by Scott McGill
Numerous translations are available for nonspecialists who want access to this world of late ancient Arabic verse. Here I single out three translations for the English‐speaking scholar venturing into ancient Arabic poetry for the first time. An accessible modern English rendering of a group of early qaṣīdas called Muʿallaqāt is that of Michael A. Sells (1989). These poems were among those which, around 800 CE, Arabic scholars in Iraq selected in groups of six or seven as canonical classics. The poems actually selected varied from collection to collection; Sells has chosen six typical and famous ones. The name Muʿallaqāt, which can be interpreted as “the hung (ones),” fostered a legend that they had been embroidered in cloth and hung upon the Kaʿba in Mecca because of their excellence. Much larger is Charles J. Lyall’s edition of the Mufaḍḍalīyāt, accompanied by a useful English translation and commentary (1918–1924). Named for its compiler al‐Muafaḍḍal ibn Muḥammad al‐Ḍabbī of Kūfa (d. 780 or 786), it contains 128 Arabic poems, mostly ancient. The best place to begin for the aspiring researcher may be, however, Alan Jones’s edition, translation, and commentary of 15 shorter laments and outcast poems with 10 longer qaṣīdas, entitled Early Arabic Poetry (2011), equipped with invaluable introductory materials and bibliography.
There is space here for the example of just one poem. ʿAbīd ibn al‐Abraṣ, of the tribe of Banū Saʿd ibn Thaʿlaba, composed a number of poems that proved popular and were anthologized in later times and that were studied closely in later ages. References in ʿAbīd’s lyrics to the Arab king Ḥujr ibn al‐Ḥārith al‐Kindī, to that king’s death, and to Ḥujr’s son Imruʾalqays would (if authentic) place his activities in the first half of the sixth century. ʿAbīd’s poems are often strongly characterized by the melancholic nostalgia widely appreciated in early Arabic verse. The poem here, excerpted partially from Jones’s thoughtful and learned translation (2011, pp. 309–335 with minimal modifications here), addresses the inevitability and cruelty of old age both directly and metaphorically. It was composed in a somewhat idiosyncratic meter, suggesting a work antedating the canonization of meters authorized by later critics. This poem begins typically with reflections on abandoned and deserted sites. In this case it seems they are lands out of which his people were driven.
Desolate, without its people, is Malḥūb; likewise al‐Quṭaybiyyāt; likewiseal‐Dhanūb;
…
Likewise ʿArda; likewise Qafā Ḥibirr – there is not one of the [tribe] in those places.
They have taken in wild things instead of their people; things have changed their state.
It is a land that has been inherited by death; everyone who dwelt in it has been despoiled –
Either slain or dead in some other way – and grey hair is a [mark of] shame for those who [survived and now] have grey hair.
Your eyes – their tears flow copiously, as if their tear‐ducts were a water‐skin full of holes
Worn out, or water flowing [down] the surface, running quickly from a hill on the front of which are run‐off gullies.
…
You yearn for the excitement of youth. How can you yearn so? How, when grey hair has warned you?
If [the land] has become changed and its people removed, they are not the first [to suffer so] and they do not cause wonder.
If the broad expanse [of these places] is now desolate of its people, and dearth and drought have beset [the area],
Everyone with any happiness will have it snatched away, and everyone with hope will be deceived.
Everyone with any camels will have them inherited, and everyone who gains spoils will himself be despoiled.
Everyone absent on a journey can return, but the one absent by death will not return.
Is a barren woman the equal of one with a fertile womb, or is the one who gains spoils the equal of one who fails?
…
Many is the stretch of water covered with slime that I have come to, the road to which is fearful and barren.
Feathers of [dead] pigeons lie in the vicinity – one’s heart beats fearfully through terror of [the place].
In the next verses – the description of a journey typical in the middle of a qaṣīda – the poet passes forbidding, desolate places, riding a stout she‐camel. The camel is likened to a strong wild ass and then an oryx, both described in specific terms. Then he imagines riding a horse, and the horse is like an eagle, which is like an old woman, its feathers white‐edged like the woman’s hair. But the eagle, like old age, seeks prey:
Just then [the eagle] saw a fox in the distance, with a barren desert between him and her.
At that she shook her feathers and stirred herself and [made] herself ready for flight.
Then she launched herself towards him with all speed, aiming to reach him in one fell swoop.
Hearing her flight, he raised his tail and was filled with fear; his action was that of a terrified creature.
Seeing her coming, he moved on at a crouch, showing the whites of his eyes as he turned them to look up at her.
Then she overtook him and flung him down, and her prey was in agony beneath her.
She threw him up, then flung him down, and the stony ground scratched his face.
He squeals as her talons bite into his flank. There is no escape – his breast is pierced.
