The Mantle Odes: Arabic Praise Poems to the Prophet Muhammad

One: Kẚb ibn Zuhayr and the Mantle of the Prophet

1 one Ka¿b ibn Zuhayr and the Mantle of the Prophet Introduction The Pre-Islamic Prototype The first poem to bear the sobriquet of Mantle Ode (Qa»īdat al-Burdah) is Ka¿b ibn Zuhayr’s Su¿ād Has Departed (Bānat Su¿ād) that, tradition tells us, the pagan poet presented to the Prophet Muƒammad on the occasion ofhisconversiontoIslam(seebelow).Inmanyrespects,then,Ka¿b’spoem marks the transition from the pre-Islamic poetic tradition, the earliest extantexamplesofwhicharedatedtoaround500ce,totheIslamic,which begins 622 ce = 1 ah of the Islamic calendar, i.e., the year of the Hijrah or Migration of the Prophet Muƒammad from Mecca to Medina. Ka¿b was the scion of an illustrious poetic family of the Jāhiliyyah (“the Age of Ignorance ,” as the Islamic tradition terms its pagan pre-Islamic past), whose most notable member was his father, Zuhayr ibn Abī Sulmá, the famed panegyrist and moralist of pre-Islamic Arabia. We therefore know from the start that Ka¿b’s ode to the Prophet is based on the rich tradition of pre-Islamicpoetry,especiallyofthepanegyricgenre,theqa»īdat al-madƒ. This genre served as a vehicle for the praise of the kings and tribal lords of the pre-Islamic warrior aristocracy and, in Islamic times, was to become the preeminent form of courtly ode that dominated the Arab-Islamic poetic tradition until the early twentieth century.1 The pre-Islamic odes, especially the celebrated masterpieces among them, were orally composed and preserved, until the collecting and edit- 2 · The Mantle Odes ing process (tadwīn) undertaken by Muslim scholars in the 2nd– 3rdah/8th–9thce centuries. We must keep in mind, therefore, that the entire pre-Islamic literary corpus, including the poetic texts, the prose narratives and anecdotes that accompany them, and the extensive biographical and genealogical information, is the product of Arab-Islamic culture that over a period of centuries transmitted, selected, edited, and shaped and re-shaped—in the form of poetic dīwāns, anthologies, commentaries , literary compendia, etc.—the originally oral tribal materials to its own ends. It is therefore impossible when dealing with pre- and early Islamic materials to speak of the historical and textual accuracy of individual poems (shi¿r, pl. ash¿ār) or prose anecdotes (khabar, pl. akhb ār). Instead, our approach in this study will be to accept the pre- and early Islamic poems and anecdotes that have been preserved in authoritative works of the classical Arabic literary canon as authentic Arab-Islamic texts. The choice of a particular recension of a poetic text or version of an anecdote over another does not, in this case, constitute a claim to its greater authenticity or historicity.2 When read in the context of the prose anecdotes that accompany the poems in the classical Arabic literary compendia and, further, in light of recent work on the ritual and performative aspects of poetry, it is evident that within pre-Islamic tribal society these poems performed multifaceted ritual, moral, political, and economic functions. At the same time, the pre-Islamic poetic tradition encapsulates and preserves for us the essential features of the autochthonous Arab Semitic culture, grounded in the civilizational bedrock of the Ancient Near East and subject to Christian, Judaic, Persian, and Byzantine influences, upon which the religion and civilization of Islam were founded. It is therefore necessary, as a prelude to the study of Ka¿b’s Su¿ād Has Departed, to understand both the literary form of the pre-Islamic panegyric ode and the range of its sociomorphic functions. In doing so we will focus on how the pre-Islamic ode serves as a prototype for Ka¿b’s Su¿ād Has Departed in particular and for the Islamic tradition of court poetry in general, and further, on the way in which Islamic culture appropriated its pagan tradition by interpreting it as proto-Islamic. To begin, we will briefly examine three renowned pre-Islamic odes that will serve as paradigms for our reading of Ka¿b’s ode of conversion. Ka¿b ibn Zuhayr and the Mantle of the Prophet · 3 1. ¿Alqamah’s A Heart Turbulent with Passion: The Poem as Ransom Payment¿Alqamah’s ode comes down to us mainly through Al-Mufaææaliyyāt, the authoritative anthology compiled by the Kūfan philologist, al-Mufaææal al-Æabbī (d. 164/780–81), at the bidding, it is said, of the ¿Abbāsid Caliph...