[In the following essay, Hamori provides an overview of al-Mutanabbi's life and works.]

LIFE

Abū ’l-Tayyib Aḥmad b. al-Husayn, known as al-Mutanabbī, was born in 303/915 into a poor Kufan family. He took up the career of professional panegyrist while still a boy, and early began his travels in search of patrons. For years he had to content himself with offering hyperboles to men of modest distinction. In 322/933 we find him in prison in Himṣ (Homs): according to most Arabic sources, he had attempted to lead a bedouin revolt in the Syrian desert. The religious tincture of his call (of which his collected verse may retain some samples) earned him, according to this tradition, the name al-Mutanabbī, “He who sets up as a prophet.” This appears to have been his only try at advancement by extraliterary means. Gradually he grew in fame, and his patrons in rank. The nine years he spent, from 337/948 to 346/957, at the court of the Hamdanid prince Sayf al-Dawlah¹ in Aleppo were his longest stay with any one patron, and must have been the most satisfying. Sayf al-Dawlah was an Arab prince—a matter of great importance to Mutanabbī—and he truly possessed the virtues—generosity and courage—that are the twin pillars of the Arabic panegyric. It was not an altogether easy relationship: Sayf al-Dawlah was quick to anger, and Mutanabbī had more pride than pliancy. But respect appears to have been mutual. Sayf al-Dawlah accepted Mutanabbī's conditions for the ceremonial recitals: the poet would not have to kiss the ground before the prince, and would not stand to recite.² At court, literary rivals and other enemies intrigued against Mutanabbī, at length with success. He fled to Egypt, dedicating his praises to Kāfūr, a former slave and now ruler of the country. Mutanabbī appears to have entertained hopes of a high government post. This was denied him; he fled once more and made Kāfūr a theme of venomous satire. His next journeys took him to Baghdad, then to Iran. After a stay with the Buwayhid amir ‘Aḍud al-Dawlah in Shiraz, he returned to Iraq in 354/965. On the road bedouins attacked his party and killed him.

POETRY AND PERSONALITY

“His verse,” we read in al-Tha‘ālibī's (d. 429/1038) survey of the poetry of the fourth Islamic century, Yatīmat al-dahr, “flourishes alike where scholars meet for study and where friends join for pleasant conversation. It is upon the pens of epistolarians and the tongues of orators. It is sung by singers and chanted by wandering preachers (qawwālūn). It fills the books of writers and anthologists …” He has ardent partisans and ardent detractors, “and this is the chief indication of the abundance of his gift, of his superior achievement, and of his peerlessness in his age”. Abū ’l-‘Alā’ al-Ma‘arrī (d. 449/1057) referred to Mutanabbī as “the Poet”; according to a plausible report, he would head a quote with “Abū Nuwās says”, “Abū Tammām says”, “the Poet says”.³ Abū Tammām, al-Buḥturī and al-Mutanabbī were thought of as the panegyrists par excellence; they invited comparison. For al-Sharīf al-Raḍī (d. 406/1016), Abū Tammām was an orator, Buḥturī a delicate painter in words, Mutanabbī a leader of armies. For Diyā’ al-Dīn Ibn al-Athīr (d. 637/1239), Abū Tammām was the supreme inventor of conceits, Buḥturī was pre-eminent in the graceful nobility and music of language, Mutanabbī “wished to follow in the path of Abū Tammām, could not equal him … but excelled in his aphoristic verses and showed particular invention in the descriptions of battle”. Of all the poets, Ibn al-Athīr found Abū Tammām and Mutanabbī richest in original conceits, and he writes: “the fortunes of the man were more brilliant than his poetry, for in truth he is the seal of the poets.”⁴ Mutanabbī's particular glory, on this view, is that, the last in a line of great panegyrists, he stands at the summit of a tradition. In a similar appraisal of Mutanabbī's place in the history of Arabic verse, Tāhā Husayn, a critical but sympathetic reader, judges that Mutanabbī, the model for his successors (imām li l-shuy‘ arā’), must bear the blame for the vices—laboured conceits the chief among them—that they adopted.⁵

