by Robert Irwin
Nevertheless, there were some pleasures along that road …
When you come to Silves, Abu Bakr, my friend,
Greet with my burning love the spirits who dwell
In that place, and ask if any remember me.
Say this young man still sighs for the white palace,
The Alcazar of Lattices, where men like lions,
Warriors live, as in a wild beast’s den,
And in soft boudoirs women who are beautiful.
Sheltered under the wing of darkness,
How many nights I spent with girls there.
Slender at the waist, hips round and abundant,
Tawny hair or golden, deeper than a sword blade
Or black lance their charms would run me through.
How many nights, too, in the river’s loop I spent
With a graceful slave girl for my companion;
The curve of her bracelet imitated the river.
She poured out for me the wine of her eyes;
Or again the wine of her nook she poured for Ole;
Another time it was the wine of her lips she poured.
When her white fingers played among lute strings,
I felt a thrill as when a sword hits and clips
Clean through the sinews of a foe in combat.
When with a languid look she’d shake off her robe,
Like a ray of light surrendering her body was.
The very air around her shivered with desire.
It was a rose opening out of a rosebud.
Middleton and Garza-Falcon, Andalusian Poems, p. 17
COMMENTARY
This is a ra’iyya – that is to say, a poem rhyming in the letter ra. Mu–tamid was governor of Silves before succeeding to the throne. It is addressed to the poet Abu Bakr whom he had just nominated as governor of the place. This is a poem of nostalgic reminiscence, for before ascending the throne, Mu–tamid, aged only thirteen, had been appointed governor of Silves. Ibn ‘Ammar had been his youthful companion there. Some time after this poem was written they fell out and in 1086 Mu–tamid cut off Ibn ‘Ammar’s head with an axe.
The next poem is addressed to the slave-girl Ftimad al-Rumakiyya:
The heart beats on and will not stop;
passion is large and does not hide:
tears come down like drops of rain;
the body is scorched and turns yellow:
if this is it when she is with me,
how would it be if we’re apart?
By her indifference I am broken:
dark-eyed gazelle among her leafage,
stars that burn on her horizon,
depth of night shining moon,
rock, then jonquil in her garden,
bushes too that spread perfume,
all know me downcast, wasted as a man,
and are concerned by my appearance,
how it mirrors my state of mind;
they ask if I may not be well,
flaming desire might burn me out.
Woman, you do your lover wrong
that he should look as you’ve been told.
You say: ‘What hurts? What’s going on?
What do you want but cannot wait for?
You’re less than just to doubt my love,
everyone knows it, here or distant.’
God! I am sick, sick with love
that makes, beside you, others puny.
My body frets. Give thought to this:
I want to see you and I cannot.
Injustice calls to God for pardon:
ask him to pardon your injustice.
Middleton and Garza-Falcon, Andalusian Poems, p. 18
The next poem was presumably written in prison, far from his beloved Seville:
Oh to know whether I shall spend one more night
in those gardens, by that pond,
amid olive-groves, legacy of grandeur,
the cooing of the doves, the warbling of birds;
in the palace of Zahir, in the spring rain,
winking back at the dome of Zurayya,
as the fortress of Zahi, with its Sud al-Su–ud,
casts us the look of the waiting lover.
Oh that God might choose that I should die in Seville,
that He should there find my tomb when the last day comes!
Jayussi (ed.), The Legacy of Muslim Spain, pp. 139–40
Besides writing poetry themselves, the ‘Abbadids naturally patronized poets and they maintained a register of those who were pensioned. Al-Mu’tadid had established a ‘House of Poets’ (Dar al-Shuara) headed by a chief poet (Ra’is al-Shuara).’ Abd al-Jabbar Abu Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr IBN HAMDIS was one of the most distinguished poets to have written under the patronage of(Abbadids of Seville. Ibn Hamdis was born in Muslim Sicily, where he seems to have led a rather jolly, party-going life. However, he emigrated to Spain after the Norman conquest of that island and found precarious patronage with al-Mu’tamid, for whom he produced a series of elaborate panegyrics. Eventually, though, the two poets fell out and wrote satirical poetry against each other. Ibn Hamdis, who modelled himself on eastern poets like Mutannabi, favoured the fashionably ornate bad’i style. Nostalgia is the prevailing mood in his poetry. He outlived his unfortunate royal patron by many years and died in 1133 at an advanced age.
In the poem which follows one must envisage Ibn Hamdis and his companions sitting in a garden which is surrounded by a stream. Their cup-bearer sends their wine floating round to them.
I remember a certain brook that offered the impiety of drunkenness to the topers [sitting] along its course, with [its] cups of golden
[wine],
Each silver cup in it filled as though it contained the soul of the sun
in the body of the full moon.
Whenever a glass reached anyone in our company of topers, he
would grasp it gingerly with his ten fingers.
