“Stop and We Will Weep: The Mu‘allaqah”
“Stop and We Will Weep: The Mu‘allaqah”
by Imru al-Qays
THE LITRARY WORK
One of seven celebrated Mv‘allaqah (Suspended Odes; sing. Mu‘allaqah) set m pre-Islamic Arabia; orally composed in Arabic (as Kifat mhki mm dhikm hablbm wa-manzih) around the mid-sixth century C.E.; compiled in written form in the eighth to ninth centuries; published in English in 1782.
SYNOPSIS
A melancholy poet stops with his two companions at a ruined abode and mourns his lost beloved who once dwelt there. After reminiscing about a series of erotic escapades, he spends a troubled night of inner turmoil. Day breaks to reveal the heroic poet and his steed on an oryx hunt, and the poem closes with a description of a destructive yet purifying desert storm.
Events in History at the Time of the Poem
Imru al-Qays ibn Hujr (d. circa 550 C.E.) was one of the most renowned poets of pre-Islamic Arabia. His biography, like that of most of the classical pre-Islamic poets, straddles legend and history. According to the most common account of his life, he was the youngest son of Hujr, the last great chieftain of the southern Arabian tribal group Kindah and king over the unruly tribes of the Banu Asad and Banu Ghatafan. The young Imru al-Qays’s devotion to poetry, especially erotic poetry, led to his banishment from his father’s house. His father instructed his servant Rabfah to put his son to death and bring back his eyes as evidence that he had carried out the order. Taking pity on the boy, Rabi’ah killed an antelope and brought back its eyes instead. Hujr later repented, and Imru al-Qays returned to his father’s house. But later banished once again, he took up the life of a profligate, wandering the desert with a band of companions, devoting himself to the hunt, wine, gambling, and slave-girls. Such was his state when news reached him of the regicide of his father, Hujr, at the hands of the rebellious Banu Asad. Exclaiming “wine today, business tomorrow!” Imru al-Qays caroused for one more day, then swore off his debauchery to devote himself to avenging his father: “Wine and women are forbidden to me until I have killed a hundred of the Banu Asad and cut the forelocks of a hundred more!” (Stetkevych, Mute Immortals, p. 245). With help from other tribes, he proceeded to inflict heavy casualties on the Banu Asad. Still not satisfied, he spent the rest of his days seeking further vengeance for his slain father. His search for allies led him to the Jewish prince of Tayma, al-Samaw’al, to whom Imru al-Qays entrusted his ancestral coats of armor before making his way to the court of the Byzantine emperor Justinian. At first Justinian lent Imru al-Qays an army with which to avenge his father’s murder and regain his throne, but rumors that he had seduced Justinian’s daughter prompted the emperor to send the poet a poisoned robe. When Imru al-Qays donned the garment, his body broke out in sores, earning him the nickname “the man covered with sores.” The condition proved fatal; the poet supposedly lies buried near Ankara, where he received the poisoned gift. Whatever truth there is in the legends, his “Stop and We Will Weep,” more commonly known as “The Mu’ allaqah of Imru al-Qays,” became the most renowned work of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and provided later Arab Islamic society with a dramatic portrait of its pagan tribal past.
Events in History at the Time of the Poem
The pre-Islamic age
The Muslims termed their pagan past the Jahiliyah (Age of Ignorance) and considered it to have come to an end with the advent of Islam (dated from Prophet Muhammad’s emigration from Mecca to Medina in 622 C.E.—year number one of the Islamic Hijrah calendar). Jahiliyah therefore refers to the period from about the fifth to early seventh centuries C.E., in the Arabian Peninsula and the Arabized regions of Syria and Iraq.
The culture of the Jahiliyah was orally preserved in poetry and lore inherited and compiled in written form during the early Islamic centuries. The Arabs of this period were primarily Bedouin, pastoralist tribes who migrated seasonally in search of pasturage for their herds of camels, sheep, and goats. A martial ethos developed among the warrior class of the tribal elites, who defended the tribe, its herds, grazing lands, and water holes from the incursions of competitors, and raided them for plunder. This pastoral economy depended primarily on the camel: wealth was measured by the size of one’s herds; major obligations such as the blood-price and bride-price were paid in camels. In addition to meat, milk, and camel-hair, the camel provided transportation through the stark desert climes of Arabia, so that a major component of the Bedouin economy was providing a supply of camels to caravan merchants. By contrast, the greatly prized and pampered Arabian horse was reserved for the use of the warrior aristocracy in battle and the hunt.
The tribal society of pre-Islamic Arabia flourished at the margins of the great dominions of its day, the Christian Byzantine Empire with its capital at Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey) and the Persian Sasanian Empire with its capital at Ctesiphon (southeast of present-day Baghdad, Iraq). Subject to these two empires were Arab kingdoms, the Ghassanids of Syria, who were vassals of the Byzantines, and the Lakhmids, who were vassals of the Sasanians. To the south, in what is now Yemen, was the South Arabian kingdom of the Himyarites. Thus, besides their own indigenous Arab Semitic culture, with its ritual and mercantile center at Mecca, the Arabs of the Jahiliyah were heirs to a dynamic mix of influences—the Ancient Near Eastern, Hellenistic, Byzantine, Persian, and South Arabian cultures, and the religious traditions of Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism.