The medieval critics' lists of vices and virtues are useful to the reader who would place Mutanabbī in his age. The handiest of these are Tha‘ālibī's; for the European reader, the main lines of attack and defence are detailed in Blachère's Un Poète arabe du IV^e siècle. Such lists are, it is true, largely predictable, generated by conventional do's and don't's. On the debit side, instances of substandard or bizarre words, arbitrary grammar, and obscurity of expression are offered, along with such breaches of decorum as the employment of ill-omened phrases at the beginning of poems, and the like. There are pages after pages of quotations to substantiate the charge of plagiarism. This is a conventional line of attack;⁶ still, no subsequent poet invited such a storm about his use of received material. Mutanabbī was indeed the seal of those poets who tended the efflorescence of the panegyric in the grand neo-classical style, which linked a “modern” rhetoric of conceits, antitheses, syntactic symmetries, etc., to themes and a lexicon which hark back to the “classical” poets of pre-Islamic and early Islamic times. Some of the quotations used to prove Mutanabbī's plagiarism are of verses merely reshuffled to suit metre and rhyme; some are of lines in which an earlier conceit is refined, as where the second/eighth-century love-poet al-‘Abbās ibn al-Aḥnaf's, “She wept, unaccustomed to weeping; the tears in her eyes looked like strangers”, yields Mutanabbī's description of girls weeping for Sayf al-Dawlah's mother: “Calamity struck when they little expected it, and tears of grief stood where tears of coquetry had.”⁷ In either case, such verses remind us of the degree to which, even in reading a medieval Arab poet as distinctive as Mutanabbī, we are reading a tradition that delighted in tying, by imitation or innovation, text to text.

On the credit side of their balance sheets, the critics quote brilliant conceits and metaphors, striking maxims, rhetorical felicities. Some remarks, however, draw attention to aspects of Mutanabbī's poetry that they considered peculiar to him. Tha‘ālibī lists among the virtues Mutanabbī's invention of “addressing the patron as one addresses one's beloved”, and “using expressions proper to love poetry in the description of war”.⁸ Such breaching of the boundaries between the different domains of poetry must have struck contemporaries as extremely bold; al-Wāḥidī (d. 468/1075) objects at one point to Mutanabbī's use (not infrequent in his practice) of grim gnomic verses to introduce a panegyric: “This kind of thing is considered proper in laments for the dead, not in panegyrics.”⁹

Perhaps more than any other Arab poet of the Islamic age, Mutanabbī has tempted readers to see his poems in the light of the biographical anecdotes about him. This is true especially of his early work. Much of it consists in wholly conventional (if on occasion blasphemously hyperbolic) qaṣīdahs, introduced by the conventional elegiac love theme (nasīb)—though, as Blachère notes, in line with a practice which had developed over the previous half-century, the old theme of the poet's desert-journey (raḥīl) in quest of the patron is of rarer occurrence.¹⁰ There are also about a dozen pieces of self-praise (fakhr) blending contempt for mankind and the world with promises of great and violent deeds. Most of these pieces are relatively short. Two are done in qaṣīdah style, with nasīb (Y, i, 112, 135/W, 26, 52).¹¹ Some of the panegyrics use passages of gloomy sententiae or scorn for the world as overtures (Y, i, 124, 231/W, 38, 160). A few use self-praise built into the nasīb (Y, i, 200/W, 128); a few a combination of gnomic verse and self-praise (Y, i, 208, 326/W, 137, 245). Blachère and Tāhā Husayn, in their thoughtful large-scale studies, try to find the fit between poems and anecdotes. Life is not, for them, far from these texts, in which they see wild exultation, inflammatory harangues and reflections of bitterly disappointed hopes. They may be right. Their readings require them to suit the chronology of texts to the tale, but since the received chronological order (as in Wāḥidī's commentary) is rough, rearrangements are certainly possible. Blachère writes of the poems he dates from 318-24/930-6 (the period, in his view, of Mutanabbī's agitation and revolt in Syria) that, although the qaṣīdahs and occasional poems Mutanabbī produced during these years are scattered throughout the Dīwān, they are similar enough in form and content to be easily identified by their mounting vehemence, which dictates the chronological sequence in which Blachère sets them. But it is not certain that likeness of form and substance must spring from unitary experience. In another place, Blachère himself suggests that a melancholy ubi sunt passage in a panegyric may owe as much to Mutanabbī's wish to vary the plan of the qaṣīdah as to his pondering of mutability (although he is still tempted to see it as an attempt by the poet to inject his personality into an impersonal verse-form). The case may be the same with the passages of self-praise in panegyrics, in the fakhr in which the poet, as Blachère notes, reached back to the old tradition of heroic verse. Blachère also believes, however, that these passages of Mutanabbī's reintroduced life into what had, in a “century of drawing-room poetry”, become mere school exercises.¹² But other interpretations are possible and perhaps more probable. In a panegyric to a member of the Tanūkhī family, which befriended the poet in Latakia, the heroic spirit works as a neat overture to expressions of gratitude:

