Abundance from the Desert: Classical Arabic Poetry

1 The Triumph of Imru’ al-Qays

1 The Triumph of Imru’ al-Qays The business of life is to go forwards. —Samuel Johnson, The Idler The first poem we shall read is the celebrated ode by one of the earliest , and certainly the most eminent, of pre-Islamic poets, Imru’ al-Qays (d. 542). The stories told about his life portray an audacious and magnetic personality of mythic proportions. He is said to have been the son of Hujr, the last king of Kinda (an ancient ruling tribe of Yemen that had migrated north and, at the time of the poet’s birth around 500, dominated central Arabia). Imru’ al-Qays’s penchant for composing erotic poetry and for causing scandals with women, though, displeased his father, and the latter eventually banished him from his house. Thereupon, Imru’ al-Qays joined a band of fellow outcasts and embraced a rowdy life given to hunting, drinking, and cavorting with such young women as he happened to encounter. When word later reached the prince of his father’s assassination by members of a subordinate tribe, he did not let the news affect the backgammon game he was then playing and urged his partner to take his turn. “Wine today, business tomorrow,” he is reported to have said.1 Following a bout of heavy drinking, he embarked on a retaliatory campaign to destroy a hundred of the rebels’ tribesmen. In this endeavor he was making progress until his allies abandoned him, at which point he turned to other tribes for support. For a period he wandered among them, recruiting fruitlessly. His desire to avenge his father and restore the throne to himself finally propelled him to visit the court of Emperor Justinian at Constantinople. Justinian sympathized and sent him off with an army, only to dispatch afterward a poisoned robe as a personal gift (the emperor meantime had learned that Imru’ al-Qays, during his stay at court, had seduced his daughter).2 When the poet was nearing Ankara the gift caught up 2 Abundance from the Desert with him, from which he developed ulcerous sores and died. Thus, he is sometimes called “Dhu al-Quruh” (the One with Ulcers), as well as “al-Malik al-Dillil” (the Wandering King). “Imru’ al-Qays” is itself a byname (his real name being Hunduj), meaning “the Man of Adversity.” Such, in brief, is the legendary biography of Imru’ al-Qays. Fortunately, thanks to recent scholarship by Irfan Shahid, we can move beyond legend and speak confidently at least concerning what happened at the end of his life. The detail of the poisoned robe from Justinian, it may be noted, was borrowed from Greek mythology (compare the story of Nessos’s robe). But, as Shahid affirms, Imru’ al-Qays in all likelihood did head to Constantinople to enlist the emperor’s aid. The Byzantines had concluded a treaty with Kinda in 502 and had sent a diplomatic mission to the tribe in 530–31 to forge an alliance against the Persians, so it would not have been unreasonable, after all, for the would-be king to turn to Byzantium for assistance against his rivals. Whether he reached Constantinople is uncertain. What seems quite clear, however, is that he was in Ankara when the famous bubonic plague of 541–44, which ravaged the entire Near East during that triennium, hit the city in 542. He was afflicted, and in Ankara he died and was buried.3 As a poet, he was often credited during the classical period with introducing many motifs to Arabic poetry, and he has generally been regarded as the first great composer in the tradition. Arab poets before him, in fact, are cloaked in obscurity. Yet it is highly probable that he was working within an established poetic context, developing familiar themes. Furthermore, the technical sophistication evident in the Arabic qasida, or ode, at this stage of history points back to a lengthy evolution. One would be more right to consider him, therefore, not as the initiator of a tradition, the first major poet in Arabic literature, but rather as the first major poet of whom we are aware. The Mu‘allaqa of his we shall read below, one of seven—by some accounts ten—prized odes (Mu‘allaqat) from the pre-Islamic era that were supposedly inscribed in gold letters and hung on the walls of the Ka‘ba in Mecca, is usually ascribed to the poet’s youthful period, before the murder of his father. This ascription seems...