In addition to the Arab kingdoms of the Ghassanids and Lakhmids, the pre-Islamic period witnessed the continual formation and dissolution of a variety of tribal federations in which a powerful chieftain or overlord ruled almost like a king. Examples of tribal chieftains who accrued such power are Hujr, the father of Imru al-Qays, and, perhaps most renowned in the lore of pre-Islamic Arabia, Kulayb Wa’il, the instigator of the infamous War of al-Basus.
Muruwwah and the warrior aristocracy
A full male member (hurr, “free man”) of the tribe’s warrior elite was expected to behave according to a system of moral values that can be subsumed under the term muruwwah (virtue, manliness). Chief among them was “nobility” or “generosity” (karam), coupled with might and valor. A man so endowed would be willing to sacrifice his life in battle to avenge a slain kinsman or in the hunt to provide sustenance for his people. He prided himself on giving of his wealth—slaughtering his finest camels to serve the guest or stranger, or sustaining the indigent and those under his protection when in need, or supplying comrades with wine in times of celebration. He was expected to speak eloquently and authoritatively at tribal councils on behalf of tribal rights and customs. A man of noble character exercised the virtue of hilm (forbearance), acting with restraint and clemency, as opposed to its antonym, the vice of jahl (recklessness), losing self-control and acting out of passion.
Jahl, blood-vengeance, and the War of al-Basus
Central to the moral and political economy of the Jahiliyah was the law of blood-vengeance. This stipulated that if a kinsman was killed by an enemy, his blood was to be avenged by slaying a man of equal rank from the enemy tribe. If a man was slain by one of his own kin, presumably by accident, then, rather than engaging in hostilities that would be divisive and destructive to the kin-group, the blood-price (normally 100 she-camels) was paid. The law of blood-vengeance thus served as a deterrent to violence, on the one hand, and a limitation to it on the other. Failure to observe this law could prove disastrous: a tribe that failed to avenge its slain would soon be marked as weak and conquered by a stronger tribe; a tribe that wreaked
HEROIC VALUES
The heroic values of the jahiliyah are summed up in the term murwwah, meaning “manliness” or “virtue” Poetry was the main vehicle for the expression and celebration of these values, as shown in a renowned poem attributed to at-Samaw’al, a Jewish Arab poet of the Jahiliyah:
When a moan’s honor is not stained by iniquity,
Then every robe he dons becomes him.
When a man’s sou! cannot bear the burden of injustice,
He will find the road to honest praise cut off
[Our clanswoman] reviles us for being few in number,
“The noble” I reply, “are always few”.
………………….
No lord of ours dies quietly in bed,
And none of us, once slain, lies unavenged.
Our sotuls flow out from us on sword-blades,
And save for on the sword, they don’t flow out
Limpid is our lineage; we are not muddied.
Our root was kept pure by dams who bore us well and well-bred stallions.
………………….
For we are as pure as the storm-cloud’s water:
There is no blunt blade in our grip and no miser among us
………………….
When a chief among us passes on, another chief stands in his stead,
Eloquent m the speech of noble men, forceful in deeds.
(al-Samaw’al ibn Adtya rn Stetkevych, Abu Tammam, pp. 291–93, with changes)
excessive vengeance would unleash uncontrollable and devastating violence. The quest for vengeance in excess of what the law of retaliation required was an instance of jaM, of reckless impetuosity. Imru al-Qays’s unquenchable thirst for vengeance for his slain royal father, al-Hujr, is clearly such a case. So, too, is the infamous blood-feud of the Jahiliyah, the War of al-Basus.
This 40-year conflict was ignited when the overbearing tribal chieftain Kulayb Wa’il killed the she-camel of al-Basus, a kinswoman by marriage, who was under his protection. Her kinsman al-Jassas impetuously retaliated by slaying his brother-in-law Kulayb Wa’il, setting off an inexorable chain of vengeance and counter-vengeance between the kindred clans of the Banu Bakr (al-Jassas’s clan) and the Banu Taghlib (the clan of Kulayb). The chief protagonist and leading poet of the War of al-Basus was Kulayb’s younger brother Muhalhil.
Arabic literary lore depicts Muhalhil, before the death of his brother Kulayb, as a feckless, self-indulgent, and resentful adolescent. While alive, Kulayb chastises his younger brother for being a dandy who spends his time flirting with women, gambling, and drinking wine. However, when Kulayb is slain, Muhalhil abandons his debauchery and swears an oath to avenge his brother. So exaggerated is his estimation of his brother’s worth that he refuses the Banu Bakr’s offer of 1,000 she-camels—ten times the standard blood-price of 100 she-camels. Instead, Muhalhil slays Bujayr, whose death was generally esteemed to even the score, exclaiming famously “Die in retaliation for Kulayb’s sandal-strap!” (al-Nuwayri in Stetkevych, Mute Immortals, p. 224). As intimated by this line, many would die on both sides and the kindred clans of Bakr and Taghlib would be forever split asunder before the thirst for vengeance would be slaked.
