Night and Horses and the Desert

by Robert Irwin

  But my desire was unfulfilled, for she had sent me no reply,

  had she done so, she would have been excused, for speech persuades.

  You long for Nu’m, but meetings are infrequent!

  Encounters are mere chance! And yet your heart will not give her up.

  Nu’m’s nearness brings you no comfort,

  nor does her remoteness let you forget, yet you cannot endure separation.

  And there was another woman before Nu’m, against the likes of whom

  I was warned – I am an intelligent man! – Better that you desist, take heed!

  Whenever I visit Nu’m, a kinsman of hers

  is always crouched, ready to spring, on seeing us together.

  He can scarcely abide it when I stop by her abode,

  he hides his bitter hatred, yet signs of it show through.

  Take her my greetings! For he

  spreads abroad the tale of my visits, at times from the rooftops, at times in whispers.

  Let her words when I met her at Midfa’ Aknan

  be your password: ‘Is this the man of whom such tales are told?

  Is this the one whose looks you praised ‘til I thought –

  God bless you – I would not forget him ‘til the day I am buried?

  Look and see, Asma’! Do you know him?

  Is this the Mughayri so much talked about?’

  She replied: ‘It is true! No doubt his constant travel

  in the cold of night, in mid-day heat have changed his aspect.

  If this be he, then he is certainly no longer

  the man I knew – but a man may change!’

  Nu’m saw a man who, when the sun is at its height,

  travels in the heat, and who, when it is night, travels in the cold.

  A mighty traveler, who covers the ground by leagues, is tossed

  from desert to desert, tangled of hair, and dust-covered.

  And his shadow, mounted on his beast, is small,

  a man exposed to heat and cold except what his costly cloak conceals.

  Nu’m was pleased by the shade of her chambers,

  midst well-watered, luxuriant green gardens,

  And by a guardian who protected her from every distress,

  so she has nothing to keep her awake.

  · · ·

  The night of Dhi Dawran you forced me, the blind lover,

  to set out, to brave terror.

  From a ledge in the darkness I watched her companions,

  being careful to hide from the circling guards.

  Until sleep should take firm hold on them,

  I maintained a precarious perch, intolerable were it not for my burning desire.

  My sturdy mount was in the open, its saddle

  exposed to night wanderers or any passer-by.

  I asked myself, ‘Where is her tent?

  And how can I secure my return?’

  Then I recognized a perfume of hers; and my love,

  so vivid, almost like a presence, guided my heart to her.

  When I could no longer hear their voices, when the

  lamps and fires kindled in the evening were damped;

  When the moons whose departure I had been awaiting,

  vanished, when the herdsmen all went home, and revellers all fell deep in sleep;

  When my sinuous crawl betrayed

  no sound, my body crouching for fear of the tribe;

  Then I voiced my greeting, startling her,

  almost causing her soft greeting to become a scream.

  Biting her finger, she said, ‘You have brought scandal on me.

  You are the sort who makes even the easiest things difficult.

  I wonder, are we nothing tos you? Are you not afraid

  – may God protect you – when your enemies lie all around me?

  By God! I do not know whether your urgent need

  brought you here tonight, or those whom you fear fell asleep?’

  So I answered her, ‘Only longing and love led me

  to you, not a soul knows.’

  She said, when she was again composed, when her fright had vanished,

  ‘May your Almighty Lord preserve you.

  Abu al-Khattab, you will be my prince,

  without rival, as long as I live.’

  I spent the night in joy, receiving what I desire,

  kissing her mouth time and again.

  Such a night – but its passage was short;

  never before had one passed so quickly.

  Oh what joy, what conviviality we had there

  with none to spoil it!

  When the night had passed, or almost so,

  and the stars were about to fade,

  She said, ‘The time for the clan to awake

  has come, but I will meet you again in ‘Azwar.’

  I was startled to hear someone shout ‘Let us be off,’

  as the full golden morning dawned.

  When she saw that some still lay abed

  while others had risen, she said, ‘Tell me, what do you recommend?

