by Robert Irwin
Run down by fate’s spite
my body hangs, a mantle on a broom;
with wealth enough to ease all pain
I turn at night from back to belly
side after side after side.
Who put pebbles on my couch when my sons died?
I tried but could not shield
them well enough from fate
whose talon-grip
turns amulet to toy.
Thorns tear out my eyes. I lie,
a flagstone at the feet of Time
all men wear me down
but even those my pain delights
envy that I cannot cringe
at fortune’s spite.
‘Lament for Five Sons Lost in a Plague’, trans. Pound,
Arabic and Persian Poems (1970), p. 30
COMMENTARY
Omar Pound has translated only the opening lines of Abu Dhu’ayb’s lament. For a full translation and excellent commentary, see Jones, Early Arabic Poetry, vol. 2, pp. 203–24. The poet goes on to present three gripping scenes of hunting and battle whose realistic imagery is used to illustrate the theme of inevitable doom. In a typical ritha, the poet receives news of death, then relates events leading up to it, delivers a eulogy of the deceased and offers consolatory wisdom.
It is a curious feature of literary life in the Umayyad period that more poetry was composed on the subject of love than on Islam or warfare. However, the ascetic poet al-Tirimmah ibn Hakim al-Ta’i (66o?–728?), who was born in Syria but settled in Kufa, fought as a warrior for the faith. Much of the poetry he wrote celebrated the Muslims’ jihad, or holy war, conducted against the Byzantines in the region to the north of Syria. Subsequently he became a teacher. He was esteemed by later poets in ‘Abbasid Baghdad as a transmitter of rare words in his poetry.
Lord of the throne
if death be near
don’t take me off
on a couch of silk,
let me die ambushed
in a water-course
with men
all serving
Allah’s ends around,
my head slashed off
my flesh worthy
of cleansing vulture
and hovering kite,
my bones soon blasted
dry and white.
‘Lord of the Throne’, trans. Pound,
Arabic and Persian Poems (1970), p. 34
Jahili and Umayyad poetry survived in anthologies put together in later centuries. The new Arab garrison town of Kufa was a leading centre for the collection and memorizing of poetry. Before being written down, poetry owed its survival to rawis like Hammad al-Rawiyya (695–772). Hammad was esteemed by the Umayyad caliphs as the memory of the Arabs. He was expert on Arab genealogy and history and, above all, on poetry. He is said to have recited 2,990 qasidas by pre-Islamic poets when Walid ibn Yazid put his knowledge to the test. However, there were darker aspects to Hammad’s career. He was fond of getting drunk and discussing heretical opinions. He is said to have started out in life as a thief, but was converted to poetry when he stumbled across a volume of verses in a house he had broken into. He was not reliable as a transmitter of other people’s poetry. Hammad and other early rawis certainly pastiched Jahili poetry on occasion; Hammad has already been mentioned as the potential forger of the Lamiyyat, which is traditionally ascribed to Shanfara. Some contemporaries thought there was something suspicious about the vast range of Hammad’s alleged knowledge of pre-Islamic poetry. According to one source, Hammad claimed that much of his extraordinary knowledge of poems which no one else knew about was due to his possession of a volume of poems which had been written down in pre-Islamic times and which had been found buried under the Lakhmid White Palace at Hira. This sounds like a convenient alibi for literary forgery. One should note that early forgeries by Hammad and others tended to be produced for reasons that were not primarily literary. As al-Jumahi noted in his Tabaqat, ‘when the Arabs began to review the recitation of poetry and the historical record of battle-days and glories, some tribes found that their tribal poets had produced little verse and that their exploits had gone unrecorded. Thus a group of such tribes with few exploits and little verse, wishing to catch up with other tribes with a richer heritage, forged verse and ascribed it to their poets’ (Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period, Cambridge, 1994, p. 102).