The War of al-Basus provides a literary, cul-tural, and historical backdrop to the life, legend, and Poetry of Imru al-Qays. The law of blood-vengeance and the tragic consequences of defying its limits, the existence of an Oedipal resentment between Kulayb and Muhalhil and later Hujr and Imru al-Qays, the dramatic shift from self-indulgence and familial resentment to extravagant blood-lust: all of these dramatic elements are shared by these two episodes of the Jahiliyah. It should come as no surprise then that Muhalhil is said to be Imru al-Qays’s maternal uncle—a genealogy that may in truth be more literary than historical.
Women in the Jahiliyah
A primary point of honor for the tribal elite was that its female kin—mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters—live in chaste and guarded luxury. A girl’s virginity was jealously guarded until marriage, and after marriage, only her husband had sexual rights to her. As the Arab poet’s beloved is from this social stratum, many poems provide an idealized picture of such a “free woman” (hurrah): confined largely to the women’s tents, they traveled in large how-dahs —tentlike structures borne by bulky male camels. Their skin is described as delicate and pale. Attended by servant- and slave-girls, these “free women” need not work so their bodies grow plump, their hands are smooth and uncallused. The poetry speaks of their having the soft dark eyes of the gazelle or oryx-doe, lush locks of black hair, and a taste for luxury goods such as silks and rare perfumes. Well protected, they appear in public only in times of crisis: during the ritual lamentation for a slain kinsman, the equally ritual incitement of their menfolk to vengeance and battle, or when taken captive by a raiding tribe.
The pampered life of the “free women” of the tribal elite is in direct contrast to that of servant-and slave-girls or women of indigent subject tribes, who serve their mistresses, and, together with the boys and men of the lower orders, undertake the domestic chores of the Bedouin encampment and tend the herds. Likewise, chastity is not the slave-girl’s lot, rather, she is “defiled / By every hand” (Hind bint Hudhayfah in Stetkevych, Mute Immortals, p. 198)
The structure and themes of the qasidah
The lore and poetry that have come down to us from the Jahiliyah, or Age of Ignorance, were, for the most part, orally composed and preserved by the warrior aristocracy of tribal Arabia. At the courts of the Lakhmids and Ghassanids, poets competed in offering poems of praise, and tribes, too, had their tribal poets and poetic traditions. The pre-eminent poetic form was the ode, or qasidah, that encoded and celebrated the values of the warrior aristocracy and became, in Islamic times, the literary and cultural foundation for Islamic concepts of heroism and nobility of character. Although by no means uniform, the qasidah had many conventional features. It might range in length from about 15 to 80 lines, each composed of two half lines, but always maintained the same meter and rhyme throughout.
Literary scholars of the Islamic period recognized three main structural units of the qasidah:
1) the nasib, an elegiac and amorous introductory section whose major themes are the ruined encampment where the poet’s beloved once dwelt, and the poet’s reminiscence of his lost beloved;
2) the rahil, a journey, in which the solitary poet completes a perilous desert crossing mounted on his trusty she-camel, which is often described at length; 3) the “goal” of the poem, most often either fakhr, the poet’s boastful celebration of himself and his tribe, or madih, the praise of a patron to whom the poet comes as supplicant. This final section is characterized by the triumphal description and celebration of the heroic virtues of the warrior aristocracy: raids and battles, blood-vengeance, the hunt, slaughtering prized she-camels to feed the indigent, speaking with eloquence and authority in tribal councils.
It is important to note in examining the structure of the classical qasidah that the emotional trajectory of the thematic sections describes a psycho-social rite of passage from the immature and impassioned adolescent self-involvement, through the solitary quest for self-knowledge, to the integration of the poet into the mature, heroic warrior aristocracy of his tribe.
The Poem in Focus
Contents overview
The “Mu’allaqah of Imru al-Qays” conforms to the mood-and-theme sequence of the qasidah form, except that it exhibits a two-part, rather than three-part, structure. The first section of the poem is the lyric-elegiac prelude (nasib), in which a melancholy poet expresses his nostalgia over the irretrievable past. To convey this, Imru al-Qays invokes the traditional images of the poet weeping over an abandoned Bedouin encampment and the poet’s reminiscence of his former mistress, or, in Imru al-Qays’s case, former mistresses. The nasib concludes with a despondent and troubling night scene, which, inasmuch as it effects a psychological transition in the poet, serves a structural function similar to that of the traditional desert journey (rahil). The second section of the poem is the martial heroic boast (fakhr), in which the poet celebrates his manly virtue (muruwwah) as a member of the tribal warrior aristocracy. The poet and his steed appear in an early morning oryx hunt that leads into a description of the horse. Then the poem closes with a dramatic depiction of a desert storm.
