Night and Horses and the Desert

by Robert Irwin

  The following extract comes from the chapter on the vileness of sinning.

  Once I was passing the night in the house of a female acquaintance, a lady renowned for her righteousness, her charity and her prudence. With her was a young girl of her own kindred; we had all been brought up together, then I had lost sight of her for many years, having left her when she reached puberty. I found that the waters of youth had flowed like a rushing exuberant river over her countenance; the fountains of grace and charm gushed over her. I was confounded and amazed. Into the firmament of her face the stars of beauty had climbed, to shine and glitter there; in her cheeks the flowers of loveliness had budded, and were now in full bloom. How she appeared before me that memorable evening, I have striven to describe in these verses.

  She was a pearl most pure and white,

  By Allah fashioned out of light;

  Her beauty was a wondrous thing

  Beyond all human reckoning.

  If on the Day of Judgement, when

  The trumpets sound for sinful men,

  I find, before the Throne of Grace,

  My deeds as lovely as her face;

  Of all the creatures Allah made

  I shall most fully be repaid,

  A double Eden to reside,

  And dark-eyed virgins by my side.

  She came of a family in which good looks were hereditary, and had now herself developed into a shape which beggared description; the tale of her youthful loveliness ran through Cordova. I passed three successive nights under the same roof with her, and following the customs with persons who have been brought up together she was not veiled from my view. Upon my life, my heart was well-nigh ravished, the passion which I had so rigorously banished almost repossessed my bosom, the forgotten dalliance of youth was within an ace of returning to seduce me. Thereafter I forbade myself to enter that house, for I feared that my mind might be too violently excited by the admiration of such beauty. Certainly, she and all the members of the household were ladies upon whose respectability amorous ambitions might not hope to trespass; but … no man is secure from the vexations of Satan.

  Arberry, The Ring of the Dove, pp. 87–94, 236-7

  The Ring of the Dove is a classic work of great charm which deserves to be even better known than it already is. Ibn Hazm also wrote a very different book, the Kitab al-Fisal fi al-Milal wa al-Ahwa al-Nihal (‘The Book of Religious and Philosophical Sects’), which is the earliest Arabic treatise on comparative religion and which deals with all the varieties of monotheism, polytheism, atheism and scepticism that Ibn Hazm could discover anything about. Despite the originality of ‘The Book of Religious and Philosophical Sects’, it entirely lacks the charm of The Ring of the Dove. Indeed, to a twentieth-century Western sensibility the book has rather a rancorous feel. Ibn Hazm reveals himself to be a religious bigot. A fierce hater of Christianity and Judaism, he had an even greater hatred of those ‘heretics’ who deviated from what he took to be the one correct version of Islam. Thus he denounced the Sufis and Asharites, as well as all sorts of Shi’ites and esotericists. Theologically Ibn Hazm was a Zahirite – that is to say he was a dogmatic literalist, who relied on an extremely narrow interpretation of the Qur’an and the Sunna and who opposed all speculative additions. The primacy of revelation over reason was absolute.

  Ibn Hazm came to despise love poetry as effeminate and conducive to immorality. He had strong views about what poets should and should not write about. Among the reprehensible topics were poems about nomadism, vagabonds, war, death and the afterlife, as well as satires and descriptions of deserts. The perils of poetry notwithstanding, it had to be mastered, because ‘learning the language necessitates the memorization of poetry’.

  Viewed from the outside at least, Ibn Hazm was a creature of paradox. This author of a classic work of gentle eroticism also composed letters which preached the importance of the renunciation of pleasure and the need for a spiritual education. Not only did he preach the virtue of continence in a manual devoted to amorous affairs, but elsewhere he wrote letters in praise of brotherhood and friendship even though he was known to be a fierce misanthrope. His early adventures in politics failed and his later books on religion were burned as heretical. He seems to have adopted a reclusive life until his death in 1064.

