by Robert Irwin
Till all the earth and all its combes and hills form
rival bands, strutting in spring’s favours,
One yellow and one red, for all the world like
clashing Y…emenis and Mudaris,
Brilliant yellow, succulent, as it were
pearls that have first been split, then dipped in saffron,
Or sunrise-glowing in red, as if every
approaching breeze were tinted with safflower:
His handiwork, without Whose marvellous grace
no ripening yellow would succeed to green.
In spring we may discern a temper like
that of the imam, with his bounteous ways:
On earth, the imam’s justice and his largesse,
and the luxuriant herbs, are shining lights;
Men will forget the meadows; but his [laurels]
will be remembered for eternity.
The caliph is, in every dark dilemma,
God-sent guidance’ eye, caliphship his orbit,
Never, thanks to him, idle, though at times
seeming to pause, as if in meditation;
Its bond belonging, as always I have known,
in his hand only, since being free to choose.
Peace reigns; the hand of fate is powerless
to hurt us now; his flock may graze undisturbed.
He has so ordered his realm that it seems
a well-strung necklace, justice its centrepiece;
No dismal nest of bedouin but has grown
plump, almost civilized, at his very name.
He is a king whose reign has baffled fame,
whose gifts make prodigality seem scant:
After all he has been, how hard for fate
to find a way to make men suffer hardship!
Julia Ashtiany (trans.), Journal of Arabic Literature 25
(1994), pp. 217–19
COMMENTARY
Mudar and Yemen were coalitions of north- and south-Arabian clans who had feuded with one another from time immemorial. Their partisans adopted distinctive banners and headbands.
In the context of this poem the imam is to be identified with the caliph, the leader of the Muslim community. Often, however, the same word is used to refer to a prayer-leader in a mosque.
Abu Tammam, a famous poet in his own right, was nevertheless equally well known as an anthologist. According to literary legend, having been trapped in a snowstorm while travelling in the region of Hamadan in western Iran, he took refuge in one of its great libraries and there researched his great anthology of pre-Islamic poetry, the Hamasa. The Hamasa, which means ‘Boldness’, was so-called after the longest of ten thematic sections comprising the anthology. The ten sections are as follows: 1. Boldness (almost half of the whole book); 2. Dirges; 3. Manners; 4. Love; 5. Satire; 6. Hospitality and Panegyric; 7. Descriptions; 8. Drowsiness; 9. Pleasantries; 10. Blame of women. Abu Tammam chose mostly extracts rather than qasidas to anthologize. What is more, he made most of his selections from minor poets who did not have diwans, or poetry collections, in their own names. One of Abu Tammam’s covert purposes in compiling this anthology was to demonstrate that the badi” devices which were being criticized as newfangled by some of his contemporaries were already employed by Jahili poets.
Abu ‘Ubada al-Walid ibn ‘Ubayd al-BUHTURI (821–97) was born at Manbij in northern Syria. His early poetry included qasidas in which he boasted of his tribe, as well as love poetry addressed to Hind (a woman who was a perfectly fictitious and conventional object of literary yearning). Buhturi was taken up by Abu Tammam, whose pupil he became. After the latter’s death, Buhturi enjoyed a career as a poet at the caliphal court. He was not a likeable character. His many enemies characterized him as a greedy sycophant. According to Yaqut, the compiler of a biographical dictionary in the thirteenth century, when Buhturi recited his poetry, ‘he used to walk up and down the room, backwards and forwards, and he shook his head and shoulders, stretched his arm out and shouted: “Beautiful, by God!” and he attacked his audience, calling out to them, “Why do you not applaud?” At court, he produced panegyric verse in praise of his patrons – as well as panegyric’s other face, satire. It was a widespread practice to direct satires at patrons who had failed to respond to panegyrics or who had disappointed poets in other ways.