My resolve guarantees that in desert and town the Khaṭṭī lances will be running with blood.
How much more of this hanging back? How much more
of this delay after delay?
Of letting the sale of verses in a sluggish market keep my soul from the paths of glory?
What has passed of youth will not return. A day once gone cannot be brought back.
When my eye glimpsed the white in my hair, it was [like a painful object] in the black of my eye.
After the perfection of youth, each added day diminishes me.
Shall I be content to live and not offer just recompense for the Prince's liberality?(13)

To take the line about the sale of verses out of context, as an expression of Romantic discontent, is very likely to increase the distance between us and the poet. It is the panegyric itself that puts an end to “delay after delay” and guarantees “the Prince's liberality”. Later in his life, when the adventures that had led to the prison in Himṣ were long past, fakhr—as in the qaṣīdahs dedicated to Sayf al-Dawlah—still played an important part in the texture of themes in Mutanabbī's panegyrics. To vary this texture; to create a signature, or even to conquer, as it were, a province of writing (as a century and a half earlier Abū ’l-‘Atāhiyah had claimed, according to the story, the zuhdiyyah as his preserve),¹⁴ or indeed to gain followers for some wild, dubious enterprise—any of these motives may have drawn the young poet's interest to fakhr. They may have overlapped. Perhaps he thought there might be a market for pure fakhr: one short poem (Y, i, 132/W, 48) is glossed, “to be spoken by one of the Tanūkhīs” (qāla ‘alā lisān ba‘ḍ al-Tanūkhiyyīn).

Several anecdotes jeer at Mutanabbī the man. At a moment of princely magnificence he makes a show of standing aloof, only to end up scrambling after dirhams on the floor. He rides with Sayf al-Dawlah's army, but panics when his turban is caught on a branch.¹⁵ These stories have a prototypal air. Perhaps they were sparked—not unlike our modern biographical curiosity—by the strident foregrounding of the panegyrist's ego; perhaps they are gestures pointing at the literariness of the poetry. There are, to be sure, admiring remarks as well. Ibn al-Athīr finds it worth mentioning that Mutanabbī saw battle with his own eyes; Ibn Khallikān (d. 681/1282) calls him “a man of high soul and lofty thought”. In the story of his death, Mutanabbī is attacked by a band of bedouins, and turns to flee. A servant's remark—“Where is your verse ‘I am known to horse, night and desert, to sword and lance, to parchment and to pen’?”—causes him to turn again and fight until he is killed.¹⁶ The last anecdote cancels the embarrassment of literariness.