Nasib
“The Mufallaqah” opens with the convention of the poet asking his two companions to stop awhile so that he might weep at the ruins of the encampment where his beloved once dwelt. He evokes place-names of the Bedouin desert, situating in both geography and memory the locus of his lost love:
Halt, two friends, and we will weep
for the memory of one beloved
And an abode at Siqt al-Liwa
between al-Dakhul, then Hawmal,
Then Tudih, then Miqrat, whose trace
was not effaced
By the two winds weaving over it
from south and north.
You see the droppings
of white antelope
Scattered on its outer grounds and lowlands
like peppercorns.
(Imru al-Qays, “The Mu’allaqah of Imru al-Qays,” lines 1–3, in Stetkevych, Mute Immortals, pp. 249–50)
The poet’s memory of his beloved unleashes an uncontrollable flood of tears that, in turn, unleashes a flood of memories of other amorous encounters. This unexpectedly long description of his erotic escapades diverges from typical qasidah proportions. Imru al-Qays’s nasib section extends to over 40 lines, whereas normally a nasib for an ode of this length would continue for about 15 lines. This in itself suggests the poet’s excessive attachment to romantic involvements and failure to move on to the more manly pursuits of the fakhr section. His adventures include affairs with two married women, Umm al-Huwayrith and her neighbor Umm al-Rabab (lines 7–8); the day he slew his mount for a group of virgins at Darat Juljul (lines 10–12); his escapade in the camel-litter with the coquettish Unayzah (lines 13–15); his scandalous lovemaking with a woman who is both pregnant and nursing (lines 16–17); and his rocky relationship with Fatimah, whose love slew his heart (lines 19–22). A final extended erotic description is devoted to a woman he refers to as “the ‘egg’ of the curtained quarters,” meaning a beautiful protected virgin whose formidable kinsmen stand guard over her to ward off any would-be seducers. From the description of her life of guarded luxury, one surmises that she is the pampered and protected daughter of the tribal aristocracy:
Many an “egg” of the curtained quarters,
whose tent none dares seek,
I took my pleasure with her,
unhurried.
I stole past guards
to get to her, past clansmen
Eager, could they conceal it,
to slay me.
......................
I came when she, before the tent curtain,
had shed her clothes for sleep,
And was clad in nothing but
an untied shift.
......................
I led her forth from her tent,
walking as she trailed
Over our tracks the train
of her gown of figured silk.
......................
I drew her temples toward me, and she
leaned over me
With a hollow waist, but plump the place
that anklets ring.
......................
In the forenoon crumbs of musk
still deck her bed,
And she, late morning sleeper, still is clad
in sleeping-gown, ungirded.
(“The Mu‘allaqah,” lines 23, 24, 26, 28, 30, 37)
Imru al-Qays concludes this last extended amorous description by declaring that his paramour is so irresistible that even the staid mature man cannot help but be moved to passion by her beauty, much less the disconsolate poet.
At this point, the poet’s despondency, which was sparked by the scene of the abandoned encampment and the reminiscences of failed love affairs that it engendered, deepens. We find the solitary poet overwhelmed by the sorrows of a seemingly endless night, what might be termed the poet’s “dark night of the soul”:
Many a night like the billowing sea
let down its veils over me
With all kinds of cares
to test me.
......................
Then, oh, what a night you are!
as if its stars
Were bound by tight-twisted ropes
to Mount Yadhbul,
As if the Pleiades werein midcourse suspended
By flaxen cords
from obdurate rock.
(“The Mu‘allaqah,” lines 44, 47, 48)
Thus, the nasib ends with the poet in a state of spiritual crisis in the suspended animation of the endless night. The poem does not say what has set off this crisis, but from the flood of cares that overwhelms him and the motionlessness of the stars, one can deduce a sense of spiritual paralysis. The poet’s emotional life is stalled and, as the series of fruitless erotic escapades suggests, rather than maturing, the poet suffers from arrested development. Nevertheless, as the ensuing fakhr section establishes, the “dark night of the soul” also serves as a period of incubation, self-realization, and maturation.
Fakhr
The shift from the melancholy despondency of the night scene that ends the nasib to the heroic celebratory boast that characterizes the fakhr section is signaled by the temporal change from night to early morning and by a change in subject to the poet’s steed. As a mount, the horse was reserved for the heroic pursuits of the hunt and the battle, and it is therefore fitting that it makes its appearance in the fakhr section. It is understood by association that the might, prowess, and muscular beauty of his steed are ultimately the poet’s own:
I would ride forth early,
the birds still in their nests,
On a steed sleek and swift,
a shackle for wild game, huge.
Now wheeling, now charging, advancing, retreating,
all at once,
Like a mighty boulder the torrent has washed
down from the heights.