However, Buhturi was to become famous as the leading specialist in wasf or descriptive poetry. Wasf became fashionable in this period. Descriptions couched in verse were coming to be appreciated in their own right, rather than as details which served to decorate a lament for a lost Bedouin girl or a boast of success in tribal warfare. (Farabi’s Canons of Poetry (Risala fx Qawanin Sina’a al-Shi V), written under the influence of Aristotle’s Poetics, was to argue that poetry was like painting, for ‘in practice both produce likenesses and both aim at impressing men’s imagination’. Buhturi’s descriptive verse was couched in the popular badi” style. In general, poets working in the badi manner were interested, in a way their predecessors had not been, in describing buildings, towns, gardens and animals. This sort of descriptive verse may possibly have owed something to the older tradition of ekphrasis, or rhetorical exercise in description, as employed in classical Greek poetry.
When loyalty turns, I never delay
for the day to break where evening falls:
Troubled, I turned to the road, towards white
Madain directing my mount, with a last
farewell to illusion, sorrow to greet
in the age-long silence of the house of Sasan,
recalled to mind by the knocks and blows
that summon echoes from forgotten doors.
They had ruled recumbent in a towering shade
baffling the eye with its starry hub,
its gateway closed on the distant line
from grand Caucasia to deep Lake Van;
worlds removed from gazelle’s abode
that the driving sands obliterate,
achievement beyond the ambition of tribes –
were it not for the bias that runs in my blood.
The years cried havoc, the centuries wore
till they left the palace a lifeless shell,
vast halls of naked solitude,
the vaulted dismay that warns of a tomb.
Could you see it now, the walls would tell
of a wedding that turned at a funeral dirge,
yet manifest still is the glory of men
whose record dispels all shadow of doubt.
At the sight of Antioch’s fall you would start
at Greek and Persian turned to stone,
with the fates at large as Anushirvan
under banner imperial drives his troops
in sea of armour closing in
on Byzantium’s emperor saffron-robed;
and under his eyes the men fight locked
in the surge and din of battle unheard,
as one irrevocably thrusts his lance
and another flashes his shield at the blade,
and alive to the eye indeed they come,
regiments signalling signs of the mute,
that enrapt in contemplation I find
my fingers tracing out their forms.
For my son had brought me ample supply
in stealth to drink on the battle field,
wine like a star that in moonless night
illumines the dark, or a beam of the sun,
that sends a glow through pulsing veins
at every draught, a bringer of peace,
and with a ray from every heart distilled
in the glass unites all men in love,
that I fancied Khosro Parvez himself
and his laureate keeping me company then:
a vision closing my eye to doubt,
or a daydream, sense to tantalize?
The hall of presence in immensity stands
like a cave high-arched in the face of a cliff.
In commanding sorrow I seem to
sense
someone coming – Is it early or late?-
grey at the parting of friends much loved,
at a wife’s disloyalty coming home.
Time’s revolution reversed its luck
when in baleful aspect Jupiter turned,
yet in majesty still it stands unbowed
by the heavy oppressive breast of fate,
unmoved by hands uncouth that stripped
the silk, the velvet, the brocade and damask,
soaring, sovereign, that battlements crown
in final culmination raised,
reaching white against the sky
as if to fly like scuds of fleece.
None might know: Was it built by men
for demon to dwell, by demon for man?
save that unanswerable witness it bears:
that its builder was king, unquestioned, of kings.
In the final glass in a vision I see
the state’s high officers, the multitudes;
embassies, weary from sun and dust,
awaiting their call from vast colonnades;
singers in marble enchantment remote,
dark their lips, and darker the eyes –
as if life had been but a week ago,
and departure had rung but a few days past,
that the rider bent on haste might find
the procession on the fifth night fading away.
To them, whose domains in felicity shone
and in sorrow still consolation bestow;
to them I owe the tribute of tears,
slow to emerge, from the deeper heart.
