Night and Horses and the Desert Read online

  Copyright

  First published in the United States in 2000 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  Lewis Hollow Road

  Woodstock, NY 12498

  www.overlookpress.com

  Copyright © 1999 Robert Irwin

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

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  ISBN 978-1-59020-914-1

  Contents

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Bibliography

  1 Pagan Poets (A.D. 500–622)

  2 The Qur’an

  3 Court Culture (7th-8th centuries)

  4 Widening Horizons (c. 750–c. 900)

  5 The Wandering Scholars (c. 900–c. 1175)

  6 The Lost Kingdoms of the Arabs: Andalusia

  7 Servitude and Military Grandeur

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  An anthology of translations of the kind which is offered here implies a canon of Arabic literature – that is, a selection of extracts from what the anthologist has judged to be the major authors and the key texts. Certainly, I did not want to involve myself in the presumptuous enterprise of proposing such a canon. I would have preferred to have followed precedent and taken guidance from the choices of earlier anthologies of the same scope. There are no such precedents to follow. Earlier anthologies (for example James Kritzek’s Anthology of Islamic Literature, 1964) have not only spread themselves more widely among Arab, Persian and Turkish sources, but have also tended to use their selected translations as illustrations of aspects of Islamic history and social life. In so doing, relatively little attention was paid to the literary status of what was chosen, although all sorts of lively and interesting theological, historical and geographical matter was included. One can learn a lot about Arab life in general from such anthologies, but not very much about Arabic literature. This book, however, is about literature. How were prose and poetry recited and written down? What were perceived to be the sources of literary inspiration? What were the various genres and to what extent were they constrained by rules? What were the canons of traditional Arab literary criticism? How did poetry and belles-lettres evolve between the fifth and the sixteenth centuries?

  On the one hand, there is rather a lot of poetry in my selection. On the other hand, there is not enough. There are a lot of poems because, in the judgement of both medieval and modern Arabs, it is in poetry that their supreme literary achievements are to be found. Prose literature has, until this century at least, been much less esteemed. Yet, for several reasons, I have skimped on the poetry. Arabic poetry is much harder to translate than Arabic prose. The medieval essayist Jahiz (on whom more later) went so far as to observe that poems ‘do not lend themselves to translation and ought not to be translated. When they are translated, their poetic structure is rent; the metre is no longer correct; poetic beauty disappears and nothing worthy of admiration remains in the poems.’ (Rightly or wrongly, he thought that the translation of prose posed no special problems.) Successful translations of Arabic poetry into English are hard to find and, as we shall see, it is debatable what constitutes a successful translation.

  Translation is like a seance with the dead and what comes out on the planchette will often read like urgent nonsense. Translating Arabic poetry is peculiarly difficult. For now, it is sufficient to observe that the way the Arabic language works means that it is very much easier to find rhymes and therefore to produce long odes with a monorhyme in Arabic than it is in English. Additionally, the Arabic metrical system is quite different from that used in English poetry. Faced with these problems, most English translators have abandoned any attempt to echo the original rhyme and metre in their translations. Even then, the Arab poets’ penchant for double entendres and other forms of word-play have given translators considerable problems. Satisfactory prose translations have been relatively easier to find – though only relatively, for some of the grandest pieces have been written in a prose which is bombastic, rhythmic and rhyming, and therefore hard to mimic in English. Some major Arab authors appear never to have been translated at all.