  I replied, ‘I will make a dash for it, and either I escape them,

  or their swords will have their vengeance.’

  She said, ‘Would you prove correct what the enemy has said of us,

  admit to what was rumored?

  If we must find some way out, let it be

  otherwise, something more hidden, discreet.’

  · · ·

  I will tell my two sisters how our affair came to this;

  I never intended to be slow in telling them.

  Perhaps they will find a way out for you,

  for they have their wits about them while mine are befuddled.’

  She left in distress, her face pale with fear,

  shedding a trickling tear of sadness.

  Two noble women came toward her, wearing

  dresses of white and green silk.

  She said to her sisters, ‘Help me with a young man

  who came visiting; one good turn will deserve another.’

  So they approached and were astonished, but said,

  ‘Do not blame yourself unduly, for the matter is not so serious.’

  The younger said to her, ‘I will give him my dress,

  my shift, and this cloak, so long as he is careful.

  He should arise and walk among us in disguise,

  thus our secret will not out, nor will he be discovered.’

  Thus the buckler between me and those I feared was

  three women – two full-bosomed, one budding fair.

  When we had crossed the encampment, they said,

  ‘Do you not fear your enemies on a moonlit night?’

  And they added, ‘Is this always your way,

  are you incorrigible, not ashamed; will you not desist, take heed?

  If you do return, cast your eye on someone else

  so that our tribe will think you love another.’

  Adel Suleiman Gamal (trans.), in A. H. Green (ed.), In Quest of

  an Islamic Humanism (Cairo, 1984), pp. 29–32

  ‘Umar ibn Abi Rabi‘a’s Diwan is not very long, perhaps because the puritanical Caliph Umar II (reigned 717–20) threatened the poet with banishment and made him swear an oath to renounce the composing of poetry. The specific instance which had aroused the caliph’s wrath against the poet was that ‘Umar had written a poem in which he seemed to be implying that people like him only went on the hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca) in order to admire the pretty women. ‘Umar was not the only poet in the early centuries to link the themes of amorous desire and making the pilgrimage. Every year the hajj brought throngs of pilgrims to Mecca, as well as to Medina, the city where the Prophet Muhammad is buried, and it was part of the ritual that women who performed the pilgrimage should do so unveiled. It was well known that many who went on pilgrimage did so not only to fulfil a religious duty, but also in the hope of finding a marriage partner.

  Many of the pilgrims brought larg
e sums of money with them and were prepared to spend lavishly in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Under the Umayyad caliphs the centre of government had moved from the Hejaz to Syria, but many aristocratic Arabs withdrew from the political fray and retired to Mecca or Medina. Perhaps for these reasons, Medina in particular acquired a reputation in the late seventh and early eighth centuries as a kind of medieval Las Vegas – somewhere to find love and pleasure. The place seems to have attracted gamblers, singing-girls and transvestite performers. A cult of amorous flirtation (dall) developed, and this found literary expression in a school of erotic poetry which was urban, cynical and, in the long run, rather stereotyped. The conventional stock-in-trade of Arab love poetry included the saliva of the beloved, her smile like a flash of lightning, her glance like a sword blade, the tears of blood of the lover and his wasting away. Poetic accounts of the progress of an affair frequently had room for such conventional subsidiary figures as the reproacher, the jealous watcher and the gossip. These figures argued with the poet and conspired to thwart the course of true love. The short, monothematic qit'a gained in popularity as a result of its use by this school of poets.

  One pervasive and, to the Western reader, strange feature of Arabic love poetry should be noted, and that is that the masculine pronoun in ghazal can refer to either sex. According to the fifteenth-century littérateur and pornographer, Shaykh Nafzawi,

  it’s the practice of poets and indeed a poetic convention, to use the masculine for metrical convenience. For qala (‘he said’) and fa'ala (‘he did’) are shorter than the feminine forms qalat (‘she said’) and fa'alat (‘she did’). And what’s more, poets will also use the masculine to conceal identities. For example take the lines:

  His garment clothes a sculpted form that enthrals the hearts of many.

  And how soft that gentle waist wrapped round!

