Samarra, holding "in his left hand a crossbow, in the right a sparrow-hawk - bashiq - the head covered with a fragment of lung held by a cord,137 naked, a fishing-line with a hook attached to his genitals, and crying out: I hunt with all my body-parts!"138 Elsewhere he parodies, in irresistible fashion, a scholar delivering a lesson: sitting in a tub of hot water, a jug on his head, he is surrounded by a circle of "disciples" posing the most unlikely questions, to which he gives the most absurd answers.139 But the most interesting aspect of his activity is of a 134 Abu l-'Abbas Muhammad b. Ahmad b. cAbd Allah al-Hashimi, Agh, XXIII, p. 86; Akhbar al-Buhturi, pp. 170-171, and n. 8; Awraq, III, pp. 323-333; Fawat, II, pp. 354-356, no. 386; Fihrist, pp. 223-224; Udaba', XVII, pp. 122-127, no. 41, which supplies his complete genealogy; Waraqa, pp. 120-121. He was born under the reign of al-Rashid around 175 h., Agh, XXIII, p. 76. 135 Agh, XXIII, p. 85; Awraq, III, p. 330; Tab, p. 342; Udaba3, XVII, p. 124, where he is seen explaining a difficult verse to a group of poets who are trying to catch him out. 136 Agh, XXIII, p. 76; Fawat, II, p. 354 bottom; Tab, pp. 342-343. 137 In place of bait. 138 Agh, XXIII, p. 81; Awraq, III, p. 328; Fawat, II, p. 356. 139 Tab, p. 343, with the names of three other clowns who here take on the role of disciples; cf. another anecdote which shows him climbing a ladder, with a slipper on his head and hats on his feet, and three accomplices beating on mortars and spraying the passers-by with muddy water, Agh, XXIII, p. 29; Awraq, III. p. 327; Fawat, II, p. 355, which mentions other nawadir of this type in a Kitab bi'r al-durr, of which we have no knowledge.

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literary nature. In some of his poems, Abu l-clbar takes all the liberties: he creates words, changes the order of letters, composes phrases denuded of sense. A Lettrist before his time, every year he added a consonant to his kunya, thus attaining, after nineteen years, a virtually unpronounceable word.140 This audacity, these outrages against the language, could have been the source of a most fecund evolution. The poet was heard to proclaim: "I - I you I - I am Abu l-clbar ... I liberate my poetry ,.."141 But alas, this trumpet blast did not bring any walls tumbling down. And how could it be otherwise? Al-Ma3mun, not inclined to appreciate any kind of frivolity, had Abu l-clbar imprisoned and released him only to expel him from Baghdad.142 Al-Mutawakkil took pleasure in his pranks but employed him as a straightforward clown: he had him catapulted into a pool of water in his palace and sent his retainers to fish him out with nets.143 Was he fundamentally nothing more than a buffoon? But a certain dolorous poem in which he laments: "I have no fortune other than my nobility It alone will save me from extinction"144 [50] would tend to cast doubt on this. The fact remains that he introduced a note of originality into a milieu in which the spirit of invention was singularly lacking.145 Other important individuals frequented and animated the coterie of al-Mutawakkil: Ibrahim b.al-Abbas al-Suli, al-Hasan and Sulayman b. Wahb, al-Fath b. Khaqan, All b. Yahya Ibn al-Munajjim, whose activity and role we 140 Fawat, II, p. 354, transcribes it in full without indicating the vocalisation; only Udaba3, XVII, p. 22, vocalises Abu 1-lbar, a kunya which the poet adopted, the Fawat tells us, on the basis of Abu l-cAbbas - although this should have been reduced to Abu l-cAbir, a reading retained by Pellat, RSO, 1952, p. 60. We maintain Yaqut's reading. 141 Tab, p. 343, 6 v., virtually untranslatable. 142 Fawat, II, p. 354; Agh, XXIII, p. 83, mentions that he was imprisoned and expelled from Baghdad by Ibrahim b. Ishaq, prefect of police; and Awraq, III, p. 329, specifies that this took place under the reign of al-Mustacm. 143 Awraq, III, pp. 328-329; Fawat, II, p. 356. 144 Agh, XXIII, p. 77; Fawat, II, p. 355. 145 All the same, he was generously rewarded since, we are told, his clownish antics earned him double the payment that he could have expected to receive for his panegyrics, Agh, XXIII, p. 76; Awraq, III, 323. He is credited with numerous works, not one of which has survived, Fihrist, p. 224: Udaba', XVII, p. 123. An avowed anti-cAlid, he would be assassinated by a Shf ite in 252, Agh, XXIII, p. 86; Awraq, III, p. 331; Udaba3, XVII, p. 127, with different versions of the circumstances of his death.

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have analysed at some length in another study.146 And this list helps us to understand to what extent the coterie is indeed a legitimising authority. The poet, for example, confronts there a well-informed prince, redoubtable scholars, colleagues who are not necessarily charitable. In brief, the critique is formed immediately and delivered without appeal. On the other hand, it plays a far from negligible part in the diffusion of works: scholars comment on them and deliver lectures about them,147 musicians are inspired by them, the audience spread their renown. And to add to the rigours of patronage, to an increasing extent the patron is expected, and willing, to participate in the cultural activity which he favours. There thus appears a kind of cultivated protector, open to all disciplines, who surrounds himself with literary advisers, writes himself and brings together scholars, poets and musicians. Thus the Tahirids, men of war, of letters and of art, who ultimately founded a dynasty. Al-Buhturi revived the panegyric to some extent and delivered the eulogy of these patrons, Ibn al-Zayyat and al-Hasan b. Wahb in particular.148 For his part, Ibn al-Rumi laments the necessity to cope with such refined connoisseurs: "Our misfortune is that our patrons are learned and poets If we succeed with their eulogy, they are jealous and deny us reward. If we fail, they rebuke us and criticise our verses pitilessly, They think themselves the rivals and the equals of the panegyrists."149 In parallel with caliphal patronage we thus see developing, according to the same rules, that of dignitaries of the ruling minority. Motives of political, doctrinal, or ethnic order presided over diverse assemblages. The empire, from the end of the second century onward, sensed the first symptoms of the malady which was to gnaw at it and lead to its progressive dismemberment. Even leaving aside the distant provinces of the west, we observe the emergence of principalities which, although not yet challenging it, nevertheless curtailed the power of the central government. Numerous 146

Art. cited supra in note 27. To be added to this list are the names of the artists and musicians, male and female, who played such an important role in the animation of the coteries, cf. our article, "Les musiciens et la poesie, les ecoles d'lshaq al-Mawsili et d'Ibrahim Ibn al-Mahdi," Arabica, XXII, 1975, pp. 114-152, with an analysis of the role of poetesses and female musicians, pp. 140-152. From this one gains an impression of the variety of persons constituting a "salon". 147 c Umara3 b. cAqil asks Thaclab, tutor to the children of Muhammad b. cAbd Allah b. Tahir, to teach them by heart a poem of Abu Tammam, which tells us about the kind of culture that the children of these great families were able to acquire. U8 Diwan, no. 259,1, pp. 632-638, 46 vv., khafif', no. 55,1, pp. 163-166, 29 vv., kamil 149 Tr. Boustany, op. cit., p. 142, n. 7.