(“The Mu‘allaqah,” lines 53–54)
The description of the steed’s speed, strength, and prowess leads into a depiction of its skill in the hunt, and the ensuing feast:
There appeared before us an oryx herd
as if its cows were virgins
Circling round a sacred stone
in long-trained gowns.
......................
One after the other, [the steed] hit
a bull and cow,
And yet was not awash
with sweat.
(“The Mu’allaqah,” lines 64, 67)
The horse passage concludes by telling us how precious the poet’s steed is, how dazzling to the eye, how carefully tended:
And our glance, in the evening,
almost failed before him,
To whatever spot the eye was raised,
dazzled, it dropped.
All night he remained, his saddle and bridle
upon him,
All night he stood beneath my gaze, not
loosed to graze.
(“The Mu’allaqah,” lines 69, 70)
The most unusual feature of Imru al-Qays’s “Mual-laqah” is its concluding passage, the magnificent storm scene. While the other thematic passages of his ode are conventional, the description of a desert storm is far less common. It occurs in precisely that place where the conventions of the genre would lead us to expect a battle scene, or some other description of the military or political might of the poet’s tribe, or of its wealth and generosity.
The storm scene opens with the poet and his companion observing the storm from afar and trying to predict its course from the clouds and lightning:
O friend, do you see the lightning?
There is its flash—
Like two hands shining in a high-crowned
cumulus!
......................
Over Mount Qatan, as I read the signs,
the right flank of its downpour falls,
Over Mount al-Sitar, then Mount Yadhbul,
falls the left.
(“The Mu’allaqah,” lines 72, 74)
Imru al-Qays depicts the two-fold might of storm, both its destructive (overturning trees and buildings) and life-giving (often in terms of robes and fabric) aspects:
Then in the forenoon it was pouring
its water down around Kutayfah,
Overturning the lofty kanahbal trees
upon their beards.
......................
In Tayma it did not leave
a single palm trunk standing,
Or a single castle but
those built of stone.
As if Mount Thabir in the foremost
of its rains
Were a tribal chieftain wrapped
in a striped cloak.
......................
It deposited its load on
the low-lying desert
Like a Yemeni [merchant] alighting with
his [fabric]-laden bags.
(“The Mu’allaqah,” lines 75, 77, 78, 80)
The poem closes with a sublime couplet that evokes all the ancient Near Eastern mythic and symbolic associations of the flood: death and rebirth, pollution and purification, the corruption of the flesh versus the immaculateness of the spirit. Beginning with the intoxicated birds of the purified spirit, the couplet contrasts them to the dross corpses of the flesh:
As if, early in the morning,
the songbirds of the valley
Had drunk a morning draught
of fine spiced wine.
As if the wild beasts drowned at evening
in its remotest stretches
Were wild onions’
plucked-out bulbs.
(“The Muallaqah,” lines 81, 82)
Instead of the expected celebration of tribal glory, the ode ends with mythic-symbolic imagery of universal significance.
The main sections of Imru al-Qays’s “Mu al- laqah”—the lyric-elegiac nasib, with its ruined encampment, reminiscences of amorous escapades, and the care-filled night, followed by the virile celebratory fakhr with its monumental horse passage and formidable storm scene—fulfill the expectations of mood and subject for a qasidah, or ode, but with this final twist.
The tragic-heroic pattern
The pre-Islamic Arabic ode depicts the ethos of the Bedouin warrior aristocracy, much as the Homeric epic does for archaic Greece. We can detect in the Greek hero Achilles’ behavior a pattern of immature and adolescent self-indulgence and arrested development (his mother disguises him in women’s clothes so he won’t have to serve in the Trojan War; he seems to pout endlessly over Agamemnon’s taking away his slave-girl Briseis; he long refuses to go into battle). In a dramatic transformation Achilles grows enraged and goes to battle sworn to extravagant vengeance for the death of his friend Patroclus. The tragic-heroic transformation of the petulant adolescent into the impetuous avenger appears in the Arabic tradition as well, where both Muhalhil, the poet-protagonist of the War of al-Basus, and later his sister’s son, Imru al-Qays, fit the mold. They both exhibit Oedipal resentment and irresponsible adolescent behavior—womanizing, wine-drinking, and gambling. Likewise, both cast aside their profligate ways to fulfill an oath of vengeance that far exceeds tribal standards of just vengeance.
Although Imru al-Qays’s profligate youth as depicted in the literary lore of his life resonates with the extensive erotic escapades that fill the long nasib of his “Mu allaqah,” the ode is by no means merely a rhymed and metered rendition of the poet’s biographical lore. Still, it is possible to detect in the way the poet uses the structurally determined moods and themes of the qasidah genre the same tragic-heroic pattern that informs the lore of his life. The poetic details of the nasib —stopping at the ruined abode, the poet’s tears, the unduly long series of amorous escapades, and the endless care-filled night—can be understood as expressions of prolonged adolescence and arrested psychological development on the part of the poet. In the larger tribal scheme of things, immaturity is characterized by self-indulgence, whereas maturity, which we can equate with muruwwah (manliness, virtue), consists above all of shouldering the obligations of the warrior elite: to risk one’s life to avenge a dead kinsman, to take part in the hunt, to provide camels for slaughter to feed the tribe, its guests, and its hangers-on.