Relatively little prose of real literary interest has survived from this period. Much of what has survived was produced by administrators and political orators. ‘ABD AL-HAMID ibn Yahya, known as al-Katib, ‘the Scribe’ (d. 750), produced what is arguably the earliest surviving literary prose. He was secretary to the last Umayyad caliph, Marwan II (reigned 744-50). For a time a powerful figure at court, ‘Abd al-Hamid was executed by a political opponent. Three of ‘Abd al-Hamid’s epistles survive. What follows is an extract from his rather sententious Epistle to the Secretaries, Risala il al-Kuttab:
No craftsman needs more than you to combine all praiseworthy good traits and all memorable and highly regarded excellent qualities, O secretaries, if you aspire to fit the description given of you in this letter. The secretary needs on his own account, and his master, who trusts him with important affairs, expects him, to be mild where mildness is needed, to be understanding where judgment is needed, to be enterprising where enterprise is needed, to be hesitant where hesitation is needed. He must prefer modesty, justice, and fairness. He must keep secrets. He must be faithful in difficult circumstances. He must know (beforehand) about the calamities that may come. He must be able to put things in their proper places and misfortunes into their proper categories. He must have studied every branch of learning and know it well, and if he does not know it well, he must at least have acquired an adequate amount of it. By virtue of his natural intelligence, good education, and outstanding experience, he must know what is going to happen to him before it happens, and he must know the result of his action before action starts. He must make the proper preparations for everything, and he must set up everything in its proper, customary form.
Therefore, assembled secretaries, vie with each other to acquire the different kinds of education and to gain an understanding of religious matters. Start with knowledge of the Book of God and religious duties. Then, study the Arabic language, as that will give you a cultivated form of speech. Then, learn to write well, as that will be an ornament to your letters. Transmit poetry and acquaint yourselves with the rare expressions and ideas that poems contain. Acquaint yourselves also with both Arab and non-Arab political events, and with tales (of both groups) and the biographies describing them, as that will be helpful to you in your endeavours. Do not neglect to study accounting, for it is the mainstay of the land tax register. Detest prejudices with all your heart, lofty ones as well as low ones, and all idle and contemptible things, for they bring humility and are the ruin of secretaryship. Do not let your craft be a low one. Guard against backbiting and calumny and the actions of stupid people. Beware of haughtiness, foolishness, and pride, for they mean acquiring hostility without even the excuse of hatred. Love each other in God in your craft. Advise your colleagues to practise it in a way befitting your virtuous, fair, and gifted predecessors.
Franz Rosenthal (trans.), in lbn Khaldun’s
‘The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History’,
2nd edn. (London, 1958), vol. 2, pp. 30–31
COMMENTARY
The content of ‘Abd al-Hamid’s epistle is particularly noteworthy, for he seeks in it to elevate the rank of secretary and to magnify his duties and qualities. Under the Umayyads’ successors, the ‘Abbasids, the scribes were indeed to become the chief students and disseminators of an Arab secular culture. Clearly ‘Abd al-Hamid’s letter was intended for public dissemination. It was common for letters to be addressed to notional or fictional addressees. The rhythms of ‘Abd al-Hamid’s Arabic suggest that this composition, like so much Arabic literature, was written to be read aloud. Unlike the poets of the age,
he was not keen on recherche vocabulary. This sort of chancery high style, together with advocacy of the necessity of scribes to possess a good general knowledge, provided the foundations of a wider literary culture known as adab (on which more in the next chapter). ‘Abd al-Hamid’s style was fairly ornate and verbose. However, in the light of later developments in literary prose, and especially in the epistolary genre, his prose would come to seem relatively plain and unadorned, for his successors among the bureaucrats and scribes sought to outdo one another in the floweriness of their prose. Finally, ‘Abd al-Hamid’s use of parallelism and saj' is also worthy of note. The revelation of the Qur’an and the Prophet’s denunciation of the utterances of the kahins had led, among other things, to the temporary decline in popularity of the rhymed prose rhythms of saj' A later essayist, Jahiz, suggested that when the heathen soothsayers were banned, so too was the rhymed prose which they employed. Its use by ‘Abd al-Hamid and other bureaucrats did much to restore its fortunes.