  For both prose and poetry, I have drawn on a wide range of translations by academics, poets and private scholars working over a long period of time. Some translators have succeeded in giving their work an accessible, modern feel, so that – for example – the ninth-century caliph and poet, Ibn al-Mu'tazz, may appear to speak directly to a contemporary sensibility. Other translators have, wittingly or unwittingly, rendered the medieval Arabic into a decidedly archaic English; but this too has something to recommend it. When a twentieth-century Arab (or for that matter a tenth-century Arab) reads a pre-Islamic ode, he is rarely reading something that speaks directly and unproblematically to him. Rather he is struggling with verse that is archaic and frequently obscure in vocabulary, imagery and technique. As Warren T. Treadgold, the translator of Shanfara’s pre-Islamic ode, the Lamiyyah, pointed out, that poem is ‘not only nearly untranslatable into English but nearly unreadable in Arabic’. From the eighth century onwards it was common for poets to produce works which were deliberately archaic, as they pastiched sixth- and seventh-century themes and made use of an obsolete vocabulary based on a life in the nomadic desert which the poets in question had not actually experienced. To render such poems into a breezy modern English idiom which is directly accessible to the average reader is, then, to perform a curious service. There is a sense in which a good translator is working not so much on the text, but on his reader. So the translator of a medieval Arab text is implicitly translating his reader into an Arab, but, as has been suggested above, a difficult choice still has to be made: what kind of Arab? A seventh-century Arab, a tenth-century Arab, or a modern Arab? And behind this strategic decision, there are, of course, other decisions which will have to be made – one choice merely masking the next in line.

  A translator may well be successful in translating the words, but this cannot mean that he has translated the associations that those words had for their original audience. For a Western readership, saliva and salivation are likely to be associated with spitting, and, perhaps, the dissemination of disease, incontinent drooling, or a response to a dinner bell. But, as the late Professor A. F. L. Beeston pointed out in his fine selection of translations from the poems of the 'Abassid poet Bashshar, saliva (riq) occupies a privileged place in the Arabic vocabulary of love. A poet is more likely to speak of his beloved’s saliva than of her kiss. Similarly, he is more likely to refer to her teeth than to her smile. For a Western readership, the ostrich may summon up various associations: the well-known passage in the Book of Job beginning ‘Consider the ostrich …’; ostrich farms and ostrich steaks; childhood visits to the zoo; above all, the foolish bird’s habit of putting its head in the sand when threatened by any peril. But the ostrich (na'am) once abounded in the Arabian peninsula and mention of this bird would summon up a quite different range of associations in the mind of someone steeped in ancient Arabian poetry or in the techniques of the desert hunt. Indeed, the early Bedouin did not regard this flightless creature as a bird at all; rather, it was a relative of the camel. Ostriches were ridden by desert ogres. The Ostrich was a constellation of stars in Sagittarius. ‘To ride the win
g of a ostrich’ was to devote oneself wholeheartedly to something. Above all, the ostrich was the image of cowardice and therefore the tenth-century poet al-Mutanabbi compares the retreating Byzantine emperor to an ostrich. The Western reader may not be aware of this range of associations and, of course, the sort of point that has just been made about ostriches could also be made about toothpicks, lupins, hunchbacks, monasteries, or almost anything.

  It would have been easy to have packed this collection with entertaining tales of adventure, sex and comedy – easy, but seriously misleading. Much of the best of Arabic literature, by which I mean what has been most highly regarded by the Arabs themselves, is decidedly short on adventure or sex. Some of what I have selected has been written in a wilfully difficult language. Personally, I am not indifferent to easy pleasure in literature, so sex and comedy do find their place in this anthology. However, I am more interested in giving the English reader a taste of the authentic strangeness of the medieval Arab past, and its sheer alienness. It is, I think, part of a translator’s task to leave some elements of strangeness in the work which he or she is representing in English. Some of my chosen pieces are abstruse, mannered, and absurdly allusive (and this applies whether they are read in Arabic or in English). They are included because they are important or at least typical, and I would not want readers to come away with the impression that all of Arabic literature is easily accessible and enjoyable to a modern Western sensibility. The great works of Arab literature were rarely self-contained. Even at the time they were composed, poems were only occasionally ‘transparent’ to their original audience, and it was common for those who transmitted a poem, whether by word of mouth or by pen, to provide a context and a commentary for the poem that was being transmitted. The earliest Arab poets were often accompanied by transmitters, whose job it was to explain the enigmatic verses that they transmitted. The great prose works of Ibn al-Muqaffa' and al-Hariri swiftly attracted numerous commentaries, and, indeed, it is quite impossible to understand the stories of Hariri without a commentary. Many Arab writers would produce their own commentaries to explain what they had written; the thirteenth-century mystical poet, Ibn al-'Arabi, is a case in point.