The first indicator of the poet’s immaturity is his excessive weeping. In the tribal ethos, women and children shed tears, whereas men shed blood—either in battle or the hunt. The poem opens with weeping, and the poet intensifies the motif into a major theme: lines 4–6 describe his shedding copious tears, until his comrades bid him, “Don’t perish out of grief, / control yourself!” to which the poet replies, “Surely my cure is tears / poured forth” (“The Muallaqah,” lines 5–6). More than 30 lines later, the poet remains disconsolate and is quite explicit about how, unlike other men, he has failed to outgrow the passions of youth:
[Grown] men find consolation from
the follies of their youth
But my heart refuses solace for
its love for you.
(“The Mu’allaqah,” line 42)
The sheer number of the poet’s amorous encounters suggests his inability to settle down and grow up, especially if we keep in mind that the traditional nasib features a poet reminiscing about one lost love only. The details of this poet’s escapades only reinforce the idea of relationships that are immature, unstable, illicit, and without (at least legitimate) issue. Indeed, they are diametrically opposed to sanctioned marriage (the hallmark of mature and responsible sexuality) and an outrage to the jealously guarded chastity of the women of the tribal elite.
The first two affairs involve married women, Umm (“mother of) al-Huwayrith and Umm al-Rabab (“The Mu allaqah,” line 7), thus compounding fornication with adultery. By contrast, the poet’s escapade at Darat Juljul is an adolescent frolic, in which the image of the virgins playing with the fringes of camel-fat, rather than cooking and eating the meat, suggests immature amorous play rather than consummated mature sexuality. Next, the comic “instability” of the poet’s exploits is highlighted in his fumbling attempt to seduce Unayzah as she rides in her enclosed camel litter. In what one is tempted to read as sexual double-entendre, she cries that the speaker has crippled her camel with his extra weight and commands him to get down, to which he replies that she should take it easy (“The Mu’allaqah,” lines 14–15).
The following episode contains what the classical Arab critics considered some of the most obscene lines of the Arabic poetic tradition. Here the poet is having sex with a married woman who is both pregnant and nursing—thus not only betraying her husband, but neglecting both the newborn and unborn:
Then many a woman like you, pregnant and nursing,
have I visited by night
And distracted from her amuleted
one-year-old.
When he cried from behind her, she turned
her upper half toward him,
But the half that was beneath me
did not budge.
(“The Mu‘allaqah,” lines 16, 17)
The last affair in the poem, that of the “egg’” of the curtained quarters,” again emphasizes the illicit nature of the relationship, as the determined poet steals by guards to get to his paramour, risking his life at the hands of her murderously protective kinsmen. Quite contrary to licit marital relations within a tribal enclosure, he leads her out into the desert:
I led her forth from her tent,
......................
Then, when we had crossed
the clan’s enclosure
And made our way to a sandy hollow
surrounded by long winding dunes,
I drew her temples toward me….
(“The Muallaqah,” lines 28, 29, 30)
A restless night follows, in which the ode conveys the same failure of maturation, this time not through amorous exploits but through a sense of psychological paralysis, which seems to grip the poet in his seemingly endless, care-ridden night. The poet’s impatient plea, “Alas, long night, will you not dispel,” points to his own arrested development, while “The Pleiades… / in mid course suspended” is above all a metaphor for the poet’s own psychological stagnation (“The Mu’allaqah,” lines 46, 48). At the same time, the psychological interiority of the night scene suggests that it is an incubation period, a period in which, through self-examination and realization of his immaturity, the poet experiences a profound inner growth that allows him to suddenly “emerge” in the heroic hunt scene that ensues. In this respect, although on the surface the night scene differs in subject matter from the conventional rahil (journey section), in “The Mu’allaqah,” it effects the same self-discovery. The psychological growth is parallel to that achieved by a solitary poet braving the hardships and terrors of the desert crossing on his trusty she-camel.
The fakhr (boast) section is signaled by a dramatic shift from the motionless despondency of the night scene to the stirring exuberance of the early morning hunt. As if to highlight this contrast, the opening lines of the jakhr section abound in images and diction of dynamic movement: “a steed sleek and swift,” “Pouring forth his gallop” (“The Mu‘allaqah,” lines 53, 57). Above all, there is the tremendous energy and momentum of line 54: “Now wheeling, now charging, advancing, retreating, all at once, / Like a mighty boulder the torrent has washed down from the heights” (“The Mu’allaqah,” line 54). The descriptions of the steed convey energy and motion, and, in the comparisons to boulders and a rain-driven torrent, suggest fertility and virility, associated with the horse and the hunt. This imagery subtly prepares the ground for the final storm scene as well.
