Abundance from the Desert: Classical Arabic Poetry

2 An Outcast Replies

25 2 An Outcast Replies Everywhere the American writer is being dunned to become healthy, to grow up, to accept the American reality, to integrate himself. . . . Is there nothing to remind us that the writer does not need to be integrated into his society, and often works best in opposition to it? —Norman Mailer, 1952 Partisan Review symposium, “Our Country and Our Culture” Our second ode comes to us from the most famous su‘luk (brigand) poet of the pre-Islamic era, al-Shanfara. He is thought to have lived a generation before the Prophet Muhammad (b. 569/70) and to have been from the tribe of al-Azd, which occupied the coastal area to the south of Mecca. From his poems, we understand that at some point he offended his tribe and was forced out into the desert. This punishment typically followed one of three offenses: disgracing the tribe by immoral conduct, killing one of its members, or dragging it into insupportable conflict with other tribes by repeated provocative acts. Assuming that he paints an accurate picture of himself, we can at least exclude the first possibility from consideration. The stories of his life indicate that his tribal situation became untenable when he began a ferocious attack on the related clan of Salaman and attribute his motive variously to resentment at being spurned by one of their women and to revenge for the murder of his father by one of their men. In any case, after ostracism he lived perilously as a su‘luk. He seems to have gathered around him a number of fellow outcasts, whom on occasion he led in raids. His end almost certainly came violently, if not in the manner traditionally described: His oath was that he would slay a hundred men of Salaman; he slew ninetyeight , when an ambush of his enemies succeeded in taking him prisoner. In the struggle one of his hands was hewn off by a sword stroke, and taking it in the other he flung it in the face of a man of Salaman and killed him, thus making 26 Abundance from the Desert ninety-nine. Then he was overpowered and slain, with one still wanting to make up his number. As his skull lay bleaching on the ground, a man of his enemies passed by that way and kicked it with his foot: a splinter of bone entered his foot, the wound mortified, and he died, thus completing the hundred.1 Though al-Shanfara’s biography remains conjectural, based necessarily on clues from the poems rather than on popular stories, there can be no doubt about the exalted position within the canon of his desert ode, which has earned the title Lamiyyat al-‘Arab (The L-Poem of the Arabs, L being the rhyme consonant). Nevertheless, during the past two centuries it has attracted familiar criticism and controversy. Critics have faulted it for alleged disorder. Among them, Francesco Gabrieli has denied that the text constitutes a proper poem and has characterized it instead as an anthology.2 J. W. Redhouse, who concluded that “the whole poem is shattered into dislocated fragments, entirely void of interdependence,” went so far as to rearrange the lines into a supposedly more rational progression . He did so on the assumption that the poem at one time exhibited unity that was later obscured by “the blunderings of successive generations of commentators and translators, blindly following in each other’s footsteps.”3 Unhappily for Redhouse’s hypothesis, there is no evidence of textual mutilation: early editions conform, with little or no variation, with later ones. Grave concerns about the poem’s authenticity have also been voiced. It had been asserted by an early philologist that Khalaf al-Ahmar (d. 796), a prominent Basran transmitter (and notorious fabricator) of poetry, produced the Lamiyyat al-‘Arab.4 Few commentators from the classical period were impressed by this claim—indeed, the vast majority ignored it—yet it has excited considerable interest during the modern period. It would not be worth our while to recount the lengthy debate over authenticity, particularly since ‘Abd al-Halim Hifni’s cogent rebuttal has made it difficult for us to take the positions of those individuals attributing the poem to Khalaf al-Ahmar seriously.5 That their case was flimsy to begin with was in fact recognized by Lyall; in 1918 he noted the improbability of the Basran transmitter ’s having the requisite genius and desert expertise to create the Lamiyya.6 Recent findings...