  Ibn Hazm wrote The Ring of the Dove at the request of a friend. It is possible that this friend was the poet Abu ‘Amir IBN SHUHAYD (992-1035). Like Ibn Hazm’s father, Ibn Shuhayd’s father had served as a vizier in Cordova. Although a friend of Ibn Hazm, Ibn Shuhayd had a reputation as a hedonist and a buffoon. His Risalat al-Tawabi wa al-Zawabi (‘Epistle of Inspiring Jinns and Demons’) is a curious piece of fantasy, composed by Ibn Shuhayd in order to demonstrate his superiority to such great poets of the past as Imru’ al-Qays, Abu Nuwas and Mutanabbi; it is a manifesto of emulation. The work has not survived in its entirety. In what has survived, Ibn Shuhayd describes how he was transported to the Valley of the Jinns, where he meets with the jinns who inspired famous poets of past centuries. Ibn Shuhayd, who competes with these literary spirits in composing poetry, is everywhere acclaimed and given ijazas to recite and interpret the works of particular poets. (The ijaza, a crucial feature of the Islamic literary and academic worlds, was a certificate of proficiency, attesting to the student’s success in mastering a particular poem, book or subject and licensing that student in his turn to teach what he had mastered.) It would appear that Ibn Shuhayd thought of both poetry and physical beauty as expressions of an inner beauty. One implication of this was that ugly people could not write beautiful poetry.

  Having engaged in a series of poetical debates, Ibn Shuhayd went on to encounter jinns who had inspired some famous prose authors. Those early masters of a limpid style, ‘Abd al-Hamid, al-Katib and Jahiz, were allowed to fulminate against the newfangled craze for the ornate and metaphor-laden rhymed prose. Ibn Shuhayd himself says that he hated the use of obscure vocabulary and artful displays of philological erudition. However, although he claimed to prefer Jahiz’s style, he said that the literary climate in Andalusia forced him to follow the more mannered fashion. Indeed, Ibn Shuhady’s descriptions of a flea and of a fox are set-piece demonstrations of the new ornate style. He was consciously trying to outdo Hamadhani, who was the acknowledged master of this sort of stuff; in fact the whole business of poets and their familiars may derive from his Maqamat. After his encounter with the spirits of prose, Ibn Shuhayd sat in on a meeting of jinns who were examining various literary compositions, before he passed on to adjudicate in a poetry contest for asses and mules. Doubtless these asses and mules were standing in for literary rivals of Ibn Shuhayd in Cordova.

  The ‘Epistle of Inspiring Jinns and Demons’ was a work of self-advertisement and self-justification. It not only laid out Ibn Shuhayd’s literary wares, but it also sought to justify his practice of pastiche, or making wholesale borrowings of verses and themes from earlier poets. But setting Ibn Shuhayd’s personal arrogance aside, his book can also be read as an attack on the notion that Andalusian poets had to follow literary models furnished by precursors in Syria or Iraq.

  Ibn Shuhayd‘s fantasy of the afterlife preceded by a few years that of Ma’arri and may have inspired the latter. However, one should note that whereas Ma’arri gave accounts of conversations with dead poets, in Ibn Shuhayd’s fantasy only the jinns who inspired them are encountered. One or both of these Arab fantasies may have indirectly inspired Dante’s famous Divine Comedy and its vision of an afterlife (in which, of course, dead poets make a prominent showing). The great Spanish scholar Miguel Asin Palacios suggested as much in his Escatologia musulmana en la Divina Commedia, which appeared in 1919, but the matter remains controversial. Like Ma’arri’s vision of the afterlife, Ibn Shuhayd’s version is interesting and inventive, but also florid and quite taxing to read, as is suggested by the boastful opening address to his friend Abu Bakr Yahya ibn Hazm (not the famous Ibn Hazm discussed earlier).