Other symbolically important elements of the horse and hunt scene are the many allusions to licit tribal life. Here we should keep in mind that the heroic hunt on horseback is a chief responsibility, as well as the exclusive right, of the mature male member of the warrior aristocracy of tribal Arabia. In the Darat Juljul escapade of the nasib the virgins are described as childishly frolicking, but, as noted, there is no cooking or eating of the poet’s camel’s flesh (“The Mif allaqah,” lines 10–12). By contrast, in the jakhr section the horse’s gallop is compared to “a cauldron’s boil”; the oryx are compared to virgins, but when their blood is shed, the meat is cooked and fed to the members of the tribe (“The Mu‘ allaqah,” lines 56, 64, 68). Cultural imagery appears in a series of comparisons: of the steed’s rump to “a stone/A bride pounds perfumes with”; of the oryx’s blood on the steed’s throat to henna on an old man’s hair; of the oryx cows to “virgins / Circling round a sacred stone / in long-trained gowns” (“The Muf allaqah,” lines 62, 63, 64). Perhaps the most telling metaphor for natural power tamed to serve society, in other words, of the mature male who subordinates his personal desires to the needs of the tribe, is the image that closes the horse passage: that of the steed kept all night tethered before the poet’s eye, in his saddle and bridle, not free to graze (“The Mu’allaqah,” line 70).
At the point where both the poetics of the qasidah structure and the biographical lore about Imru al-Qays might have led us to expect a blood-vengeance battle scene, the poet surprises us with the majestic storm scene. This might not be as divergent from conventional expectations as it seems at first glance. If we keep in mind that in the tribal ethos of pre-Islamic Arabia, blood shed in vengeance for a slain kinsman was understood to revitalize the kin group, we can detect in the imagery of the destructive yet revitalizing might of the desert storm a metaphorically identical pattern of pollution and purification, death and rebirth. The overturning of trees “upon their beards” and the knocking down of palm trunks and all but the strongest buildings suggest acts of war as well as forces of nature (“The Mu’ allaqah,” lines 75, 76).
The reconstitution of the social fabric, that is, the revitalization of the polity through the achievement of blood vengeance, is likewise hinted at in the metaphors that describe the rain-ravaged mountains—” a tribal chieftain wrapped / in a striped cloak”—and in the similes that describe the herbs that spring up on the low-lying desert “Like a Yemeni [merchant] alighting with / his [fabric]-laden bags” (“The Mu’allaqah,” lines 78–80). Further, the pre-Islamic ritual of drinking wine to celebrate the achievement of blood vengeance lurks eerily below the surface of the otherwise idyllic closing couplet: the early moming warbling of songbirds drunk on spiced wine is contrasted with the evening scene of bulb-like bloated bodies of beasts drowned in the torrent’s flood.
The beauty and genius of the closing passage lie precisely in Imru al-Qays’s substitution of the anticipated blood-vengeance battle with the destructive yet revitalizing desert rainstorm. In the tribal ethos of pre-Islamic Bedouin Arabia, this substitution suggests metaphorical equivalence—blood-vengeance in the tribal ethos is a form of destruction that renews and revitalizes the kin-group, just as the mighty and devastating desert storm revives the desert, turning its barren tracts into lush pasturage. Thus, however grounded “The Mu’allaqah of Imru al-Qays” may be in the local tribal feuds of the Jahiliyah, through his employ of the tragic-heroic pattern and the image of the purifying flood, Imru al-Qays has created a poem of broad, indeed universal, appeal, in which the cultures and religions of the ancient Near East still resonate.
Sources and literary context
Given the historical uncertainties in the oral transmission of both pre-Islamic poetry and poetic lore from the mid-sixth century C.E. until the time these materials were compiled into writing during the ninth and tenth centuries, any attempt to pinpoint the precise circumstances behind the writing of Imru al-Qays’s “Mu’allaqah” can be nothing more than a speculative literary exercise. This said, we can suggest that, inasmuch as the biographical lore of Imru al-Qays is dominated by the regicide of his father and his excessive search for blood vengeance, this same theme may motivate and inform the greatest poem attributed to him. If we further consider the mythic significance of the killing of a king as creating a “wasteland,” then to avenge that death is to restore life and fertility to that wasteland—precisely the image of a desert storm. Pursuing this line of reasoning, we could tie Imru al-Qays’s “Mu‘allaqah” to his great
THE ARABIC ODE
“TPhe ode, or qasidah, was the preeminent Arabic Hterary form from prelslamlc times un til the early twentieth century. A few lines from “The MiTaHaqah” of the pra-lstamic poet Labid provide a sense of the Arabic qashktifs sequence of themes and moods: the nostalgic self-involvement of the nmib {elegiac introduction); the solitary quest on camelback of the mhit (desert journey); ami the celebratory self-confidence of the fakhr (tribal boast),
[nasib]
Effaced are the abodes,
brief encampments and long settied ones
At Mina the wilderness has claimed
Mount Ghawl and Mount Rijam
………………….