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princes of the regime, appointed [51] to important posts to maintain the balance of political power, surrounded themselves with courts that aspired to the grandeur of Samarra. But this development did nothing to break the homogeneity of the socio-cultural system; on the contrary, it favoured the repetition of the same model. Furthermore, all these persons also had palaces or residences in the capital and, most often, it was there that their coterie was accommodated. Around Arab military chieftains or ministers of Persian origin, in the salons of the caliph or of a councillor, men of letters throng in the quest for fortune. Nevertheless we feel it would be erroneous here to exaggerate the role of the patron and to lay too much stress on his individual qualities. The public face of an organisation, his function is most of all to ensure the stability of the ensemble, a stability not dependent on the destiny of individuals. The political vicissitudes which lead, for example, to the assassination of a caliph, the execution of a minister, the dismissal of a general, provoke a momentary imbalance, a crisis, but never a mutation. Throughout the centuries, Arab culture has remained the expression of intangible structures. Literature has been perpetuated without the appearance of a different public and without the evolution of a corps of writers responding, with their conduct and their works, to a new cultural situation. This conclusion clarifies the entire evolution of Arab writing up until the nineteenth century. What has been transmitted to us is a corpus responding to the norms laid down by legitimising authorities. Is it permissible to ask whether the promotion of this literature has not itself been subjected for too long to these norms, and if the moment has not come to speculate about the existence of attitudes held in defiance of a system. Did there exist in the Arab domain even the premise of a counter-culture? Bibliographical Abbreviations Agh: Akhbar Abi Tammam: Akhbar al-Buhturi: Awraq: Bayan: Buldan: Diyarat:

Kitab al-Aghani, Abu 1-Faraj al-Isfaham, Beirut 1955-1964. al-Suli, Beirut 1956. al-Suli, Damascus 1958. Kitab al-Awraq, al-Suli, I: Akhbar al-shu'ara1, London/ Cairo 1935. Al-bayan wa l-tabyin, al-Jahiz, Cairo 1960. Mu'jam al-buldan, Yaqut, Beirut 1955-1957. Kitab al-diyarat, al-Shabushti, Baghdad 1962.

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24

Fawat: Fihrist: Jamharat ras&il: Hayawan: Ptab: rejection. The lady's "nightvisit" to the lover (3) is followed by her turning from him, which precipitates his sending his friends to present his suit, only to be rejected; as a result of this rejection, he sets off on his own journey to the patron. The literal "visit" which links lady to patron is the rahil itself, in which the poet, having lost the lady, travels to cUqba. This journey from lady to patron reinforces the female/male contrast by providing a figurative, as well as a literal, transition from the nasib (dominated by the female beloved) to the madih (dominated by the male patron); the agent which effects this transition is the poet's camel, both female and of noble lineage, which bears him on a journey which takes him from a female element—the wild cows ( c f«) which walk "with the gait of women" (yam14

Bashshar's use of symbolic nomenclature has been noted by A. Roman, "Un poeme 'ouvert' de Bassar b. Burd," BEO, 30 (1978), 185; cf. also Aghdnt, III, 1009-10, on the poet's habit of "padding" his verses with fictitious names. The practice (especially as regards using a symbolic name in the nasib to suggest abstract qualities or concepts to be presented in the madih) appears to be of some antiquity; for example, Zuhayr's "peacemaking" Mu^allaqah, which emphasizes loyalty and fidelity to one's word (wafa7), begins with a nasib addressed to Umm Awfa. The problem invites systematic investigation; there is an interesting parallel, moreover, between such usage in Arabic love poetry and the convention of the senhal in the troubadour lyric. 15 Ashrafa "to look down on", figuratively "to oversee, supervise", is regularly associated in the dictionaries with min ^alin "from above". On the importance of sharaf'm connection with traditional Arab concepts of honor, see B. Fares, L'honneur chez les Arabes avant I'lslam; etude de sociologie (Paris, 1938), pp. 81-7; cf. also Vadet, pp. 162-4, n. 2.

127

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47

shina mashya n-nisd^i)—to a male—the wild ass (ya^fur) sleeping at mid-day in the proximity of the mirage. The most important motif in the complex association between lady and patron is that of power, embodied in the eye-hand contrast. The lady's power to wound or heal, located (in the traditional love context) in her eyes, parallels the similar power of the patron, located (synecdochally) in his hands.16 Bashshar refers twice (1, 9) to the "sideways glance" (tarf) of the eye, both in conjunction with an epithet suggesting nobility; the first instance refers specifically to Umm al-cAla:> herself, the second places her among a class of women characterized by this feature. He thus plays (as A. Ghedira has noted) with 'Timage de 1'ceil qui penche d'un cote plus que d'autre, comme la balance, symbole de la justice," implying the impossibility of fairness—"L'ceil qui louche d'un cote, c'est la justice qui fait pencher la balance d'un cote"17—or (to pursue Bashshar's own metaphor) of even-handedness on the part of the lady. Similarly, cUqba's hands, the agents of the power which he wields and which is based both in his position and his lineage, are capable of dispensing both reward and punishment, blessings and destruction. Lady and patron both possess the power of life and death over lover and poet, a power which derives ostensibly from the respective situational contexts of love and rule, but in actuality from their noble lineage. The lady's conduct towards her lover is unjust, capricious and arbitrary: ignoring his devoted service, she rejects him with a tear and a platitude. Of c Uqba's conduct, and the related (and central) question of justice, more in a moment; but first I will consider a final motif which links lady and patron. Both are recipients of greetings, and hence, by extension, of messages. The lover's salutation to his lady (1) precedes his suit to her (llb-18), itself the result of her disfavor, brought about by the slander of the hamma? (8). The lady's response to this suit (transmitted, along with her "greetings", by Sulayma [21]) is rejection. Corresponding to this sequence of motifs (salutation - slander - suit + response) in the madih, 16 On Bashshar's use of eye imagery, see A. Ghedira, "La frequence du mot dans les poemes de Bassar 1'aveugle," Arabica, 28 (1981), 1-37; cf. also A. Roman, "A propos des vers des yeux et du regard dans 1'oeuvre du poete aveugle Bassar b. Burd," Melanges de I'Universite Saint-Joseph, 46 (1970-71), 481-514. Bashshar's imagery, in this and in other poems, provides an example of what L. K. Donaldson-Evans has called the "aggressive eye'' topos; cf. Love's Fatal Glance: A Study of Eye Imagery in the Poets of the Ecole Lyonnaise (University, Miss., 1980), pp. 9 ff. and especially (on Arabic poetry) pp. 26-30; see also Ruth Cline, "Heart and Eyes," Romance Philology, 25 (1972), 263-97. 17 Ghedira, 10; as he observes, "La dame courtisee, entouree de nombreux pretendants sur lesquels elle ne jette pas le meme regard equitable, prefigure en quelque sorte 1'allegoric de la justice." Elsewhere, Ghedira notes (15, 25-33) correspondences between eye and hand, but does not develop the mutual association with power characteristic of this qasida.