Then he drinks out of it a grape-induced intoxication which lulls
his very senses without his realizing it.
He sends [the glass] back in the water, thus returning it to the
hands of a cupbearer at whose will it had [originally] floated to
him.
Because of the wine-bibbing we imagined our song to be melodies
which the birds sang without verse.
While our cupbearer was the water which brought [us wine] without
a hand, and our drink was a fire that shone without embers,
And which offered us delights of all kinds, while the only reward
[of that cupbearer] for [giving us those delights] was that we
offered him the ocean to drink.
[It is] as if we were cities along the riverbank while the wine-laden
ships sailed [the stretch] between us.
For life is excusable only when we walk along the shores of pleasure
and abandon all restraint!
Monroe, Hispano-Arabic Poetry: A Student Anthology, p. 204
The proliferation of courts encouraged the movement of poets from patron to patron. The most famous of the eleventh-century Andalusian poets, Abu’l-Walid Ahmad IBN ZAYDUN (1003-71), came from an old Cordovan family, but he pursued a turbulent career in the service of several courts; in the course of his peripatetic career, high office alternated with prison or exile. As a politician-poet, Ibn Zaydun specialized in panegyric and satire, but his best and most personal work was on the theme of lost love. As a young man, Ibn Zaydun fell in love with a beautiful blonde princess, Wallada (see page 274). The two at first exchanged letters of mutual devotion, but when later their relationship deteriorated Wallada composed poems of rejection, while Ibn Zaydun responded with poems of desperation and reproach. His case was hopeless and Wallada began to consort with his former friend and chief rival, Ibn ‘Abdus, a prominent politician. Ibn ‘Abdus was eventually successful in having Ibn Zaydun cast into prison. On his release, Ibn Zaydun sought employment as a politician and poet elsewhere. He end
ed up in Seville, as vizier first in the service of Mut’adid and then of Mu’tamid.
How many nights we passed drinking wine
until the marks of dawn appeared on the night;
The stars of dawn came to strike the darkness
and the stars of night fled, for night was conquered.
When we attained the best of all delights
no care weighed on us, and no sorrow irked us.
Had this but remained, my joy would have endured
but the nights of union fell short.
When we met in the morning to say goodbye,
and the pennants fluttered in the palace court
And the proud horses gathered and the drums rolled
and the hour signalled depart,
We wept blood – as if our eyes
were wounds from which the red tears flowed.
We had hoped to come again after three days
but how many more have been added to them!
Bernard Lewis (trans.), in TR (Reading, Berks., 1976), I, ii, p. 47
The next poem was written at the al-Zahra, site of the caliphal palace outside Cordova.
With passion from this place
I remember you.
Horizon clear, limpid
The face of the earth, and wind,
Corne twilight, desists,
A tenderness sweeps me
When I see the silver
Coiling waterways
Like necklaces detached
From throats. Delicious those
Days we spent while fate
Slept. There was peace, I mean,
And us, thieves of pleasure,
Now only flowers
With frost-bent stems I see;
At my eyes their vivid
Centres pull, they gaze
Back at me, seeing me
Without sleep, and a light
Flickers through their cups,
In sympathy, I think.
The sun-baked rose-buds in
Bushes, remember
How their colour had lit
Our morning air; and still
Breaths of wind dispense
At break of day, as then,
Perfume they gather up
From waterlilies’
Half-open drowsy eyes.
Such fresh memories
Of you these few things
Waken in my mind. For
Faraway as you are
In this passion’s grip
I persist with a sigh
And pine to be at one
With you. Please God no
Calm or oblivion
Will occupy my heart,
Or close it. Listen
To the shiver of wings
At your side – it is my
Desire, and still, still
I am shaking with it …
Pure love we once exchanged,
It was an unfenced
Field and we ran there, free
Like horses. But alone
I now can lay claim
To have kept faith. You left,
Left this place. In sorrow
To be here again,
I am loving you.
Middleton and Garza-Falcon, Andalusian Poems, pp. 14–15
WALLADA bint al-Mustakfi (d. 1091/2), the object of Ibn Zaydun’s passion, was the daughter of one of the last Umayyad caliphs of Cordova, Mustakfi (whose reign and murder took place in 1025). Wallada was one of a relatively large number of women who wrote poetry in Muslim Spain. She maintained a literary salon which was probably where Ibn Zaydun first encountered her.
The superbly arrogant verses which follow were inscribed on the sleeves of her robe, the first couplet on the right sleeve and the second on the left. The custom of adorning the embroidered sleeves of garments with pious invocations, declarations of political allegiance or poetry was common throughout the Muslim world.
I am, by God, fit for high positions,
And am going my way, with pride!
Forsooth, I allow my lover to touch my cheek,
And bestow my kiss on him who craves it!
