Abundance from the Desert: Classical Arabic Poetry

Introduction

xiii Introduction The construction, the frame, so to speak, is the most important guarantee of the mysterious life of works of the mind. —Charles Baudelaire, “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe” Classical Arabic poetry, that is, the Arabic poetry dating roughly from 500 to 1250 CE, has, through the ages, been valued by the Arabs as a magnificent cultural achievement. Critics from the classical period regarded it as proof of the Arabs’ eloquence, a trait by which, in their view, the Arabs were exalted over the other peoples of the earth. Ancient compilers and anthologists recorded a vast quantity of this poetry in many large volumes; these works have been carefully passed down to us. And in the modern period, an Arab scholar may look back and, expressing a widespread feeling of pride and admiration, say: “The Greeks are characterized by their philosophy, epic and dramatic compositions. . . . The Romans by establishing religious, civil, political, and economic laws. . . . The Indians by making up fictitious fables they placed in the mouths of animals. . . . The Arabs filled the world with poetry.”1 Nevertheless, for most of the past century and a half, the classical Arabic poem has been disparaged in the West, mainly for its alleged incoherence, but also for its perceived artificiality and monotony. In 1856 German philologist Wilhelm Ahlwardt wrote that the Arabic poem is “never a self-contained whole.” That Arabic poetry had no structural cohesiveness became a commonplace among Orientalist scholars and led to such formulations as “atomism.” “Arab poetry is essentially atomic,” the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Islam (1934) tells us, “a string of isolated statements which might be accumulated but could not be combined.”2 This judgment was even accepted by a few Arab critics, and it remained unquestioned into the 1970s. The latest prominent proponent of the xiv Introduction atomism thesis—though he does not fault Arabic poetry for its lack of unity (classical Arabic poems, he claims, were never meant to be unified)—is a professor of Arabic literature at Oxford University, Geert Jan van Gelder. Before we proceed and discuss his critical work, however, it would be useful to back up and refresh our memories on the seminal theoretical discussions of organic unity. The first exposition of the concept occurs in Plato’s Phaedrus. In this recorded dialogue between Phaedrus and Socrates, Socrates argues that every discourse must have a definite form, with every part in its proper place. “Every discourse,” he says, “should be like a living organism and have a body of its own; it should not be without head or feet, it should have a middle and extremities which should be appropriate to each other and to the whole work.” He quotes as an example of a bad work a four-line epitaph that can be read in any order without affecting the meaning, and thus has no clear beginning, middle, and end. Furthermore, all parts of the discourse should relate to the idea of the whole. To these stipulations, Aristotle added that the structural union of the parts should be such that “if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed.”3 These concepts have been elementary to literary criticism ever since. Yet it may be suggested, by one wishing to ward off the traditional Orientalist criticism, that organic unity is a foreign Western concept that should not be used as a basis to evaluate Arabic poems. In response, I would cite Aristotle. Aristotle writes in Poetics that whereas history deals with particulars (what has happened ), poetry deals with universals (what may happen). Poetry expresses what a person may feel in a certain situation, according to the law of probability. As long as we understand the poet’s particular circumstances, then, we should be able to identify with his or her feelings. In this way, poetry is universal; it articulates likely responses to situations and expresses common human emotions. (Note the observation by eighteenth-century English poet and critic Samuel Johnson : “Poetry has to do rather with the passions of men, which are uniform, than their customs, which are changeable.”)4 So, if we accept the Aristotelian position that poetry is universal—which has never been undermined or seriously challenged —it follows logically that the standard by which poetry is judged should be universal as well. This brings us back to organic unity, the fundamental and encompassing criterion of literary excellence. Moreover, I would add that it is reckless to assume that...