EARLY ISLAMIC POETRY AND POETICS 48

THE USES OF THE QASIDA

we find (or appear to find) the reverse: suit + response (42-43, in connection with the slave's death), slander, now disregarded thanks to c Uqba's protection (47), and salutation (54). This reversal suggests that we are in the presence of what Sperl has identified as an important thematic motif relating nasib and madih: the poet finds compensation for his unrequited love for the lady in the generosity and protection of the patron.18 In other words, the frustration and loss which characterize the love relationship are nullified by the fulfillment found in that of poet and patron. This pattern, of primary importance in Caliphal panegyrics, is also found mutatis mutandis in poems in praise of lesser patrons; but a number of factors mitigate against such a reading of this particular qasida, chief among them the fact that the analogy between lady and patron (an informing figure of many panegyrics) is manipulated in such a way as to establish identity, rather than contrast, between them. This suggests that, far from compensating for the lady's cruelty, the patron repeats it; and he does so because both act according to a system of values which they share. Before discussing these values, however, let me call attention to some of the verbal and semantic resonances and rhetorical devices which link recurrent motif clusters. Bashshar was considered an originator of the badf style; his particular attachment to the figures oftajms (paronomasia) and tibdq (antithesis)—which often function complementarily—is clear in this qasida.19 Tajnts links Sulayma, Ibn Salm, and the "greeting" motif (saldm) through their common derivation from s-l-m\ partial tajnts links these words, in turn, to others with similar sounds: mulimm (2), mamsan (3), amsd (10, 15)—the latter two derived from the common root m-sy—sama? (32), istahallat (19), tasallaytu (22). Opposed to such mellifluent sounds are an abundance of d-sounds which associate the dd^ldawa^ antithesis with both positive (wacd, dayn) and negative (cidd, a^dd^, dima?) elements and reinforce the antithetical potentials embodied in the eyes of the lady and the hands of the patron. The contrast between c-y-n and ^-n-y both identifies the "source" of the lover's affliction (cqyn) and relates it to his distress (^ind7) and to the aid he requests from his friends (acina); all of these words occur in the "feminine" section of the qasida, which concludes with the poet's encounter of the wild cows ( c m). The emphasis on eyes which marks the first portion of the nasib is balanced by references to 18

See Sperl, 29 ff. On their combined use in the poetry of Abu Tammam, see A. Hamori, On the Art of Medieval Arabic Literature (Princeton, 1974), pp. 125 ff.; see also Bencheikh, pp. 182 ff., for the use of tajnts by cAbbasid poets in general. The fact that these devices (singly or in combination) can constitute an overall organizing strategy for entire poems refutes van Gelder's statement (p. 199) that tajnts and tibdq "are effective, to the Arabs, within the confines of one line only". 19

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hands, and to actions performed by hands, in the final portion of the madih: sana^atni yaddhu (46), the "slights" (sqfh) of the blamer (47), the partial tajnis between kafani/kaff(^$), the tajnis between yad/aydd (51, also an example of ihdm), yadfa^u (53)—all of which remind us of the patron's power and its dual potential for good or harm. 20 (Kaff, in line 48, also suggests the motif of justice, prefigured by tarf, in its sense of the pans of a scale or balance.) Specific effects of sound are used with anaphora or rhyme-word to establish antithetical or complementary meanings. The resonances between maqdmifmaqdla, hulamd^ilghuramd^i, mdlikiyun/aryahiyun will be discussed below; another such pair is fuqard^ilkuramdDi (33-34). A more specific example of the use of sound-patterns to suggest meaning is the contrast between the predominantly liquid consonants of the nasib and the harsher ones of the rahil: ^ayn, ghayn, and dad, in particular, occur with great frequency, as do doubled consonants in somewhat awkward combinations (tajashshamtuha). A contrast is thus established between the harshness of the desert journey and the gentler, feminine atmosphere of the nasib; the madih, in this respect, is neutral, showing a more random distribution of consonants. All these devices reinforce and clarify the qasida's thematic and structural organization. Within its tripartite thematic divisions we can discern separate but interrelated (often overlapping) structural patterns affecting groups of a few lines, more lengthy passages, and the entire poem. Besides the thematic parallelism between nasib and madih, there is a bipartite division of the poem achieved by the takhallus, which occupies the poem's center (28) and reflects the tension between female- and maledominated situations between which the rahil forms a semantic as well as a literal link; while an overall circular structure is provided by the framing device of greeting and by the recapitulation of key motifs. The following diagram will illustrate this circular structure.21 20 It is interesting to speculate if the emphasis on hands in this passage is a reflection of the importance of touch and physical contact for the blind poet; cf. Ghedira, 25 ff. An additional reinforcement of the motif of lack of balance is suggested by the occurrence of words derived from r-w-h: rdhat (5), ar-Rawha° (17, the site of the lady's promise), and ruhi(2Q, addressed to Sulayma) all produce negative effects culminating in the loss of the lady, while the sequence rdhalruhtu (42) follows the death of the slave. These negative associations may illuminate the designation of cUqba as aryahiyun\ moreover, the 3rd form of the verb, rawaha, means literally "to shift from one foot to another" and figuratively "to do first one thing, then its opposite". This possibility adds to the duality implicit in eyes and hands that of the feet, that is, of one's position or attitude. The notion of wavering and unreliability is also suggested by the reference to the mirage in the rahil, beside which the (male) wild ass sleeps (26: HTna qdla l-ya^furu wa-rtakada l-dlllu bi-ray^dnihi rtikdda n-nahd^i). 21 Ring composition, of which this qasida provides an example, is an important aspect of Arabic poetic structure which has as yet received little attention. It has been discussed

131

EARLY ISLAMIC POETRY AND POETICS 50 W

E

PH

o ti

H c/3

THE USES OF THE QASIDA

1 Greetings to Umm al-cAlaD . 8 Slanderers cause separation 9 "Don't blame lady" 13-18 Speech of Sulayma (hulama^ilghuramd^i) 21-22 Poet loses lady 23-27 Ratal &S\Takhallus: mention of cUqba 29-38 MadTh

(MdlikiyunlAryahtyun)

39-41 Poet acquires, then loses, slave W ffi

§ PH

H c/5 HH

H Z
[A • impl. audience} —» hist, audience Hist, poet -^ {impl. poet -> [A BI (+62)] -> impl. addressee} -> hist, addressee [hist.^historical; impl. = implied]

10 See end of note 6. Obviously poets alternated between styles, but it is the dramatic style I am concerned with here. 11 See Hess-Luttich, Ernest W. B. (1985): Dramatic Discourse, in: T. van Dijk (Ed.) Discourse and Literature. New Approaches to the Analysis of Literary Genres, (Amsterdam /Philadelphia), pp. 199214 and idem (1981): Grundlagen der Dialoglinguistik (Berlin). 12 See Pratt, Mary Louise (1977): Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (Bloomington), especially chapters three and four, Linguistics of Use and The Literary Speech Situation, pp. 79-151, and Hess-Luttich, E. (1985), 203 and idem (1981), 109f. 13 Though there is little information about the colloquial of the time, a rift between it and classical fushd becomes evident in books that collect grammatical errors of educated people. 14 This aspect cannot be expressed in a synchronic diagram.