The world of this poetry is to an extent idealized, and it is probably misleading about that world because it is implicit in the bulk of what was preserved. That is, there must also have been other sorts of compositions, some perhaps pertaining directly to Christianity or Judaism, or liturgies of the gods of Arabian polytheists. There must have been written correspondence and other sorts of writing in the languages of ancient Arabia, including Old Arabic. But the survival of the poetry almost alone has led both medieval and modern scholars to conceive of a world barren of literary production apart from poetry and song and, then, to regard the ancient Arabians as extolling poetry far beyond any other forms of art. That may have been, but equally it may be the illusion caused by the selective survival of texts.
Tales of Arabian life before Islam do survive, transmitted as Arabic prose in later compilations, but these have collectively received much less scholarly attention. Most hold that such texts are effectively oral folklore and unreliable as records, with a small minority of scholars considering such material to have been transmitted in written form from an early stage. There are several genres of such texts. Claiming to derive from the fifth, sixth, and early seventh century, but collected in eighth‐ and ninth‐century (and later) compilations of antiquarian lore, there are wise sayings (ḥikma), advice in the form of testaments from kingly fathers to princely sons (wasīya), genealogies (nasab) with accompanying historical accounts (the plain report, khabar, and the biographical sīra), orations and sermons (khuṭba), transcripts of letters (risāla), stories of famous battles (ayyām), and copious recorded memories of the early Islamic community. Robert Serjeant (1983) usefully surveys early Arabic prose. Albrecht Noth (1973) and Fred Donner (1998) propose methods to address the question of historicity in Arabic narratives from late antiquity, focusing on the genesis of Islam. Recently, Arabic papyri have begun to receive closer attention, including some quite early documents and epistles, the earliest extant dated one from 22 AH (643 CE). For an overview of the still‐incipient field of Arabic papyrology, see Petra Sijpesteijn (2009). Long labors are still required to exploit the Arabic prose texts claiming late antique derivation.
The most important literary work of Arabian late antiquity, and perhaps of all late antiquity, is the Qurʾān. Sometimes the Qurʾān is considered as the beginning of Arabic literature, notwithstanding the numerous references in both the poetry and the Qurʾān itself to written texts (many of these collected in Jones 2003). An ongoing debate concerns the possibility of prior translations of biblical texts into Arabic before the Qurʾān (summarized, with a negative conclusion, by Griffith 2013, pp. 7–53). In any case, barring future discoveries, the Qur’ān is effectively t
he oldest extant Arabic book. It is thought to be the revelation of the prophet Muḥammad ibn ʿAbdallāh of Mecca, a town nestled in the western mountain range of Arabia, about 70 kilometers from the coast of the Red Sea. Muḥammad is said to have delivered the contents of the Qurʾān piecemeal and in serial form, occasionally revising verses with the passage of time. It is conceived as God’s communication to Arabic speakers through his prophet. It was subsequently arranged in 114 sections called sūras, as long as 286 verses (themselves of varying length) and as short as three. Related mostly in a rhythmic, strophic style rich in assonance, called sajʿ, the Qurʾān bears a complex message addressing matters universal, cosmic, and eschatological, on the one hand, and specific events in Muḥammad’s career, on the other. Throughout, it returns again and again to a few major points. It vehemently and constantly warns its audience of the dire, imminent judgment of humans by God. It glorifies God; proclaims his manifest, awesome, and exalted power and omniscience; and demands obedience to him and his commands. Severe punishments in the Fire await those who do not believe and obey. It promises heavenly postmortem rewards for those who believe and perform justice. Relatively few passages are legislative in character. More are paraphrases or retellings of stories that the audience was expected to know about figures such as Joseph, Jesus, and, most of all, Moses. The Qurʾān soon came to be the foundational scripture of the religion Islam. From its first appearance until today, the Qurʾān has been used to offer guidance in life for billions of people, interpreted in countless ways for the ends of different sects that themselves changed over time.
The nature of the Qurʾān and its composition and codification remain controversial problems among critical historians. Most scholars, but not all, have agreed with traditional accounts that hold that its contents were related by Muḥammad as revelations over a period of 23 years until his death around 632, and that Muḥammad’s earliest followers recorded his revelations on various materials and recited them to memorize them. Its importance was guaranteed by the conquests by Muḥammad’s followers of the Sasanian Persian Empire and half of the Roman Empire. The third successor of Muḥammad as head of this militant community, the caliph ʿUthmān (r. 644–656), is said to have ordered the creation of a standard version. Variant copies of the Qurʾān were reportedly replaced by copies of this “ʿUthmānic recension.” Today, very early fragments of seventh‐ or eighth‐century Qurʾān manuscripts survive in special collections. They have been treated with intensive study in recent years (summarized by Déroche 2013). Their existence more or less invalidates earlier theories of a minority of scholars that the Qurʾān may have been a later composition, but we still do not know whether the traditional accounts of its codification are true. Indeed, there is no consensus on many questions concerning this extraordinary text, even as modern scholarship on the Qurʾān flourishes. For orientation and copious bibliography, one may consult several major reference works on the Qurʾān that have been published in recent years (e.g. McAuliffe 2001–2006; Leaman 2005; Rippin 2006). In 2013, a new academic society was created for its study, the International Qur’anic Studies Association.