Stripped bare, where once a folk had dwelled,
then one day departed.
Abandoned lay the trench that ran around the tents,
the thumam grass that plugged their holes.
The cfanswornen departing stirred your longing
when they loaded up their gear,
Then climbed inside their howdah frames
with squeaking tents.
………………….
What then do you remember of Nawar
when she has gone far off,
And her bonds, both firm and frayed,
are cut asunder?
[rahil]
Cut off your love from him
whose bond is not secure
With a camel-mare jaded by journeys
that have reduced her to a remnant,
Till she is emaciate
of loins and hump.
………………….
Yet she is as nimble in the reins
as If she were a rose-hued cloud,
Rainemptied, running with the south wind,
Sprightly.
[fakhr]
And many a bitter mom of wind and cold
I curbed,
When its rains were in the hand
of die north wind.
I defended the tribe my battle-gear borne
by a winning courser,
Her reins my sash when
I rode forth at dawn.
………………….When tribal councils gather
there is always one of us
Who contends in grave affairs
and shoulders them.
………………….
Out of superior might a man munificent,
who with his bounty succors,
Openhanded: a winner and plunderer of all
that he desires.
………………….
Their honor is not sullied, their deeds
not without issue,
For their Judgment is not swayed
by passion’s flights.
………………….
They are a springtime
to those that seek refuge
And to indigent women, their food-stores exhausted,
when the year stretches long.
(‘The Mu’allaqah of Labid” in Stetkevych, Mute Immortals, pp, 9–17, with changes)
and bloody victory over the Barm Asad—either to the one he first achieved with the aid of the Banu Bakr and the Banu Taghlib, or the one he hoped to achieve before the poisoned Byzantine robe claimed his life.
Concerning the place of this ode in Arab-Islamic literature, the prelslamic qctsidah has traditionally been regarded as one of its twin foundations, together with the Quran. Early in the spread of Islam, scholars deemed the Quranic text as the word of God, to be inimitable (see The Quran , also in WLAIT 6: Middle Eastern literatures and Their Times). So, too, did they consider the poetry of the Jahiliyah, or pre-lslamic poets, to be of a beauty and originality unattainable by poets of the Islamic period. The poetics of the pre-lslamic qasi-dah —its meters, its length (usually between 15 and 80 lines of two half-lines each), its monorhyme, its two- or three-part structure of motifs and images, its diction, many of its similes and metaphors—dominated Arabic poetic production from its inception until the early twentieth century. Of all these poems, the most celebrated is “The Mu’allaqah of Imru alQays.”
Impact
The pride of place that “The Mu allaqah of Imru al-Qays” enjoys in the Arabic poetic tradition is indicated first and foremost by the fact that in all recensions of the Muallaqat, it occupies the opening position. No record exists of the poem’s initial reception. Indeed, the earliest recorded source for both the diwan (collected poems) of Imru al-Qays and of the Muallaqat is a certain Hammad al-Rawiyah (“the transmitter”) (d. 772), an extremely knowledgeable connoisseur of poetry, but also a renowned forger. The high esteem accorded the Muallaqat, seven long odes, each by a different pre-lslamic poet, is indicated by the traditional explanation of their title, “The Suspended Odes.” It refers, goes the explanation, to a pre-lslamic custom whereby the winning poems in a poetry competition at the fair of Ukaz were written in gold letters on fine linen and suspended from the Kaaba in Mecca, the shrine believed to have been built by Adam, then rebuilt by Abraham and Ishmael. The complex attitude of Islamic culture toward the Jahiliyah is one that combines aesthetic admiration with moral condemnation. It is perhaps most succinctly and powerfully expressed in the Prophet Muhammad’s estimation of the most celebrated poet of the pagan age: that Imru al-Qays was the best of all the poets, and their leader into Hellfire.
—Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych
For More Information
Abu-Deeb, Kemal. “Toward a Structuralist Analysis of Pre-Islamic Poetry (II): The Eros Vision.” Edebiyat 1 (1976): 3–69.
Arberry, A. J. The Seven Odes: The First Chapter in Arabic Literature. New York: Macmillan, 1957.
Boustany, S. “Imru’ al-Kays B. Hudjr.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam. Vol. 3. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971.
Haydar, Adnan. “The Muallaaa of Imru’ al-Qays: Its Structure and Meaning.” Part I: Edebiyat 2 (1977): 227–61; Part II: Edebiyat 3 (1978): 51–82.
Imru al-Qays. “The Mu’allaqah of Imru’ al-Qays.” In The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993.
Stetkevych, Suzanne Pinckney. Abu Tammam and the Poetics of the Abbasid Age. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991.
——-.The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993.
——-.The Poetics of Islamic Legitimacy: Myth, Gender and Ceremony in the Classical Arabic Ode. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.