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EARLY ISLAMIC POETRY AND POETICS 160

Beatrice Gruendler

To give an example, in the admonition R151015 by Ibn al-Rumi, discussed below, the historical partners, placed outside brackets in the paradigm, are the actual poet and his first major patron, the Tahirid governor of Baghdad, 'Ubaydallah b. cAbdallah (d. 300/913). Grouped within curly brackets { } are the traces of author, individual addressee, and wider audience in the admonition. Square brackets [ ] enclose the dramatis personae, e.g., poet and patron, represented by A and B, in a particular scene. Such a scene can be further described with the criteria, proposed by Ernest W. B. HessLuttich,16 which specify, for instance, the number and constellation of participants, their relationship to each other; a speaker's orientation adopted toward others, and his or her articulated social and moral position. The whole scene unfolds according to a scheme of action, which is either argumentative, e.g., a debate, or univocal, as for example when the poet praises his mamduh face-to-face.17 In some scenes, the historical poet and patron, are mirrored by their dramatized counterparts, and, in certain interactive phrases, even fuse with them. This micro-level, requires a second, more detailed, theoretical component. In the poetry of Ibn al-Rumi, such phrases perform five different acts, which strategically frame the praise proper (antistrophe)18 and the final part (metastrophe) of qasd'id, as illustrated hereafter with LI6II, 1 9 dedicated to the aforementioned governor. Opening the antistrophe, first and second acts identify the mamduh and declare the poet's intention to praise him (104): a(ummuhumu madhan \va-akhtassu minhumu akhdhum cUbaydalldhi wa-l-haqqu yulzamu

I enclose all of them (sc. the Tahirids) in my praise, though I distinguish their brother 'Ubaydallah among them - truth must be obeyed. A third type of act recurs throughout the antistrophe and the metastrophe, in the form of invocations for the patron. They wish him blessed life and afterlife (301), lasting glory and noble deeds (269f.), and his worthiness of his rank (207) and of his poets' praises (303). If a qasida contains a message, it is preceded by an injunction to convey it, as a fourth act. Here, the verse "Deliver (alikni) to cAmr b. Layth from me a message..." (146) introduces a long missive to the new Saffarid overlord of Baghdad, vaunting to him 'Ubaydallah, who became his vice-governor. A fifth act is the qasida's formal

15 Ibn al-Rumi (1973-81): Diwdn. Ed H. Nassar et al., 6 vols. (Cairo), vol. v, pp. 1947-48. In the following, the letter "L" preceding a poem number signifies "praise qasida" "F" felicitation, "R" admonition, and "E" epigram. 16 Hess-Luttich, E. (1985), 207f. and (1981), 104. 17 These criteria distinguish the scene from another type of passage, called episode, which, because it only contains sporadic anonymous witnesses without any perceivable relationship to each other, is not explored here. See Gruendler, B. (1995), 205-24. 18 In referring to the parts of the qasida, I adopt the concept of strophe and antistrophe of Stefan Sperl (1989), but drop his assumption of an antithetical relationship between the two parts and add a metastrophe as a third part. The strophe (S) then refers to any introductory theme or occasion of a qasida, the antistrophe (AS) to the praise proper, and the metastrophe (MS) to matters regarding the poet and the qasida itself. This categorization is no more than a limited tool, for some qasd'id, of course, lack strophe or metastrophe, while in others strophe and antistrophe form a seamless whole. 19 Ibn al-Rumi (1973-81), vol. v, pp. 2091-2109.

EARLY ISLAMIC POETRY AND POETICS c

Abbasid Praise Poetry

147 161

dedication in which poet, patron and qasida are joined formula-like as a single verb (297): manahtukaha hawliyyata l-nasji lam tazal tu(dnd madd hawlin daklkin wa-tukhdamu

I dedicate it (sc. the qasida) to you: a year's weaving, worked on tirelessly and attended to a full twelve months. A shorter alternative runs "Take her (fa-dunakaha) as one, who is envied for being yours" (300). The phrases' second person pronouns, filled with the patron's identity,20 allow the historical author to position himself opposite the patron.21 These acts of speech were linked to a depiction of the patronage situation, which, juxtaposed to reality, exposed any differences that might exist between them. Given the double-layered communicative situation, the patron must react to the recited praise for the poet's sake as much as for the general audience. This interdependence of words, acts, and context is what speech act theory investigates, which is precisely why it has been chosen to complement the overarching dramatic discourse model. The exact concept selected here is that of John Austin, developed by John Searle and Emile Benveniste.22 Searle considers explicit assertions, orders, promises, etc. as direct speech acts. These are neither true or false, but, as acts, succeed of fail, depending on their fulfillment of constituting (propositional, preparatory and sincerity) rules, which Searle establishes. For instance, to ask a favor from someone who, to the speaker's knowledge, cannot perform it, violates the preparatory rule and invalidates the request. Such validity is unaffected, however, by the ulterior reaction of an addressee, which is a separate act according to Searle though Richard Ohmann23 (and Ibn al-Rumi) thought otherwise. Benveniste further requires a speaker's authority for a valid act of speech: to say "you are fired" is futile, unless uttered with the authority of an employer.24 Yet no speech act is fixed, and its meaning in every new instance is subject to the context. When applied to literature, this initially philosophical and linguistic theory, is particularly useful in analyzing texts that thematize issues of speech and moral responsibility, as Stanley Fish has shown.25 For

20 Benveniste, Emile (1966a): La nature des pronoms, in: idem, Problemes de Hnguistique generate I (Paris), pp. 251-57, esp. p. 254. 21 Only the dedication and declaration of the intention to praise are true performatives, in the sense that they simultaneously accomplish and denote an act; cf. Benveniste, Emile (1966b): La philosophie analytique et le langage, in idem, Problemes de Hnguistique generate I (Paris), pp. 267-76, esp. p. 274. 22 Searle, John (1969): Speech Acts. An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge) and Benveniste, E. (1966a). 23 Ohmann, Richard (1972): Speech, Literature and the Space Between. In: New Literary History 4, pp. 47-63 and idem (1973): Literature as Act, in: Seymour Chatman (Ed.) Approaches to Poetics (New York), pp. 81-107. 24 Benveniste, E. (1966b). See note 21. 25 See Fish, Stanley (1976): How to Do Things with Austin and Searle: Speech Act Theory and Literary Criticism. In: Modern Language Notes 91, pp. 983-1025. Other literary applications include Ohmann, Richard (1972) and (1973), Pratt (1977), and Felman, Shoshana (1983): The Literay Speech Act. Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages. Transl. Catherine Porter (Ithaca) [First publ. as Felman, Shoshana (1980): Le scandale du corps parlant (Paris)]

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the same reason, speech act theory serves to analyze the dramatic subtype of cAbbasid madih. The combined application of speech act theory and dramatic discourse yields four levels of analysis: characterization of the dramatis personae, typology of scenes, supporting verbal ornament, and articulated relationship(s) between praise poet and mamduh.26

2. Dramatis Personae Many of the fictional personae populating dramatic madih derive from the pre-Islamic poetic tradition, such as the female neighbor (jdra\ and even the poet, when he appears as hero of the nasib or other conventional themes. The poet's beloved, however, occasionally becomes his wife. Further fictional personae are personifications of generosity (nadaf-1 or lost youth (shabdb). White hair (shayb), a personified metonymy for old age, proves an extremely malleable character in Ibn al-Rumf s strophes. White hair deters women from the poet's persona, cures his immorality, threatens him with death, or promises a joyful reunion with his former youth in the hereafter - depending on the poet's perspective. Most human personae, in turn, are limited to one type of action. All the personae's actions are performed through words, which thus characterize them.28 Since the human personae's verbal acts are so predictable, they tend to appear paraphrased or shortened to epithets, such as "the blaming one" ((ddhila, Ictimd). Only the poet's persona can choose his standpoint and expound at length on his motives towards his interlocutors, who really serve as foils for him. A good example is poem no. 929 by Dicbil, which depicts a domestic scene almost entirely through the couple's speech. The persona of the wife asks angrily, "Where are the cattle?" and the poet's persona retorts, "Woe unto you, the cattle met with praise [of my hospitality], and they have stayed together." Later when she tries to save one last milch camel for her young children, the poet slaughters it for the next guest. The scene culminates with the poet's proclaiming his trust in God's provision and his own reputation and his scorn for shortsighted economizing. His wife's plea as a concerned mother only provokes him to trumpet heroic detachment. His answer then reveals the ancillary role of his wife. Briefly the beginning of the response mocks her complaint, as is evident in the poet's addressing her with the feminine "you" (7). However, when restating his values, he shifts to the masculine general "you" (10). Historical personae include the poet and the praised one as well as any superiors of the latter or intercessors with him. Other than fictional personae, they are complex and de26 This model is a slight expansion of an intial version, based upon Ibn al-Ruml; cf. Gruendler, B. (1995) in note 4. For the fourth level, see also eadem (1996): Ibn al-Rumi's Ethics of Patronage. In: Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review 3, pp. 104-60. 27 Dicbil b. CA1I al-Khuzaci (1962): Diwdn, ed. M. Y. Najm (Beirut), no. 8, p. 13 and Zolondek, Leon (1961): Dfbil b. (Ali. The Life and Writings of an Early (Abbdsid Poet (Kentucky), no. 8, pp. 11 and 93. 28 For this aspect, see Felman, Sh. (1983). 29 Dicbil (1962), no. 9, p. 13-14 and Zolondek, L. (1961), no. 34, pp. 19f. and 96.