Men of the pen did not monopolise eloquence (balagha). ‘Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law who became caliph, is traditionally regarded as the first master of eloquent oratory and sermons attributed to him were often cited as examples for emulation. Arab soldiers and statesmen also proved themselves to be masters of the rhetorical possibilities of their language. (Sometimes such mastery is really somewhat suspicious and one wonders if words have not been put in their mouths by later historians.) When the Arab general ‘Amr ibn al-‘As (d. 663) conquered Roman Egypt for Islam and occupied Alexandria, he reported back to the Caliph ‘Umar, I already sore spot. The have taken a city of which I can only say that it contains 4,000 palaces, 4,000 baths, 400 theatres, 1,200 greengrocers and 40,000 Jews.’ When Caliph ‘Umar asked about the feasibility of a naval expedition against Cyprus, ‘Amr replied discouragingly: ‘The sea is a boundless expanse, whereon great ships look tiny specks; nought but the heavens above and waters beneath; when calm the sailor’s heart is broken; when tempestuous, his senses reel. Trust it little, fear it much. Man at sea is an insect on a splinter, now engulfed, now scared to death’ (George F. Hourani, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times, Princeton, N.J., 1995, pp. 54–5).
AI-HAJJAJ ibn Yusuf, who was governor in Iraq from 694 until 713, outdid even his famous predecessor. When he arrived in rebellious Kufa in 694, he veiled his face and secretly made his way to the town’s main mosque. Only when he had ascended the mosque’s pulpit did he cast off the veil and begin speaking. He started with a couplet from a poet, Suhaym ibn Wathil:
I am he that scattereth the darkness and climbeth the heights:
As I lift the turban from my face, ye shall know me!
He continued (in rhymed prose):
O people of al-Kufah! I see before me heads ripe for the harvest and the reaper; and verily I am the man to do it. Already I see the blood between the turbans and the beards.
The Prince of the True Believers has spread before him the arrows of his quiver and found in me the cruellest of all arrows, of sharpest steel and strongest wood. I warn you, if you depart from the paths of righteousness, I shall not brook your carelessness, nor listen to your excuses. You Iraquis are rebels and traitors, the dregs of dregs! I am not a man to be frightened by an inflated bag of skin, nor need anyone think to squeeze me like dry figs! I have been chosen because I know how to act. Therefore beware, for it is in my power to strip you like bark from the tree, to pull off your branches as easily as one pulls off the branches of the selamah tree, to beat you as we beat the camels which wander away from the caravans, and grind you to powder as one grinds wheat between mill-stones! For too long you have marched along the road of error. I am Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, a man who keeps his promises, and when I shave I cut the skin! So let there be no more meetings, no more useless talk, no more asking: ‘What is happening? What shall we do?’
Sons of prostitutes, learn to look after your own affairs … Learn that when my sword once issues from its scabbard, it will not be sheathed, come winter, come summer, till the Prince of True Believers with God’s help has straightened every man of you that walks in error, and felled every man of you that lifts his head!
Robert Payne, The Holy Sword (London, 1959)5 pp. 121–2
The version given here was translated from a belles-lettristic history by al-Mas‘udi (on whom see Chapter 5), but such was the fame of Hajjaj’s minatory address from the pulpit that it was also anthologized by Tabari, Jahiz, Ibn Qutayba, Qalqashandi, and many other historians and anthologists. The eloquent Hajjaj was a much hated man. He had started out in life as a schoolmaster. (Schoolmasters enjoyed a low status, in literature at least, and they were satirized in, among other works, The Thousand and One Nights.) Subsequently Hajjaj attained notoriety as a faithful and incorruptible, but brutal, servant of the Umayyads. Nevertheless, some part of his pedagogical background stayed with him; he seems to have been obsessed with the purity of the Arabic language and he was the leading patron of the study of grammar in Iraq. He also presided over important innovations in the way Arabic was written, as secretaries under his direction introduced vowel signs in a script which hitherto had only registered consonants. The innovation of diacriticals in order to distinguish certain otherwise identically shaped consonants one from another was also ascribed to him. Moreover, the sanguinary Hajjaj was also the patron of Jarir, Farazdaq and Akhtal, among other poets.
In general, it is striking how little difference the coming of Islam at first made to Arabic literature. The poets stayed with such traditional pre-Islamic topics as fated doom, lovesick yearning and tribal boasting. The great Muslim religious poems were produced in later centuries.