  Therefore it is rare for my selections to stand free. Most of what I have chosen needs to be set in a context and located within a literary genre, as well as detailed glossing. There is the problem of a plethora of place names – especially in many pre-Islamic qasidas, in which a roll-call of obscure desert toponyms was expected to evoke nostalgia, erotic longings, or pride in battle. Additionally, the Arab poets possessed a detailed knowledge of desert flora and fauna which a modern readership is most unlikely to share. (Some ruthless English translators have dealt with this problem by excising all foreign names from their translations, as well as conducting a literary cull of the wildlife of the Arabian peninsula.) A wide range of translations and translators has been drawn upon for this book – academic, free, archaicizing, modernizing – and this may enable the reader to sense the wide range of possible strategies and styles.

  Although I have concentrated on important and typical texts, I have not been rigorous in this, for I have occasionally chosen obscure pieces by eccentric outsiders (such as the toxicological diatribe of the tenth-century occultist-cum-horticulturalist, Ibn Washshiyya). This is an anthology of extracts. For that, at least, I do not have to be apologetic, for the arbiters of medieval Arabic literary culture made a cult of extracts of prose and poetry and a cult, too, of anthologies of such extracts. Some of the most esteemed works of Arabic literature, such as Isfahani’s Book of Songs, or Abu Tammam’s Courage, or Ibn Abd al-Rabbihi’s The Precious Necklace, are collections of other men’s flowers. Snippets of memorized prose and verse, often culled from such anthologies, formed a vital part of the conversational and epistolary culture of the educated Arab. Because of the way culture was transmitted and anthologized, it is often difficult to assign an item of Arabic literature to a particular time. For example, the tenth-century anthologist Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani tells us many stories about the early eighth century and, more specifically, about the Umayyad prince Walid (later the Caliph Walid II for a few months) and the poems allegedly composed under his debauched patronage. Since some of the tales are clearly apocryphal, they and the poems they frame probably did not originate in the early eighth century. On the other hand, Abu al-Faraj strove to transmit faithfully the stories which came to him from books and oral informants. So it is unlikely that the tenth-century anthologist actually made up stories about Walid. This sort of problem crops up again and again, with the consequence that a huge amount of Arab literary culture floats fairly freely in a chronological limbo.

  What is meant by ‘classical Arabic’? Strictly speaking, classical Arabic is fasih Arabic. According to E. W. Lane’s Arabic-English Lexicon, fasih means chaste, free from barbarisms; the usage among Arabs of pure speech of which the beauty is perceived by hearing; eloquent; following the rules of desinential syntax. Most of the pieces included in this anthology conform to the strictures of linguistic rigorists and have indeed been translated from classical Arabic. However, in the last chapter I have included a few late medieval pieces (for example, a tale from The Thousand and One Nights and an extract from Usamah’s memoirs) which were not composed in classical Arabic. They were written in an ‘incorrect’ Arabic which reflects later, spoken demotic usages. (But for more on the features of post-classical or Middle Arabic, see Chapter 7.) ‘Classical Arabic’ does not mean pre-modern Arabic, for classical Arabic is still occasionally used by authors and speakers today. Classical Arabic should be contrasted with vernacular or colloquial Arabic, rather than with the modern standard Arabic which it overlaps.