  How excellent, Abu Bakr, is an opinion yo
u expressed whereby you hit the mark, and a conjecture you formulated without missing the target! Through the two you manifested the countenance of truth and tore the veils from the bright forehead of exactitude, when you observed the friend you had won and saw that he had gained mastery over the extreme limits of heaven so that he joined together its sun and moon and united its two Farqad stars, for whenever he saw a breach he stopped it up with its Suha, or else, whenever he observed a gap he repaired it with its two Zuban stars, and did things similar to this. Hence you declared: ‘How did he come to be given such ability as a youth, and how did he shake the trunk of the palm tree of eloquence so that “it showered its ripe dates upon him”? Surely there is a demon guiding him and a devil frequenting him! I swear that he has a genie who helps him and a devil who aids him; this is not within the power of a human being, nor is such breath the product of such a soul.’ Yet since you have brought up the subject, Abu Bakr, then hearken and I will cause you to hear a wonderful miracle:

  Ever since the days when I was learning my alphabet, I used to long for men of letters and yearned to compose eloquent discourse; hence I frequented literary gatherings and sat at the feet of teachers. As a result the artery of my understanding throbbed and the vein of my knowledge flowed with spiritual substance, so that a small glance used to fill me up and a brief examination of books was useful to me, for the ‘waterskin of knowledge had found its cover’, nor was I like the snow from which you strike fire, nor like the ‘ass laden with books’. Thus I attacked the breach of eloquence without respite, making fast the foot of its bird with snares, so that marvels overwhelmed me and gifts without measure encompassed me.

  COMMENTARY

  Farqad, Suha and Zuban are all stars.

  The phrase ‘it showered its ripe dates upon him’ is from the Qur’an, sura 19, verse 25.

  The phrase ‘the waterskin of knowledge had found its cover’ is a proverbial expression.

  The Risala is full of abstruse references to dead poets and forgotten controversies, for Ibn Shuhayd has designed his text to show off his mastery of such matters. In the scene which follows he demonstrates his mastery of conceits – elaborate metaphors which compare apparently dissimilar objects.

  He said: ‘But teachers of literature have instructed me.’ I replied: ‘That is not their prerogative; instead instruction derives from God – may He be exalted – where He says: ‘It is the Clement who taught the Koran, created man, and instructed him in eloquence.’ No poem can be explicated nor any land broken up. It is a far cry from you that musk should derive from your breath and ambergris from your ink, that your style should be sweet and your discourse fresh, that your breath should derive from your soul and your well from your heart, that you should reach out to the humble and raise him high, or to the lofty and humble him, or to the ugly and embellish it.’

  He replied: ‘Let me hear an example.’

  I continued: ‘It is a far cry from you that you should describe a flea and say:

  ‘It is a negro slave and a domesticated wild beast, neither weak nor cowardly. It is like an indivisible portion of the night or like a grain of allspice taught by instinct, or like a drop of ink, or the black core in a camel tick’s heart. It drinks in one gulp and walks in bounds; it lies hidden by day and travels forth by night. It attacks with a painful stab and considers it lawful to shed the blood of every infidel as well as every Muslim; it rushes upon skilled horsemen and drags its robes over mighty warriors; it lies concealed beneath the noblest of garments and tears away every curtain, showing no regard for any doorman. It goes to the sources of the sweet lap of luxury and reaches fresh thickets; no prince is safe from it, nor is the zeal of any defender of avail against it, although it is the lowliest of the lowly; its harm being widespread and its pact often broken. This is the nature of every flea, may the latter suffice as a means of lessening man’s condition and as a proof of the Clement’s power.’

  It is furthermore a far cry from you that you should describe a fox and say:

  ‘It is more cunning than ‘Amr and more treacherous than the murderer of Hudhaifa ibn Badr. It wages many battles against Muslims and is impelled to shed the blood of cocks, the muezzins of the dawn. Whenever it perceives a chance, it takes advantage of it, and when brave warriors pursue it, it baffles them. Despite this it is Hippocrates in the way it seasons its food, and Galen in the moderation of its diet. Pigeons and chickens form its breakfast, while pheasants and francolins form its supper.’

  J. T. Monroe, Kisalat al-Tawabi wa’l-Zawabi: The Treatise of Familiar

  Spirits and Demons (Berkeley, 1971), pp. 51, 77-9

  COMMENTARY

  ‘It is the Clement who taught the Koran, created man, and instructed him in eloquence’ is from the Qur’an, sura 55, verses 1-4.