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velop throughout the poem. The poet alternates between the roles of protege and panegyrist (in addition to his fictional role as a hero); the addressee is presented as a statesman figure (caliph, governor, vizier) with unique qualities and attainments, a generous patron, and an ideal model for praise poetry. These roles may clash, as in Ibn al-Rumi's felicitation F952:43-55,30 where the patron's generosity and his simultaneous ambition as a poet make his poets hesitate whether to act upon their gratitude by praising him, or to acknowledge the mamduh's poetic superiority, as dictated by the conventions of madih, by withholding their poems.

3. The Typology of Scenes Large sections of the praise poems are made up of scenes, which flow into each other or compartmentalize various perspectives. The scenes, set by the dramatis personae, vary considerably, and Hess-Luttich's above-mentioned criteria, which distinguished episodes from scenes, also help to subdivide the latter.31 Number and constellation of personae yield a subdivision into four types: group scene with three or more speakers, dialogue with two, and evocation and monologue with one each, their difference being that the speaker in the evocation tries to conjure an unreachable persona, such as his former youth, whereas the speaker in the monologue meditates on his own present or past. The speakers of a scene appear in the first and second grammatical persons — the former reserved for the poet's persona, the latter for his changing interlocutors, whereas the third person marks evoked personae absent from the scene.32 A scene's opening verse usually introduces an interlocutor in the third person, who is then switched to the second person, when addressed by the poet. Either side may open this conversation, which varies in length and elaboration. A scene is brought to conclusion by an apostrophe, a rhetorical figure, or the entrance of a new interlocutor. The speakers' relationship can be balanced (with both being actually quoted), as in scenes by CA1I b. al-Jahm, or it can be asymmetrical (with the poet indirectly rephrasing his interlocutor's statements), as predominates with Ibn al-Rumi. Further criteria are the medium, the definition of time and space, and the scheme of action. This typology also allows one to differentiate between individual dramatic styles. 'AH b. al-Jahm, for instance, tends to stage an adventurous scheme within one place and time, and his scene often spans the strophe and antistrophe ofaqasida, giving its order of themes a dramaturgic underpinning. Such is the case in his qasida no. 16,33 composed during his imprisonment by al-Mutawakkil in 239/853. A dialogue between the shackled poet and a dream image (khaydl) of his beloved comprises the poem's main part (3-10). She came for a brief visit when the darkness of the night had lowered its curtains, for the prison has guards who rarely sleep.

30 31 32 33

Ibn al-Rumi (1973-81), vol. iii, pp. 1170-74. See note 17. Benveniste, E. (1966b), 255f. C A1I b. al-Jahm (1369/1949): Diwdn, ed. Khalll Mardam Bek (Damascus) p. 50f. Other poems sent from prison are nos. 14 (Ddliyyd), 24 and 25. For the terms strophe and antistrophe, see note 18.

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I said to her: "Why did you venture a scheme of arrival, difficult for the breath of winds?" She said: "We have submitted to desire after patience the worst of lovers' hearts is the patient one." She voiced the lament and her tears streamed over [my] cheek when her neck and mine intertwined. I said to her, while tears [rolled down] in different ways, and desire kindled the fuel of burning love: "When the soul of a lover is pure, the easy and difficult events of the nights are alike, Be not afraid when you see his shackles: for shackles are the anklets of men, Neither deny the state of freedom and its passing, for the Commander of the Faithful will give it anew." The first question and answer concern passionate love, which has enabled the beloved to overcome even the prison's gates (4). In the second exchange, she silently sheds tears, sympathizing with the poet's state, while he calms her, declaring his innocence and confidence in impending release. This last response of the incarcerated poet substitutes the theme of passionate love for loyalty and trust in the caliph, which would typically occur in a qasida's antistrophe. The merging of strophe and antistrophe allows C A1I to use the love plot for another purpose and to aggrandize his steadfastness by contrast with the beloved's submitting to passion. At the same time, to address his beloved permits CA1T to insist on his own allegiance and denounce his undeserved imprisonment without implicating the caliph. A scene can also remain within the thematic range of the antistrophe, as in cAll's qasida no. 23,34 likewise dedicated to al-Mutawakkil. In five pairs of questions and responses, the personae of the poet and a bystander argue about the mamduh. In the first question (1), the bystander asks whether sun or caliph shine brighter; the poet brands the question as adoration of the sun, elaborating on this in a second question and answer (5-9). This opening forecasts the theological substance of the entire scene. After the bystander's third and fourth questions about the caliph's stature and generosity (10-15 and 16-17) have elicited similar partisan answers, the bystander's fifth question about the caliph's courage in war (18), launches the poet's longest retort in which he presents the caliph as a restorer of orthodoxy. According to CA1I, the caliph saved religion and its supporters from "blind civil war," i.e., the doctrine of the created Koran and the inquisition enforcing it (19-45), underscoring his statements with two quotations of the principal opponents: triumphant caliph (27-33) and defeated Satan (36-43). The admirably tight dialectic reaches a climax in the shocking juxtaposition of caliph and devil.35 In

34 - » * . „ J^ o* cih l^ concerned. But it is the deliberate and excessive reliance on such rhetorical figures that marks the badi* style, and this we begin to find only in the work of Abbasid poets, no doubt in varying degrees of frequency. Among those who resort to it often are Muslim and, more strikingly, Abu Tammam, who as a result provoked a controversy that continued to rage among critics for a long time to come. But there is hardly a single Abbasid poet who managed to escape altogether the influence of badi*. Obvious examples of it are to be found not only in Bashshar, Muslim b. al-Walld, Abu Nuwas, Abu'l—€Atahiya, al-Buhturi, but even in Dicbil who vehemently opposed Abu Tammam's poetry (on other grounds). Badi* is, no doubt, the product of conscious craftsmanship (often too conscious), but it does not necessarily preclude genuine feeling, as we can see from the manner poets used it even in their elegies. 64 65

Al-Jahiz, op. tit., vol. I, p. 51. Ibn Rashiq. op. tit., vol. I, p. 85.