  Early studies of Arabic literature produced in the West had a rather miscellaneous appearance, for it was inevitable that the writers featured in those studies should in large part be determined by what was available and had been read in European libraries. There are serious errors of omission and emphasis even in works produced in the twentieth century. For instance, in R. A. Nicholson’s A Literary History of the Arabs (1907), which is a substantial and extremely valuable book, there is not so much as a mention of such major figures as Tawhidi or Tanukhi. The important anthologist Ibn 'Abd al-Rabbihi seems to have been hardly more than a name to Nicholson and he gave the stylish and interesting historian Miskawayh short shrift compared with a later and much duller historian, Abu al-Fida. In general, the early Western historians of Arabic literature seriously undervalued the poetry and prose – especially the prose – produced in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

  Arabic names and dates may puzzle readers without a previous background in Middle Eastern studies. Surnames were unknown in the medieval world. In their absence, people resorted to quite elaborate systems of nomenclature. A man was identified first by the name of his son (actual or hypothetical), then by his own name, then by his father’s name, then his grandfather’s, and so on. Additional epithets might be used to pin an individual down by his place of origin, religious school, or trade. Thus to take as an example the name of a famous tenth-century poet and anthologist, Abu al-Faraj 'Ali ibn al-Husayn ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Qurashi al-Isfahani: Abu al-Faraj literally means ‘father of Faraj’. This part of the name is what is known as the kunya. ‘The father of’ might be used in a metaphorical or facetious sense. Thus one might be ‘father of the big nose’, or ‘father of dirt’. (It is in fact unlikely that Abu al-Faraj really had a son called Faraj, for the name means ‘father of joy’.) 'Ali is the poet’s ism, or proper name. Ibn means ‘son of’ and therefore al-Husayn is the name of the poet’s father, Muhammad is the name of his grandfather and Ahmad the name of his great-grandfather. A man’s lineage written out in this way was known as a nasab. Qurashi signifies that the poet was descended from the famous Arab tribe of the Quraysh, and al-Isfahani indicates that he was born in the Persian city of Isfahan. Qurashi and Isfahani are nisbas. Apart from those parts of a name already mentioned, some individuals, particular
ly those who were in the service of the court or army, also acquired honorific names. For example, a famous twelfth-century literary historian went under the name 'Imad al-Din Aluh al-Katib al-Isfahani. 'Imad al-Din was a laqab or honorific name which its bearer had acquired in official service, and it means ‘pillar of the religion’. All ‘din’ names are laqabs. So are the regnal names assumed by caliphs and sultans, such as al-Mustansir, al-Nasir, al-Ashraf, and so on.

  Which portion of the full name was used briefly to identify an individual varied according to circumstance. The essayist Jahiz took his name, really a nickname, from his goggle-eyed appearance. The cosmographer Qazwini derived his name from Qazwin, the town from which he came. Hariri means ‘silk-worker’, but the fiction-writer Hariri owed his name to his father’s profession rather than his own. The famous fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldun was not actually the son of Khaldun; ‘Ibn Khaldun’ was an abridgement of his nasab and the Khaldun who was the ancestor of the historian seems to have flourished in the ninth or tenth century. It can be quite difficult to guess under what part of a name an Arab writer may appear in an index or catalogue.

  Essentially the same system was used for naming women, who were chiefly identified as mothers of someone (umm means mother) and as daughters of someone (bint means daughter). However, in the chapters which follow there will not be many women’s names. The production of classical Arabic literature was dominated by men and few women wrote books. According to Ibn Ukhuwwa, the author of a tract on morals and market-inspection, 'it is said that a woman who learns how to write is like a snake given poison to drink’. This was a commonly held attitude, but it was by no means universal (see, for example, in Chapter 7, Athir al-Din’s lamentation over his scholarly daughter, Nudar).

  The first year of the Muslim calendar is the one in which Muhammad left Mecca for Medina. This year corresponds to A.D. 622 in the Christian calendar. Dates are given in this book according to the Christian calendar. However, the Muslim year, based on lunar months, is shorter than the Christian solar year. Therefore there is not a one-to-one relationship between Christian and Muslim years and this explains why many of the birth- and death-dates given in this book are accurate only to within two years.