  (‘Amr ibn al-‘ As was a cunning general and counsellor of Mu–awiyya (reigned 661-80), the first of the Umayyad caliphs.

  Hudhaifa ibn Badr was a pre-Islamic chieftain murdered by Qays ibn Zuhayr after a quarrel arising out of a horse race.

  Hippocrates (c. 460-c. 370 B.C.) was the most celebrated of all Greek physicians. Galen was a famous second-century Greek physician. His works were translated and were well known in the medieval Arab world.

  After the collapse of the caliphate and the sacking of Cordova, Muslim Spain was divided up between the Ta’ifa or ‘party’ kings. Different dynasties ruled in Seville, Toledo, Cordova, Saragossa, Granada and elsewhere. The divided Muslim principalities were poorly placed to resist the rising power of the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain and in 1085 the important city of Toledo was captured by Alfonso VI of Castile. In the centuries that followed, the great Muslim cities were successively lost to the forces of the Christian Reconquista. However, the political and military weakness of the Muslims did not mean that there was a corresponding cultural decline from the early eleventh century onwards. On the contrary, it was in the eleventh century that Andalusian poetry acquired a distinctive identity. One reason for this may have been that there were an increased number of centres of political patronage and the Ta’ifa kings vied with one another to attract the services and praise of poets and prose writers. Poets in royal employment often doubled as diplomats and drafters of chancery documents.

  Some of the Ta’ifa kings themselves wrote poetry and two of the ‘Abbadid kings of Seville were celebrated as being among the greatest poets Muslim Spain ever produced. AI-MU–TADID, who ruled Seville from 1042 until 1069, has been characterized as ‘a treacherous and bloodthirsty tyrant’, and indeed one of his chief treasures was a collection of his enemies’ skulls, which he kept in an enclosure beside the front door of the palace. According to the poet Ibn al-Labbana, ‘there was nothing al-Mu’tadid liked so much as to look at this enclosure, and he used to spend the greater part of his time gazing at it; he would often weep and feel compassion for his victims’. The sanguinary monarch also wrote verses celebrating his own glory, as well as love poetry in the more or less compulsory melancholy vein. The following verses are more jolly:

  By my life! Wine does make me talk much,

  And I like to do what my companions like:

  I divide my time between hard work and leisure:

  Mornings for the state affairs, evenings for pleasure!

  At night I indulge in amusements and frolics,

  At noon I rule with a proud mien in my court;

  Amidst my trysts I do not neglect my striving

  For glory and fame: these I always plan to attain.

  Nykl, Hispano-Arabic Poetry and its Relations with

  the Old Provençal Troubadors, p. 132.

  Mu–tadid’s so al-MU–TAMID (b. 1039), succeeded as ruler of Seville in 1069 and governed it until his deposition in 1091. According to Ibn Khallikan, al-Mu‘tamid was ‘the most liberal, the most hospitable, the most munificent and the most powerful of all the princes who ruled in Spain. His court was the halting-place of travellers, the rendezvous of poets, the point to which all hopes were directed, and the
haunt of men of talent.’ He also enjoyed an even greater reputation than his father as a poet. It is likely that Ibn Zaydun (see page 271) tutored him in the rules of poetry. Mu–tamid’s poems tend to be devoted to single themes (therefore they do not conform to the conventional development of the qasida) and the early ones are mostly about the pleasures of life. Many of his poems record his lifelong passion for the slave-girl I'timad al-Rumakiyya, whom he had first encountered as she washed clothes by the river. In the poems addressed to her and other women, Mu–tamid conformed to the literary convention of the sovereignty of women and compared himself to a lion pursued by a gazelle. It is reported that when one day I–timad expressed the desire to walk in mud, he had a fabulously expensive mud made from moistened camphor spread beneath her feet. Al-Muçtamid’s later poems commemorate decline, defeat and exile; an Almoravid Berber army conquered Seville and he died in one of their prisons in Morocco in 1095. As he told one of his sons, ‘The road of kings is from the palace to the grave.’