Massignon thought that Mutanabbī's Qarmaṭī (Carmathian) convictions accounted for his “bitter and combative thought,”¹⁷ for such verses as these:

What station shall I attain! What power shall I fear
When all that God has created and all that he has not
Is of no greater account to my high resolve (himmah) than one hair of my head?(18)

or as these, with the strange echo of the Qarmaṭī attack on the pilgrims returning from Mecca:

In me the sword will have a companion like its own sharp edge;
my fame will be that of the boldest of the bold.
I have exhausted the utmost measure of patience. I will
now hurl myself into the perils of war, to the utmost measure …
With men of resolve who have long awaited that I should
turn over to them the power I took from the hands of slaves,
[With] a shaykh who regards the five prayers as supererogatory,
and permits shedding the blood of pilgrims in the sacred enclosure …
Tomorrow is the rendez-vous between the slender blades
and the kings—Arab or non-Arab—who do not submit …(19)

But how much can we know of Mutanabbī's convictions? Some medieval commentators attempt to play down Mutanabbī's more scandalous utterances; others throw them in relief. In a famous anecdote, Mutanabbī reveals to a certain Abū ‘Abdullāh Mu‘ādh b. Ismā‘īl al-Lādhiquī that he has been sent “to this erring community” as a prophet. “To do what?” the man asks. “To fill the world with righteousness, as it has been filled with iniquity,” Mutanabbī replies.²⁰ Supposing that Mutanabbī kindled a religiously tinged uprising in the Syrian desert, are we to take these words seriously? The phrase is traditional, therefore he may have spoken it; or therefore it may be a tag in a stylized narrative. A short poem of pure warlike fakhr follows, but neither in this nor in any of the rest of the Dīwān is there anything that goes beyond the bitter and the combative. If there is no evidence in Mutanabbī's poems to prove he was a rebel, there is still less to suggest he was a would-be reformer, as Tāhā Husayn would have it. All accounts agree that Mutanabbī was not a devout man, and he occasionally wrote lines to which a devout reader could object. But what he thought of man and God we do not know. Unlike Ma‘arrī's Luzūmiyyāt, for Mutanabbī's poetry human perplexity and off-stage suffering are not essential topics. The biographical anecdotes do not permit us to look behind the texts, and even the texts are ambiguous. Gabrieli cites a large selection of verses in which readers have seen signs of religious nihilism or philosophical interests, but he is probably right in believing these to be instances of rhetorical hyperbole and sententiae. Blachère sees no merit in medieval comparisons of apophthegms by Mutanabbī and Aristotle; he does however discern an intellectual and spiritual kinship between Mutanabbī and Ma‘arrī.²¹

The poetic persona of the early fakhr may tempt the reader to see the stamp of personality elsewhere in Mutanabbī's poetry. In his sensitive but deeply Romantic work, Tāhā Husayn writes of the panegyric to Badr al-Kharshanī, whose centre-piece is this man's fight with a lion: “It has a nobility of spirit and a power which I cannot but think the poet borrowed from himself for the adornment of his patron.”²² It is indeed difficult not to think of the exuberant power of some of the celebrations of Sayf al-Dawlah's border wars as the work of a poet who has found a hero worthy of him. We note how Mutanabbī applies to Sayf al-Dawlah certain images that he previously used in self-praise:

Only he mentions his ancestors who stands before defeat
[in a contest for superior honours] and has no other resource left

and:

The nights have not attained their wish: they did not,
as they passed, have me on their lead-rope,(23)

over against:

Praise belongs to Ibn Abī ’l-Hayjā’ [Sayf al-Dawlah] himself. To have to bring his Jāhilī ancestors to his aid is to be tongue-tied and feeble-minded

and:

The visitations of time upon the people follow his [Sayf's]
bidding; he holds in his hand the lead-rope of time.(24)

But then one looks at the tables, compiled by medieval critics, of the many instances in which Mutanabbī repeats a poetic idea, and the curtain between word and motive comes down once again.