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Abu Tammam's well known elegy on his son 66 is a poem charged with deep emotion, revealed, among other things, in the detailed and moving description of the final stage of the son's fatal illness; its language is perhaps the simplest to be found in the whole of Abu Tammam's poetry. Yet it is not entirely free from bad^ devices.67 Likewise, Ibn al-Rumi's heartbreak and grief at the death of his middle son did not prevent him from using badl^ in his elegy.68 Badi* is to be found in Mutanabbl's impassioned utterances such as his elegy on his grandmother as well as in Abu Firas al-Hamdam's pleas from prison in his Byzantine exile, his pathetic poem addressed to his mother or his complaint to the ruler, his cousin Sayf al-Dawla. Later on Ibn al-Farid (1180-1234) was said to have composed some of his mystical verses in a state of trance lasting sometimes several days; yet his poetry abounds in badi^. Elsewhere I have tried to show, through an analysis of Abu Tammam's Amorium poem, 'how a particular rhetorical device can at once be a structural principle and a clue to the overall meaning of the poem' and how 'in the finest examples of Abbasid poetry badi^ is more than just rhetorical embellishment or a mere outward trapping'.69 Al-Macarri's elegy on a Hanafi man of learning, the ddliyya, one of the justly praised poems in the Arabic language,70 is, to cite but another example, full of badi*, but the various figures of speech in it are so well integrated in the whole of the poem, and the relationship between them and the general tenor of the work is so close that no sensitive reading of the poem will yield an impression of artificiality. One particular element of badi* in al-Muctazz's analysis deserves special consideration, because more than any other it was the specific product of the intellectual climate in the Abbasid age, and it was often at the root of Arab critics' rejection of modern poetry, even though they themselves may not have been fully aware of it, concentrating their attention as they did on its more superficial manifestation, namely the use of language.71 This is al-madhhab 66

Diwdn Abl Tamman, ed. Muhammad cAbduh cAzzam, vol. IV (Cairo, 1965), p. 577. 67 See e.g. line 12. 68 See Iliya Sallm al-Hawi, Ibn al-Rumi (Beirut, 1959), pp. 203-204. 69 M. M. Badawi, "The Function of Rhetoric in Medieval Arabic Poetry", Journal of Arabic Literature > vol. IX (Leiden 1978), p. 56. 70 This is the poem beginning with Ghayru mujdm fl millati wrf-Hiqddilnawhu bdkin wa Id tarannumu shddr. shuruh Siqt al-Zand (Cairo, 1964), vol. Ill, pp. 971 rT. 71 Bonebakker, however, argues against associating the criticism of the bad? style with the controversy over old and new poetry. But this is taking the critics' own statements at their face value. See "Poets and Critics", op. tit., p. 105.

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al-kaldmi, translated by Kratchkovsky as 'dialectical mannerism'.72 It denotes a type of rational argumentation, an ability to produce subtle and ingenious ideas, a way of evolving images and conceits akin to the cwit' and the appellation 'Metaphysical' used by Dryden to describe Donne's cwit' and subsequently adopted and made famous by Dr. Johnson in his essay on Cowley in his Lives of the Poets. Indeed a comparison between these phenomena in the two poetic traditions is most illuminating. In a famous passage in his Discourse Concerning Satire (1693), Dryden complains that Donne 'perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, where he should engage their hearts and entertain them with the softness of love'.73 Similarly, al-madhhab al-kaldmi\s a term which, as has already been said, al-Muctazz took over from al-Jahiz, who, himself a follower of mu^ta^ila, rationalist theologians, was aware that underlying some of the poetry of the moderns was a cerebral type of activity not unlike that which marks the rationalist theology known as ^ilm al-kaldm. This is not at all surprising, since it is known that Abu Tammam who made al-badi^ his main style of writing was a mu'tazilite, not unacquainted with the work and methods of kaldm thinkers and that his poetry abounds in philosophical terms. In both cases the rigorous argumentative logic results in witty comparisons, surprising conceits and far-fetched images. In his essay on Cowley, Dr. Johnson complains that in the work of the Metaphysical poets there is discordia concors, 'a combination of dissimilar images or discovery of occult resemblences in things apparently unlike' that 'the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons and allusions'.74 Al-Amidi complains of similar things in Abu Tammam: he condemns his unfamiliar and far-fetched metaphors.75 Abu Tammam was often accused of obscurity, a charge that was later levelled at Mutanabbl, another poet who used badi* extensively and employed terms from Sufism and philosophy. Dr. Johnson's remarks on the extravagance and hyperbole of later Metaphysical poets admirably fit the later developments in badi* style, particularly the descriptive poetry of Ibn al-Muctazz and al-Sanawbari : 72

Kitdb al-Badi* of *Abd Allah ibn Al-MuHa^ ed. Ignatius Kratchkovsky (London, 1935), p. 17. 73 Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker (Oxford, 1900), vol. II, p. 19. 74 Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford, 1905), Vol. I, p. 20. 75 Al-Amidi, al-Muwa%anay ed. A. Saqr (Cairo, 1961), pp. 6, 256.

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their amplification had no limits; they left not only reason but fancy behind them; and produced combinations of confused magnificence, that not only could not be credited, but could not be imagined.76 Of course earlier Arabic poetry was not completely devoid of hyperbole and even sustained 'conceit*. There is, for instance, one memorable passage in the Pre-Islamic al-Nabigha of Dhubyan (in his eulogy of cAmr b. al-Harth,77) in which the conceit of the birds of prey circling over the army before the battle in anticipation of the victims is carried over five lines. But such conceits are solitary occurrences, and it is the cumulative force of these conceits, backed by ingenious and subtle thinking, the product of the rigorous logical argumentation of the time that gives the badi* of Abbasid poetry its peculiar flavour. A poet of a less philosophical cast of mind such as al-Buhturl, who was relatively free from the influence of contemporary thinkers was driven to complain of the current fashion of the infusion of logic in poetry, protesting that poetry surely has nothing to do with truth and logic.78 The results of this intellectual sophistication were, as is to be expected, much more striking in the qit'-a. The significant innovations introduced by the Umayyads were carried on to considerably greater lengths by the Abbasid poets, who expanded the horizons of Arabic poetry in several directions. At their hands the occasional Arabic poem acquired an unprecedented degree of complexity of sentiment and attitude, and an ironic tone hitherto unknown. Humour, for the first time, flourished in Arabic poetry—a significant development indeed, often revealing not only a comprehensive view of life where nothing deserves to be taken too seriously but also an urbane and cultured spirit reflected in the very allusiveness of the style of humour. Likewise, the mujun (buffoonery and gaiety) of love poetry addressed to women and at times to youths was not always just a product of simple hedonism, but was generally not free from a degree of awareness of the expense of spirit in a waste of shame, thus rendering the tone of such writings at once more convincing and moving. It is this awareness of ultimate issues in life and death, this (for lack of a better term) religious feeling, which gives Abu Nuwas's wine poetry 76 77

78

Samuel Johnson, op. tit., vol. I, p. 21. This is the poem beginning with Kilfm li-hammin yd Umaymata ndsibi\wa lay tin Uqasfhi batFi n-kawakibi (Ahlwardt, op. tit., pp. 2-3). Diwdn al-Buhturi, Dar Sadir, Beirut, 1962, vol. I, p. 234.