  It were as if two rounded jewel-caskets lie upon his breast, well-shaped

  and set there high above his belly but just below the neck.

  In these lines the masculine form is used, but applied to the description of a woman.

  Shaykh Nafzawi, The Glory of the Perfumed Garden (1975), pp. 66–7

  In the example cited by Nafzawi, it is indeed clear that the subject is female. However, in some poems one is left utterly uncertain whether the poet is wooing a woman or a beautiful boy – particularly in examples produced by notorious bisexuals such as the ninth-century poet Abu Nuwas. Addressing a woman as if she were a man perhaps helped to keep the woman’s identity secret. Moreover, the masculine pronoun is also more versatile for rhymes.

  Pious folk held that it was improper to mention a woman’s name in poetry, and for this reason the Caliph ‘Umar I attempted to ban love poetry (though he had no more success than he would have had had he attempted to legislate against the weather). Nevertheless, there could be other factors besides propriety, which sometimes led poets not to name an individual woman in a poem. When an Umayyad princess, Ramla, asked ‘Umar ibn Rabi’a who he was writing his poetry for, he replied: Tor no particular one. I am a poet, who likes to make gallant songs and to praise female beauty.’ Ramla found such literary generalizing quite disgraceful and called the poet ‘a scoundrel’.

  Evidently the Hejazi poets did not monopolize the theme of love. The Umayyad court poets, including Akhtal, Jarir and Farazdaq, also composed verses on the subject of love. There was also a rival school of desert poets who devoted themselves to the intensely serious theme of chaste and doomed love. In the early period, the leading poets of this school came from the tribe of the Banu ‘Udhrah. A saying amongst these tribesmen was, ‘When we love we die.’ They also liked to cite a saying attributed to the Prophet: ‘He who loves and remains chaste, never reveals his secret and dies, dies the death of a martyr.’ JAMIL ibn ‘Abdallah ibn Ma’mar al-Udhri (c. 660–701) wrote a poem in which he woke his sleeping companions to ask, ‘Does love kill a man?’ ‘Yes,’ they replied, ‘it breaks his bones, leaves him perplexed, chased out of his wits.’ Jamil was the acknowledged leader of the Udhrite school of poetry. Most of the little that is known about his life concerns his legendary love for Buthaynah. As a young man he sought to marry Buthaynah, a young woman who belonged to the same tribe. However, her parents refused their consent and married her off to someone else. Even after her marriage to another, Jamil and Buthaynah continued to have intense secret meetings. It is reported that on one occasion Jamil asked Buthaynah for the reward that was due to him for the love poems he had addressed to her, and when she asked him what he meant, he replied that he was referring to ‘the thing that normally happens between lovers’. Buthaynah refused him, but he then claimed that he was pleased; if she had agreed to his proposal, he would have had to have killed her with his sword, for ‘if you granted it to me, I knew that you would grant it to others also’. He died in Egypt, exiled from his love.

  Buthaynah said when she saw my hair tinted red

  ‘You have grown old, Jamil! your youth is spent!’ I said, ‘Buthaynah, don’t say that!

  Have you forgotten our days in Liwa, and in Dhawi ‘l-Ajfur?

  Did you not see me more, when we were in Dhu Jawhar?

  When we were neighbours? Do you not remember?

  And I young and soft-skinned, trailing my train behind me,

  My hair black as the raven’s wing, perfumed with musk and amber,

  That was changed by the vicissitudes of time, as you well know!

  But you! Like the marzuban’s pearl, still a young girl,

  We were neighbours once, sharing the same playground. How did I grow old and you did not?’

  Salma K. Jayussi (trans.), in Beeston et al. (eds.), The Cambridge

  History of Arabic Literature: Arabic Literature to

  the End of the Umayyad Period, p. 426

  COMMENTARY

  The red tint of the hair would have come from the use of henna, which was often used to conceal greying hairs.

  A marzuban is a Persian governor of a frontier province.