Nykl, Hispano-Arabie Poetry and its Relations with
the Old Provençal Troubadors, p. 107
The four poems which follow were all addressed to her ultimately rejected lover. They trace the trajectory of a heart’s affections.
1
Wait for me whenever darkness falls,
For night I see contains a secret best.
If the heavens felt this love I feel for you,
The sun would not shine, nor the moon rise,
Nor would the stars launch out upon their journey.
2
Must separation mean we have no way to meet?
Ay! Lovers all moan about their troubles.
For me it is a winter not a trysting time,
Crouching over the hot coals of desire.
If we’re apart, nothing can be otherwise.
How soon just the very thing I feared
Was what my destiny delivered. Night after night
And separation going on and on and on,
Nor does my being patient free me from
The shackles of my longing. Please God
There may be winter rains pelting copiously down
To irrigate the earth where you now dwell.
3
Had you any respect for the love between us,
You would not choose that slave of mine to love.
From a branch flowering in beauty you turn
To a branch that bears no fruit.
You know I am the moon at full,
But worse luck for me
It’s Jupiter you have fallen for.
4
They’ll call you the Hexagon, an epithet
Properly yours even after you drop dead:
Pederast, pimp, adulterer,
Gigolo, cuckold, cheat.
Middleton and Garza-Falcon, Andalusian Poems, p. 16
After the fall of the caliphate of Cordova and the dispersal of its courtiers and littérateurs, the taste for poetry became more widely diffused throughout Muslim Spain. Some of the poetry produced in provincial centres seems to have been written in conscious rejection of the urban, Arab and elitist values of the old Cordovan court, and some was inspired by Shu’ubi sentiments as the non-Arab peoples of Spain (Ibero-Latins, Visigoths and Jews, as well as Berbers) disputed the Arabs’ claims to religious and cultural superiority. Christian converts to Islam (muwalladun) made a major contribution to Arabic literature, as did musta’riba, or mozarabs, Arabized Christians who had mastered the Arabic language and absorbed much of Islamic culture without actually converting to the Islamic faith.
Strophic poetry (that is, verses arranged in stanzas) first appeared in Spain in the ninth century. Examples of a particular form of strophic verse, the muwashshahat (sing. muwashshah), start to appear as early as the ninth or the tenth century. The full sense of the word is not clear, though it appears to be related to the word for a certain type of ornamental belt, the wishah, with a double band. Interpretations differ. According to one authority, ‘Since it was held together by the concluding line as by a belt, and written down the visual effect was of a chain belt, it was called muwasbsbab‘girdled’ [poem]’. The muwashshah was a multi-rhymed strophic verse form written in classical Arabic. When the fourteenth-century North African philosopher-historian, Ibn Khaldun, came to discuss the form, he had this to say:
The muwashshah consists of branches and strings in great number and different metres. A certain number [of branches and strings] is called a single verse [stanza]. There must be the same number of rhymes in the branches [of each stanza] and the same metre [for the branches of the whole poem] throughout the whole poem. The largest number of stanzas employed is seven. Each stanza contains as many branches as is consistent with purpose and method. Like the qasida, the muwashshah is used for erotic and laudatory poetry.
Ibn Khaldun went on to suggest that such
poems were popular both with the court and with the populace at large because they were easy to understand.
Usually the muwashshah consisted of five stanzas. It was customary to open with one or two lines which matched the second part of the poem in rhyme and metre, but then, in the first part of the poem proper, there was a sequence of lines which rhymed within the stanza. However, the rhyme changed from stanza to stanza, before reverting in the second part of the poem proper to the opening rhyme and metre. Although the main body of the poem was in classical Arabic, the final line, the kharja (literally ‘exit’), was written in colloquial Arabic or in some other vernacular tongue. The kharja, the punch-line of the poem, was a ‘quotation’ in direct speech. As often as not it took the form of a slave-girl’s dismissive response to the poet’s amorous proposal. The failure of the muwashshah to conform more than occasionally to the strict metrical forms of the classical qasida meant that many did not consider it to be poetry at all.
The muwashshah was intended to be sung, and was often performed at banquets. Glorification of a ruler or the loving address to a girl (often a Christian slave-girl) were its most usual themes, though other topics were employed. Ibn al-’Arabi (see page 297) and others made use of the form to express mystical themes. Although the muwashshah form was first developed in Spain it subsequently spread throughout North Africa and the Middle East and it was particularly popular in Mamluk Egypt. The following muwashshah is by Abu Bakr IBN ZUHR. Although his father was a famous physician, Ibn Zuhr was a less distinguished medical practitioner and littérateur. His one dubious claim to fame is that when the Almoravid ruler Ya–qub ibn Mansur decided to have all books on philosophy and logic destroyed, Ibn Zuhr was put in charge of the bonfires.
My heaving sighs proclaim Love’s joys are bitterness.
My heart has lost her mentor,
She spurns my anguished cry