PANEGYRIC (MADīḥ)

Poems in the big, public genres—panegyrics mainly, along with some elegies and satires—make up the greatest part of Mutanabbī's Dīwān. Such poetry had a job to do, but once the job was done, its second, longer life would begin. It would enter circulation and become, more often than not in the form of single lines or brief passages, the cash of the literate life. From scholarly worrying-bone and rhetorical stiffener, its uses stretched to literary re-casting—Tha‘ālibī has a section on conceits by Mutanabbī elegantly done into prose and used in epistles (rasā’il) by al-Sāḥib Ibn ‘Abbād, the vizier and littérateur who nursed a grudge against Mutanabbī, but knew a good phrase when he saw one²⁵—and to playful allusion (known as talmīḥ) in social intercourse.²⁶ Mutanabbī is certainly quotable. His aphorisms are forceful:

Rage against Time is like a fire in the belly, but it is the captive's rage against the thongs

or:

A mindless ignoramus needs polite learning (adab) as a headless donkey needs a halter.(27)

His images can be astonishingly bold and, within a mannerist system of perception, beautifully precise:

Their hair blackened the trees on the mountain-side; it was as if low-flying crows flitted among the trees.
Crimson blood ran upon the leaves, seeming oranges among the boughs

or:

Above the clashing waves the birds are like
riders of dappled horses, who have lost hold of the reins.(28)

For its first job, however—for its use as a panegyric or the like—a qaṣīdah needed to work as a piece. It might be a suite on a succession of themes, but as a piece it had to hold the attention of the audience and enhance the impact of its message. This is not to say that poems were recited in the respectful silence of the concert-hall. In an anecdote of Mutanabbī's recital of the qaṣīdah written to thaw a chill between himself and Sayf al-Dawlah, Abū Firās (the prince's kinsman, rival poet, and Mutanabbī's enemy) throws, line after line, accusations of plagiarism and ill-decorum at the poet. The prince himself interrupts the performance when the verse,

If you are gladdened by my envier's tales [it is well]; no wound that gives you pleasure causes pain

moves him to embrace Mutanabbī.²⁹ The anecdote may be stylized, but it presents a scene thought conceivable. Nor is there reason to think that all the poems are constructed with equal care. It is clear, however, that in many cases Mutanabbī takes pains to keep the poem moving and to give to the whole text, or to certain passages in it, effective form. A few examples may be offered.

The Sayf al-Dawlah period, with its endless border war against the Byzantines, supplied the poet with stories of brave doings—the handiest means of pulling a panegyric together. To be sure, a panegyrist wants to persuade the audience not so much of the mere fact that his patron did thus and so, but rather of his affinity for doing thus and so. A passage relating specific events will usually be framed in general statements about the patron's valour and munificence. Nor does the panegyrist write history. In a poem about a military expedition, place-names may provide a kind of armature; outstanding details may be briefly recalled; but the fibre of the narrative comes from its images—of burning cities and wild mountains, of armed might, danger, endurance, violence and death—and from great set-pieces of marching and clashing armies, and the decisive intervention of the hero. Such elements are combined in the poem celebrating the battle for the fort of al-Hadath. The reader will note how the poet gradually moves from compact reference to detail and then to broad canvas, giving the poem a sense of movement. After the opening maxims and their application to the patron, the poem moves through several, increasingly specific, compact references to the event that occasioned it. Then, with the verb of motion (“they came …”), a detailed if stylized chronicle begins. These are frequent patterns of composition in Mutanabbī, as is the subsequent narrowing of focus on to the hero. The theme of the fledgelings is perhaps intended to frame the passage (metre: ṭawīl):

‘alā qadri ahli ’l-‘azmi ta’tī ‘l-‘azā’imu wa-ta‘zumu fī ‘ayni ’l-ṣaghīri ṣighāruhā

wa-ta‘tī ‘alā qadri ’l-kirāmi ’l-makārimu wa-taṣghuru fī ‘ayni ’l-‘azīmi ’l-’azā’imu

According to the degree of the people of resolve come the resolutions, and according to the degree of noble men come the noble actions.

Small deeds are great in the eyes of the small, and great deeds are small in the eyes of the great.

Saif al-Daula charges the army with the burden of his own zeal, which numerous [enemy] armies have proved incapable of bearing,

And he demands of men what he has in himself—and that is something which (even) lions do not claim.

The longest-living of birds, even eagles of the desert, the young ones and the old ones of them, offer (themselves as) ransom³⁰ for his armoury;

It would not harm them that they were created without talons, seeing that his swords and hilts have been created.

Does al-Hadath the red recognise its³¹ own colour, and does it know which of the two wine-bearers was the clouds?