Such were my thoughts, though the place by right
not mine I call, nor mine their race,
but for a debt that my country owes
for a deed of old – a tall tree now –
when to South Arabia’s shores they came,
valiant men in illustrious arms,
and with bow and sword against wild odds
freed us of the Abyssinian foe.
Bound, then, to the noble in spirit I feel,
to the gallant, whatever their nation and name.
Tuetey, Classical Arabic Poetry, pp. 241–3
COMMENTARY
The poet, troubled by personal problems, rides out to contemplate the pre-Islamic ruins of the Arch of Kisra. In this somewhat unconventional qasida the deserted campsite has been replaced by a ruined palace. The vanished glories of Persian culture were quite frequently evoked in Arabic literature and it was, for example, common for wine poets to describe the Sasanian imperial decoration of the silver or glass cups from which they were drinking. The Sasanian emperors cast a long shadow in the history of Islamic culture. The Persian palace at Ctesiphon, also known as the Arch of Kisra, also known as Madain, was located in southern Iraq (and in this poem Buhturi is implicitly expressing a preference for Syria over Iraq). Buhturi contemplates surviving frescoes in the ruined palace and re-creates the vanished splendour of the Persian imperial court. His contemplation widens to encompass the vicissitudes of fate and time (anticipating in his own way the fifteenth-century French poet Villon’s, ‘Ou sont les neiges d’antan?’).
Khosro Parvez is yet another way of spelling Chosroes or Khusraw, the Persian emperor who also featured in Abu Tammam’s ‘Spring’ qasida.
Antioch in north-west Syria was one of the most important cities fought over by the Persians and the Byzantines. Today it is within the frontiers of Turkey, but in the Middle Ages it was treated as being part of Sham or Syria.
The Christian Abyssinians occupied Yemen in the sixth century, but around the year 572 the Persians, responding to an Arab appeal, drove the Abyssinians out and made Yemen a Persian satrapy for a while.
Ibn al-Mu‘tazz, another early experimenter with wasf praised Buhturi’s qasida on the Arch of Kisra as the greatest poem of all time. Abdallah IBN AL-MU‘TAZZ (861–908), a member of the ruling ‘Abbasid dynasty, was born in the palace city of Samarra in a period when being a caliph was a hazardous occupation. His grandfather, al-Mutawakkil, and his father, al-Mu’tazz, were both murdered by the Turkish slave soldiers who were supposed to protect them. Ibn al-Mu’tazz, who was devoid of ambition, eventually sought a retiring life in Baghdad as a pensioned writer and party-goer. Unfortunately, however, after the deposition of one of his cousins in 908, he was persuaded to become caliph. He lasted less than a day.
During Ibn al-Mu’tazz’s more successful career as a poet, he produced not only a great deal of excellent verse in the badi” style, but also a pioneering treatise on poetics. This book, the Kitab al-Badi” (877–8), dealt with the aesthetics of contemporary poetry. Paradoxically, Ibn al-Mu‘>tazz justified the badi” style, as practised by Abu Tammam and Buhturi, by citing precedents for its metaphors and mannerisms which he had discovered in earlier poems and in the Qur’an. In the course of his apologia for modern ways of composition, the poet-prince discussed metaphor, alliteration and antithesis, as well as the order of treatment of subjects and the technique of rounding off a poem by returning to the subject referred to in the opening lines. Ibn al-Mu‘tazz, like earlier and later literary critics, tended to focus on individual lines or turns of phrase rather than on a poem as a whole.
Together with Buhturi, Ibn al-Mu‘tazz was one of the earliest and most distinguished practitioners of wasf. His poem in praise of the caliphal Pleiades Palace in Baghdad is particularly famous. More generally his poems, which are usually direct and make use of brilliant, concrete imagery, are peculiarly likely to appeal to the contemporary reader. His longer poems, including one on the future decadence of the caliphate, may have owed something to an awareness of Persian literary traditions.
Seven short poems, mostly exercises in wasf, are given below.
1
If you can sleep, the night is short. The sickness
Seems trivial to the visitor.