  Akhtal once described the effect of wine in these terms: it creeps through the frame like ants crawling through drifted sand.’ The subject matter and imagery of love poems overlapped with those of poems devoted to the subject of wine-drinking, as one of the commonest themes of the latter genre was the celebration of the beauty of the cup-bearer (who was customarily a beardless boy). The consumption of alcohol is of course forbidden by the Qur’an. It is therefore a cultural paradox that medieval Arab (and Persian and Turkish) poets produced a large quantity of verse, known generically as kbamriyya, which was devoted to wine, drunkenness, drinking-parties, wine cups and cup-bearers. Some casuists argued that the Qur’anic ban (most forcefully expressed in sura 5, verse 90) applied only to wine made from dates, as grapes were hardly known in the Hejaz in the Prophet’s lifetime. Others argued that the ban only applied to the wine fermented from grapes and not to nabidh, which was made from dates. Yet others argued that the consumption of alcohol was allowed for medicinal reasons. Some pleasure-lovers did not trouble with casuistry: they simply resolved to enjoy themselves first and repent later. The tenth-century poet Ma’arri cited a certain Abu Uthman al-Mazini who, when reproached for his wine-drinking, replied, i shall give it up when it becomes the greatest of my sins.’

  Wine had frequently been celebrated in Jahili verse. Also, the Sasanian Persian rulers, whose empire the Arab Muslim armies occupied in the seventh century, had presided over a cult of drunkenness at court and heavy drinking was one of the attributes of a Persian gentleman. Some at least of the Umayyad caliphs and princes seem to have regarded themselves as heirs to this boozy tradition, though they usually caroused at private banquets away from the eyes of the pious. According to Jahiz’s Book of the Crown, the Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (reigned 685–705) used to get drunk once a month, so drunk that he could not tell whether he was in the air or in water. Thus, the caliph claimed, i seek to clarify my spirit, strengthen my memory and purify the seat of my thought.’ (Then
he cleansed himself of the sinful alcohol by throwing it all up.)

  WALID ibn Yazid, who became caliph briefly in 743-4 as Walid II, was the most notorious of these princes. He was also a noted poet, musician and composer. He expected to become caliph on his uncle Hisham’s death, but in the meantime he spent his leisure in desert palaces where he hunted, drank, gambled, listened to his favourite singers and composed verses for them to sing. There is an unmistakable air of braggadocio in the works of this libertine poet.

  I would that all wine were a dinar a glass

  And all cunts on a lion’s brow.

  Then only the liberal would drink

  And only the brave make love.

  Hamilton, Walid and His Friends, p. 20

  Pass the cup round to the right

  Don’t pass it to the left.

  Pour first for him, and then for him,

  You of the silver lute.

  Dark wine long aged in earthen jars,

  Sealed up with camphor, spice and pitch.

  So my hereafter’s sure: no fire for me! I’ll teach

  The folk to ride an ass’s pizzle!

  Tell him who looks for heaven to run along to hell!

  Hamilton, Walid and His Friends, p. 122

  COMMENTARY

  These verses, like many of Walid’s compositions, were sung to him by members of his retinue.

  A golden wine like saffron in the cup,

  That merchants carried up from Ascalon.

  The smallest mote is clear; an ample jug

  Shields it from finger’s touch. And as it’s poured

  The bubbles gleam as lightning in the south.

  Hamilton, Walid and His Friends, p. 164

  Walid’s caliphate lasted a matter of months, before a rebellion forced him to flee. He was cornered in a place in the Syrian desert, where he died fighting. His head was sent to the new caliph in Damascus. The golden age of khamriyya poetry came later, under the ‘Abbasid caliphs, but Walid’s verses provided a model for such later libertines as Abu Nuwas. However, it is worth bearing in mind that some of Walid’s more outrageous verses may have been posthumously foisted on him by enemies of the Umayyad dynasty.

  ABU DHU‘AYB al-Hudhali (d. 649?) was a younger contemporary of the Prophet. He composed poetry about bees and honey, as well as on the grander themes of love and the instability of fate. He is best known for his gentle, melancholy poems of lament – especially for his poem on the death of his sons, all of whom had died within a year of one another. This poem belongs to the genre of ritha, or lamentation.