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(and not only his overtly religious poems) a deeply disturbing spiritual quality which was beyond the reach of Yazld b. al-Walid whose mind had been formed in an intellectually less developed and adventurous age. In one poem Abu Nuwas chides for his facile certainty and cocksureness the would-be philosopher who assumed that because of his weakness for wine the poet is bound to be denied God's forgiveness: 'You who claim to be a learned philosopher, you have learnt only one thing, while a great many others have eluded you',79 words almost to be echoed in Hamlet's sceptical remark to the equally cock-sure Horatio: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. (Hamlet, I, v. 165-6) This scepticism, this obsession with obstinate questionings, is an expression of the spiritual restlessness of the times, which also began to witness the first emergence of mystical (Suff} poetry (which was to flourish in the next century and later). It also helps to explain the work of Abu 'l-cAtahiya whose devotional verse, often expressed in a movingly simply language, at times attained a degree of profundity and emotiveness one associates with the best and most moving religious poetry of the world: tradition has it that al-Rashid was reduced to tears when he heard one such poem sung by his seamen.80 Abu Nuwas's wine poetry and religious poetry is all of a piece: the assertion made by some scholars that his religious poetry is the work of his later years, when the poet repented his sins, is very far from the truth; he wrote both types all along. And indeed a sensitive and intelligent analysis of his poetry, its language, imagery and structure, which, alas, is out of the question in a general treatment such as this, will reveal the complexity of his ambivalent attitude. Such an analysis of Abu Nuwas, as indeed of the vast mass of Arabic poetry, has been absent for a long time and it is only now beginning to be made by very few critics and scholars. Another feature of Abbasid poetry which will be revealed by such a close reading of the text is the creative manner in which poets made use of the poetic tradition either by turning a convention upside down, partly in order to poke fun at it while at the same time benefiting from it, or by manipulating it and utilizing it for their own purposes (such as providing a contrast with their own experiences). 79 80

Divan Abi Nuwas, ed. Ahmad cAbd al-Majid al-Ghazali (Beirut, n.d.), p. 7. Al-Anwar al-Zahiya fi Diwan Abi al-^Atahiya (Beirut, 1886), pp. 66-67.

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In both cases poets managed to produce poetry of supreme irony. To illustrate this point it will be sufficient here to cite two conventions: the ^udhri poetry convention and the atldl. Bashshar makes full use of the ^udhri love tradition which no doubt had already become firmly established by his time: he refers to earlier poets who were reputed to have died of love. At the opposite extreme he makes fun of the convention by making an ass relate how he has died of a desperate passion for a she-ass. Between these two extremes is the type of poem in which he falls in love with a woman whom he sets out by idealizing, and who tells him to behave like true lovers of old and perish from his passion for her, but he successfully manages to seduce her in the end: here the poet relates himself to the convention only to rise above it.81 A similar ironic relation is created towards the atldl convention by Abu Nuwas, when in a poem82 he half-jokingly turns the atldl convention upside down: it is not that the poet's beloved has deserted the campside which now lies in ruins before the lamenting poet. It is the poet himself who has deserted the place which is far from being destroyed. The irony is enriched by the fact that what is being deserted is a mosque, a place of piety (din), the implication being that he has turned his back on religion (and sought his solace in wine). The light-hearted opening brings out more fully the metaphysical implications of the poem: the poet's inconsolable grief at the transitoriness of human relationships and the departure and death of friends has made him desert religion and seek comfort in wine, a theme reinforced by the religious imagery (both Muslim and Christian) as well as the imagery derived from death, time and mutability which the poem contains. Another creative use of this convention occurs in the much more celebrated smiyya poem on Iwdn Kisrd (Khosrow's Ctesiphon) by al-Buhturl,83 a poet whose attitude to tradition is usually much more conformist. Starting from a mood of dejection as a result of his preoccupation with his impoverished condition, the poet sets out on a journey on his camel to the ruined remains of the Persian palace in search of diversion. There ensues a lively and sensitive description of the remains, in which the poet recreates in his inagination court scenes from the glorious Persian past—a masterpiece of des81 82 83

Al-Agham, vol. Ill, p. 164. Divan Abi Nuwas, pp. 3-5. Dlwan al-Buhturl, vol. I, pp. 190-94.

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criptive writing interspersed with the poet's meditations on time and mutability, life and death. Yet the whole thing is ironically related to the qasJda tradition, where the Pre-Islamic poet, musing on the ruins of the encampment of a past mistress sets out on a journey on his camel in search of diversion. Al-Buhturi's dejection is real and not a mere literary device caused by an imaginary love and the glory that was Persia, he is careful to point out, is not the insignificant remains of a desert encampment. Al-Buhturi's descriptive power, whether in this poem or in other works, such as his celebrated description of the pool in one of alMutawakkil's palaces, was recognized from the start. He is generally regarded among the most skilful descriptive poets in an age which witnessed remarkable developments in the descriptive genre. Yet on the whole al-Buhturi's treatment is much more straightforward than the subtler and more cerebral descriptions of his contemporary, Ibn al-Rumi, whose work contains many more surprising 'conceits'. It is not that Ibn al Rumi was incapable of writing simpler and more straightforward descriptive verse, as witness his magnificent description of the voice and manner of singing of his beloved singing girl Wahid, or his vivid and amusing portrayal of scenes from everyday life in the market place such as the making of pastry and sweetmeats, or of different dishes at a banquet. Again in his satirical poems (a genre made sharper and more personal in the Abbasid age) his eye was very much fixed on the object of his attack, thus providing several satirical portraits or caricatures in which he makes full use of people's physical deformities or distinguishing features such as a long face, protruding eyes, excessively long beard or a hunch back—although the scathing details in such attacks are not without biting c wit'. And some of the most celebrated descriptive Abbasid poetry which contains far-fetched imagery or metaphors is the work of Ibn al-Rumi. In one poem 84 he compares singing girls bending over their musical instruments to women nursing their babies. The comparison is carried over six lines in which points of analogy are pursued to their extremes, with a subtle hint at the miraculous healing power of music in the allusion to the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus. In another (in the amatory prelude to his panegyric on Ismacil b. Bulbul) the woman's individual features and parts of her body, no fewer than nine in number, are likened to different items from the 84

See al-Majdm al-Hadttha, vol. 3 (Beirut, 1961), pp. 127-28.

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world of vegetation, her figure likened to a bough, her buttocks to a hillock, her cheeks to apples, breasts to pomegranate, her hair to dark vine, her eyes to narcissi, etc . . . Although it has been argued by a recent scholar that he is the only Abbasid poet who endows nature with a life of its own and makes her a source of spiritual solace,85 Ibn al-RumTs descriptive nature poetry is clearly the work of an 'urban' poet who sees nature in an essentially civilized context. To him earth is proudly decked out like a maiden in embellished garments, boughs 'whisper' to one another while birds 'call out publicly/proclaim loudly', birds and boughs look 'intoxicated', the rainbow looks like 'many layers of women's clothes, each of a different colour and length'. After rain the earth comes out in bloom, displaying its beauty, looking like a once modest female accosting a male in order to ensnare him. The last stage in the 'conceited' style in descriptive verse is to be found by the time we reach Ibn al-Muctazz (861-908) and al-Sanawbari (-945?). It was called 'phantastic' by von Grunebaum and Heinrichs rightly described it as the logical consequence of the bad** style.86 Dr. Johnson's words about the later Metaphysical poets provide an accurate description: 'they left not only reason but fancy behind them; and produced combinations . . . that not only could not be credited, but could not be imagined'.87 Ibn al-Mu ctazz's energies were directed to the discovery of new startling comparisons, the star in the dark night is likened to an eye stealthily looking while the attention of those watching was distracted, the crescent moon is likened to a silver boat weighed down with a load of amber.88 Al-Sariyy al-Raffa* (-972) likens lilies to 'silver spoons with amber spots' 89 (These would be perfect examples of what Coleridge meant by Fancy in his famous distinction between Imagination and Fancy in Poetry.) Likewise, Sanawbarl writes of 'red anemones rising and falling like banners of ruby unfurled on spears of chrysolite'.90 In fact, in Sanawbarfs nature poetry we witness a fascinating phenomenon in which art and nature have become so inextricably inter85