Scholarship on the Qur’ān has recently engaged intensively with the historical context out of which the book appeared: late antiquity. One may gain a sense of the new directions in Qurʾānic studies from three volumes of such studies, collections of contributions of varying success: Gabriel Reynolds (2008, 2011) and Angelika Neuwirth, Nicolai Sinai, and Michael Marx (2011). In an important monograph Reynolds (2010) argues that the Qurʾān is ultimately homiletic in character, thus relating it to a late ancient genre thriving in the world of its historical genesis. He joins many other scholars in making the case, now clearly established, that the Qurʾān assumes an audience with plenty of knowledge about the Bible and related texts. It has not yet been determined when or how the community that followed Muḥammad came to abandon or to be deprived of a tradition of direct experience with the biblical texts and tales that would have rendered the Qur’ān’s accounts fully comprehensible to them, but this must have happened in the first generations after Muḥammad, because within one hundred years of Muḥammad’s life, various forms of exegesis and storytelling began to be composed to fill in that background knowledge for those who followed the guidance of the Qurʾān. In another recent work similarly worthy of attention, Holger Michael Zellentin (2013) has elucidated substantial features shared by both the legal culture implicit in the Qurʾān and that of the third‐century Didascalia Apostolorum, leading him to propose a Jewish Christian background long sought also by many other researchers in different ways. These and other major problems in the study of the Qurʾān await definitive resolution. Many other important recent contributions to the study of the Qur’ān could be pointed out, but generally it is researchers with experience in the study of late antique texts that have made the most decisive gains in recent years. While specialists certainly can never exclude the Islamic reception and massive tradition of commentarial works (tafsīr) of the Qurʾān from their research – for it is the spectacular reception of the Qurʾān that endows it with unmatched importance – the Qurʾān itself must be understood first of all with reference to its own historical context. So long as we employ late antiquity as a period, then the Qurʾān is a product of that period – indeed, it is its single most influential work. Scholars of late antiquity wishing to approach the Qurʾān in translation have innumerable versions available to them. Not all English translations have scholarly value. Those of Tarif Khalidi (2008) and Arthur J. Droge (2013), among a few others, succeed in legibility, fidelity to the Arabic, and integrity.
Whether one is interested in ancient Arabian inscriptions, early Arabic poetry, or early Arabic accounts of the pre‐Islamic times, a single new volume edited by Greg Fisher (2015) presents a thorough collection of primary sources, both literary and epigraphic, about all of these subjects. Many of the data it gathers have been scattered and relatively inaccessible even to specialists in Arabic, let alone to specialists in late antiquity. The varied contributions raise the fundamental question about the genesis of the Arab peoples but do not answer it, nor are they able to historicize adequately the category “Arab.” We still do not have a consensus about exactly how “the Arabs” came to be, nor do we yet have a historically sound vocabulary for talking about the peoples of Arabia before Islam. Fisher’s volume, nevertheless, can be consulted with great profit and may be regarded now as a solid starting‐point for scholars interested in Arabian literatures of late antiquity and their origins.
REFERENCES
Al‐Jallad, Ahmad. (2015). An Outline of the Grammar of the Safaitic Inscriptions. Leiden: Brill.
Déroche, François. (2013). Qurʾāns of the Umayyads: A First Overview. Leiden: Brill.
Donner, Fred. (1998). Narratives of Islamic Origin: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing. Princeton, NJ: Darwin.
Droge, Arthur J. (2013). The Qur’ān: A New Annotated Translation. Sheffield: Equinox.
Fisher, Greg. ed. (2015). Arabs and Empires before Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Hoyland, Robert. (2009). Arab kings, Arab tribes and the beginning of Arab historical memory in late Roman epigraphy. In: From Hellenism to Islam: Cultural and Linguistic Change in the Roman Near East (ed. Hannah M. Cotton, Robert G. Hoyland, Jonathan J. Price et al.), 374–400. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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McAuliffe, Jane Dammen. (2001–2006) Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān. 6 vols. Leiden: Brill.
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Noth, Albrecht. (1973). Quellenkritische Studien zu Thema, Formen, und Tendenzen frühislamischer Geschichtsüberlieferung. Bonn: Selbstverlag des orientalischen Seminars der Universität. 2nd ed. The Early Arabic Historical Tradition: A Source‐Critical Study, with Lawrence Conrad (trans. Michael Bonner). Princeton, NJ: Darwin. 1994.