4
Widening Horizons (c. 750–c. 900)
‘L—d!’ said my mother, ‘what is all this story about?’ – ‘A Cock and a Bull,’ said Yorick.
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
In 987 an Iraqi scribe and bookseller, Ibn al-Nadim (also known as al-Nadim), brought out his Fihrist (or Index) in which he attempted to list and characterize ‘the books of all peoples, Arab and foreign, existing in the language of the Arabs, as well as of their scripts, dealing with various sciences, with accounts of those who composed them and the categories of their authors, together with their relationships and records of their times of birth, length of life, and times of death, and also of the localities of their cities, their virtues and faults, from the beginning of the formation of each science to this our own time’.
Not only were thousands of authors included in Ibn al-Nadim’s survey, but some of them were extremely prolix. The essayist Jahiz is known to have been the author of almost two hundred titles, a few of which will be discussed below. Kindi (d. 865), ‘the Philosopher of the Arabs’, was a noted polymath; in the words of Fritz Zimmerman, he not only ‘wrote on mathematics, logic, physics, psychology, metaphysics and ethics, but also on perfumes, drugs, foods, precious stones, musical instruments, swords, bees and pigeons’.
All this is evidence of an explosion of literacy from roughly the mid eighth century onwards. Part of this is attributable to increasing use of (relatively) cheap paper, which replaced parchment and papyrus. Chinese experts in the manufacture of paper had been captured by an Arab army at the Battle of Talas (751) and then employed to make paper in Samarkand, but the use of paper only became widespread during the caliphate of Harun-al-Rashid (786–809), when it was adopted for state business in the ‘Abbasid capital of Baghdad. The foundation of libraries was another sign of the explosion of literacy. The Caliph al-Mamun (813–33), who was fanatically devoted to astrology and the study of old books and was a leading patron of translations into Arabic, is said to have founded Bayt al-Hikma, or the ‘House of Wisdom’, in 830 (although it may have existed under his predecessors). The Bayt al-Hikma was a library which became a teaching institution. Besides the large public libraries founded under the patronage of caliphs and viziers, and those attached to the great mosques, there were smaller circulating libraries run by
scribes, from which books – often of a popular and entertaining nature – could be rented out. Authors provided bookseller-scribes with manuscripts of their works and licensed them to make copies for circulation. During the ‘Abbasid period a reading public came into being, of which such professional scribes were an important component. Ibn al-Nadim himself was the son of a scribal copyist who ran a bookstore. Writers congregated at the Suq al-Warraqin, the bookdealers’ market. Readers were replacing listeners as consumers of culture in the ‘Abbasid period. (Even so, it is important to bear in mind the quasi-oral culture of the time. It was, for example, normal to ‘publish’ a work by reading it aloud in a mosque. The Mosque of al-Mansur in Baghdad was particularly popular with poets. It was also common for an author to subject a disciple to an oral examination before giving him permission to reproduce the author’s manuscript.)
Ibn al-Nadim’s Fihrist can be read as a map of the literary world during the early ‘Abbasid period. His book was divided into nine chapters and it is evident from the way the chapters were divided that Ibn al-Nadim’s categories are not ours. The first chapter dealt with language, calligraphy and scripture; chapter two dealt with grammar; chapter three encompassed historians, genealogists, government officials who wrote books, cup companions, jesters and singers; chapter four was consecrated to poetry; chapter five was on the literature of Muslim sects; chapter six, on the writings of jurisconsults and experts on religious law; chapter seven dealt with philosophy and the sciences; chapter eight was a sort of ghetto reserved for ‘story-tellers and stories, exorcists, jugglers, magicians, miscellaneous subjects and fables’; in the last chapter Ibn al-Nadim discussed non-Islamic sects as well as literature on Asia. What emerges from the chapter headings and the contents of the Fihrist is the high status accorded to religious writings and to poetry and the low regard accorded to prose fiction. Fiction scarcely counted as literature. (An extract from Ibn al-Nadim on fiction will be given in the next chapter.)