Gregor Schoeler, Arabische Naturdichtung (Beirut, 1974), pp. 234, 369. Wolf hart Heinrichs, "Literary Theory: the Problem of its Efficiency", in G. E. von Grunebaum, ed., Arabic Poetry. Theory and Development (Wiesbaden, 1973), p. 26. 87 Samuel Johnson, op. cit.y vol. I, p. 21. 88 Divan Ibn al Mtfta^ Dar Sadir (Beirut, 1961), p. 247. 89 Diwan al-Sariyy al-Raffa> (Cairo, 1355 AH), p. 133. 90 Diwan al-Sanawbarz, ed. Ihsan cAbbas (Beirut, 1970), p. 477. 86

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twined that nature has become art and art nature and reality and conventions have exchanged places. 'The likening of gardens to lovers', he writes in one poem, 'has increased the lovers' love for gardens'. 'How many a girl's supple and delicate figure there is in the branches of trees. How many a cheek with a black mole in its pure red. How many a captivating fragrant mouth (lit. teeth), how many a winning eye'.91 Here, no doubt is the ultimate apotheosis of literary convention which itself has become a mode of apprehending reality—a perfect instance illustrating Professor Ernst Gombrich's thesis in Art and Illusion that man's apprehension of nature is determined by his art. Now instead of women being likened to boughs it is boughs that are being likened to women and apples look like cheeks. Roses, too, look like cheeks and narcissi like eyes,92 and cypress trees look like courtesans who have lifted their skirts. Al-Raffa* compares roses to cheeks flushed from 'blushing'.93 This attitude to nature is of course not an entirely new departure, but the culmination of several earlier strands, some of which are to be found even in Ibn al-Ruml. However, to see nature purely in terms of art is full of damaging implications both for art and for perception of nature. It points to the stagnation which was eventually to set in in Arab culture, in which convention would take over completely, to the exclusion of the possibility of any fresh vision of reality, as amply illustrated by the excessive artificiality and verbal acrobatics to which poetry was to be reduced in the course of time. Yet Sanawbari makes effective use of this attitude when he indulges in pure fantasy in such poems as those in which he imagines a dramatic war between flowers or a debate between the rose and the narcissus.94 Here the conception of poetry as mimesis becomes totally irrelevant, and indeed there is in them more than the mere absence of verisimilitude which characterizes medieval European debates such as The Owl and the Nightingale. Untramelled by the slightest hint that the poet is making a critical comment on life, directly or indirectly, be it through an allegory or otherwise, these delightful works by Sanawbari are frankly artificial creations of a whimsical and playful imagination. In them nature plays the human role assigned to it, 91 92 93 94

Ibid., pp. 462-3.

Ibid., p. 454.

Diwan al-Raffd\ p. 135. Dtoan al-Sanawbari, pp. 77-79; 498.

EARLY ISLAMIC POETRY AND POETICS FROM PRIMARY TO SECONDARY QASIDAS

373 31

a role, however, which man in his search for his own identity had originally found in nature itself. This tradition was kept alive by other poets, many of whom like al-Shabb al-Zarif (1262-1289) produced insipid imitations, but occasionally it was given an elegant and charming expression as in some of the work of Safiyy al-Dln al-Hilll (1277-1339). But this is taking us outside the many self-imposed limits of this essay. M. M. BADAWI

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14 TOWARD A REDIFINITION OF (loyalty, fidelity) 133, 134 wafir metre 33-4, 355 Wahb, Banu 111, 144n. 9 Wahid 243, 249, 250 Wahid 370 Wahid beauty 248 charms 254-6, 257, 259-60, 261-2, 263

428

INDEX

physical posture 259 see also Ibn al-Rumi wajd (ardour) 222 Wajrah 286 al-Walid b. cAbd al-Malik, Jarir's naqa'id 353 al-Walid b. Yazid, wine poems 358-9 Wallada bt. al-Mustakfi 191n. 15 war motif, panegyrics 85, 87, 89 wasf (description) 241-4, 307 wasf al-rab? 84, 86, 88 Wasil ibn 'Ata' 378, 383 kalam 379, 380 water, as sexual and ablutionary 334, 335 water imagery, cAntarah, Mu'allaqah 313-14 water motifs 63 water-courses, laying bare motif 58, 59 water-rain imagery 300n. 1ll al-Wathiq 100, 101, 383, 384 accession 86, 89 eulogised by cUmara b. cAqil 106 exiles Marwan b. Abi 1-Janub b. Abi Hafsa 103 White, Allo'n 237n. 5 on self-conception 239n. 65 on transgression 234 wild ass motif 306 journey sections 292-3, 293-4 wild asses (himar Al-wahsh) 286-8 wild bull motif 306 in journey sections 292-3 journey sections 293, 294 wild cow motif 288n. 81, 290, 291n. 95 Labld's treatment 58, 59, 60 and ostrich motif 303n. 119 wine, description 238n. 27 wine poems 220-1, 355, 367-8 expression of self-transcendence 234-7 khamriya 358-9 logic 228-37 portrayal of self-dissolution 221-4, 232 and self-dissolution 224-8 style 362-3 womanhood, Imru' al-Qays's treatment of 72 women failing success with 204-5 heroism 172 panegyrics 196n. 64 Wright, John 340n. 29

Wright, Owen, on music and verse 248n. 22 Yahya ibn Nawfal 379 al-Yamama 103 Ya'qub ibn Da'ud 137n. 34 Yaqut, on Abu l-cAyna' 112 Yashkuriy al-Munakkal, poetic styles 344 see al-Munakhkhal al-Yashkuri Yazid b. Muhammad al-Muhallabi, panegyrics 105-6 Yazid b. al-Walid, poetic style 368 youth, and old age 86-7 Yugoslavia oral poetry 7-9 poets 11, 13, 14, 25 zaby (antelope) motifs, in qasidahs 291 Zaha 245n. 17 za'inah 294 zalim 291 Zalzal (slave-girl musician) 246n. 18 al-zaman (fate) 91 za'n motif 296, 297n. 103, 298-9, 298n. 104, 300-1, 301n. 113, 308 Zanadiqah, heterodoxy 380 Zandaqah, disputes with Islam 383 zarf (refined, elegant manners) 251 zarifs (gentlemen) 251 al-Zawzam, Sharh al-mucallaqat al-sabc 56 al-Zayyat 384 zihafat 30 Ziyad al-Acjam 395 Zuhayr ibn Abi Sulma 41 age 5 animal and bird motifs 29In. 92 animal motifs 283 in qasidas 291n. 95 camel motifs 297 description of attendant maidens 299n. 108 formulas used 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 48-50 from Imru3 al-Qais 52 from Labid 53 poetic style 25 poetic treatment of love 205 qasidas 349 use of fictitious names 127n. 14 wild cow motifs 288n. 81 Zuni Indians, creation myths 57 Zwettler, Michael, The Oral Tradition of Classical Arabic Poetry 55