But let me not deny upon the blood,
The little dear blood you have left me –
You gave your gift:
I embraced a fragment stem
That breathed in its own cool night;
If any saw us in the shirt of darkness
They must have thought us wrapped in a single body.
2
Star in utter night: a lovesick glance
Stolen past watchers.
Dawn clambers out
From under dark:
White hints in a skein of black hair.
3
Hand, until you must drop,
The sparrow hawk you perch at dawn
Achieves your pleasure.
The fugitive will not be saved by flight,
The claws home in when you release them.
Quick at your word, all skill, grace,
He is, but for death his passion, flawless.
4
As she peels off her blouse to bathe
Her cheeks become a rose.
She offers the breeze
Harmonies finer than air
And moves a hand like water
To the water in the jug.
Then, done, about to hide
In her clothes once more,
She catches a glimpse of the spy:
The lights go dead
As she shakes midnight hair
About her body’s shimmer
And steady drops of water
Spring over the water.
May all praise God who fashioned
Such loveliness in woman!
5
Looking, the narcissus, looking.
To blink – what unattained pleasure!
It bows beneath the dewdrop
And, dazed, watches
What the sky is doing to the earth.
6
A treeful of bitter oranges: carnelian
Boxes of pearls
Glimmer among the branches, like faces
Of girls in green shawls –
You recognize the fragrance of one you desire
&nb
sp; And a less obvious sadness.
7
Another glass!
A cock crow buries the night.
Naked horizons rise of a plundered morning.
Above night roads: Canopus,
Harem warder of stars.
Andras Hamori (trans.), Literature East and West 15 (1971), pp. 495–7
Abu’l-Hasan IBN AL-RUMI, ‘the son of the Greek’ (836–96), was the son of a Greek freeman and claimed descent from Byzantine royalty. He began his career as a poet in Baghdad at a time when the caliphs were in Samarra and Baghdad was controlled by the Tahirids, a clan of Persian dihqan origin, who had become the city’s military governors. At first Ibn al-Rumi experienced disappointment in failing to obtain patronage from the clan and he wrote to Muhammad ibn ‘Abdallah ibn Tahir, citing the ancient proverb ‘He who kisses the bum receives wind as his reward’. Later he became the fulsome partisan of another Tahirid, ‘Ubaydallah. Eventually Ibn al-Rumi moved to Samarra, where he continued the struggle to support himself with panegyric and blackmailing satire. He earned handouts but no fixed salary as he went in and out of favour with various patrons. Ibn al-Rumi cannot have been an endearing client. He was ugly, quick-tempered, gluttonous, blasphemous and superstitious. He wore dirty clothes, drank heavily and spent money lavishly when he had it. His disreputable personality notwithstanding, he claimed to admire ascetic holy men.
Ibn al-Rumi was a prolific poet who produced an extensive diwan. Like Abu Tammam, he was a partisan for the badi style. He was noted for descriptive poetry and for love poems addressed to both sexes. He composed a number of poems in praise or blame of particular singing-girls. However, above all he was a specialist in hija that is satirical poetry, much of it crudely abusive. Besides pillorying stingy patrons, he waged a satirical war against rival poets throughout his career. He was particularly envious of more successful poets like Buhturi.
How Ibn al-Rumi died is not clear, but it is alleged that in or around the year 896 he was poisoned by the Caliph al-Mu‘>tadid’s vizier, Qasim. Qasim was afraid lest the poet’s sharp tongue might be turned against the vizier’s clan. According to the account given in Ibn Khallikan’s thirteenth-century biographical dictionary, Ibn al-Rumi, after having been fed a poisoned biscuit, rose to leave. Qasim asked him where he was going. The poet replied that he was going where the vizier had sent him. The vizier then said to the poet, ‘In that case, convey my greetings to my father.’ ‘I am not going to the fires of Hell,’ retorted Ibn al-Rumi.