The white [rain-] clouds watered it before he descended, then when he drew near it the skulls watered it (again) [with blood].

He built it, and built it high, whilst lances were clashing against lances and the waves of the fates surged around it;³²

The like of madness possessed it, then amulets consisting of the corpses of the slain thereafter bedecked it.³³

(It was) an exile driven away by destiny, then you restored it to the (true) religion with Khaṭṭi lances in destiny's despite.

You cause the nights [fate] to lose (forever) anything that you take (from them), whereas they are debtors repaying what they take from you.

When what you intend is a future verb (act), it becomes past tense before any conditional particles can be prefixed to it;

And how can the Byzantines and Russians³⁴ hope to destroy it (al-Hadath), seeing that that thrust (of yours) is for it foundations and pillars?

They had summoned it to justice, and the fates were the arbiters; and no wronged man died, nor did any wronger live.

They came against you trailing their steel,³⁵ as though they travelled by night on horses that had no feet.

When they flashed, their swords could not be distinguished—and their garments and headgear were of the like (steel);

An army that marched slowly from the east of the earth and the west, confused noises proceeding from it (echoing) in the ears of the Gemini;

Gathered together in it was every tongue and nation, and only interpreters could make the speakers understand.

What a time, the time whose fire melted away the counterfeit, and all that remained was a sharp (sword) or a sturdy warrior (lion)!

Broken to pieces was all that could not break through armour and lances, and of the champions there fled whoever did not strike against (the enemy).

You stood firm, when there was no doubt that any who stood must die, as though you were in the very eyelid of death, and death was asleep,

The champions passing you by, wounded and in flight, whilst your face shone brightly and your mouth was smiling.

You surpassed the bounds of courage and reason, so that people said you had knowledge of the unseen.

You pressed their two wings³⁶ tightly upon the heart, so that the under-feathers and wing-tips died under the squeezing,

With a blow that struck the crania while victory was still absent, and proceeded (forthwith) to the upper breasts as victory advanced.

You despised the Rudaini³⁷ spears so that you flung them away, and so that it was as though the sword was reviling the lance;³⁸

Whoever seeks a great victory, its keys are only the light, cutting white swords.

You scattered them over all [the hill of] al-Uḥaydib, just as dirhams are scattered over a bride,

Your horses trampling with you the nests [of the eagles] on the mountain-tops, and many dishes of food lay about the nests.

The eagles' chicks thought you visited them with their mothers, whilst they were (in reality) sturdy, noble steeds;

When they [the horses] slipped you made them go on their bellies, as snakes crawl along on the earth's surface …³⁹

We see why al-Sharīf al-Raḍī called Mutanabbī a leader of armies. Blachère, who is a Romantic reader with little use for mannerist brilliancies, and who writes of the poetry of the Sayf al-Dawlah period that it seldom achieves the vibrancy of the poetry from before Mutanabbī's imprisonment, nevertheless agrees with this opinion, and concedes that the praise of Sayf al-Dawlah sometimes calls forth an epic grandeur unexampled in earlier Arabic poetry.⁴⁰

One text, in which Mutanabbī gives his version of a check to a planned raid into Byzantine territory, is an instructive example of poetic power as a means of managing the news. In the section quoted below, the large-scale composition is not unlike that in the last example. The poem moves from the broadest view—“Byzantium”, “the land”—closer, through distinctions of mountain and cave and then the names of particular places, to focus on the hero; then it broadens to the general again, to Sayf al-Dawlah's habit of being a hero, after which it seems ready to seal the matter with an aphorism, but, refusing to let performer and audience catch their breath, contradicts itself and only then, with a second gnomic verse, comes to a cadence. The poet uses this compositional scheme of focusing and broadening, and then of the false before the true cadence, to catch us up in a powerful current. The propagandist uses the current to announce, and yet conceal as the mere exception that proves the heroic habit, the setback—“except when the Sayḥān freezes over”:

… Do not be amazed: there are many swords, but today there is only the one Sword of Dynasty [Sayf al-Dawlah].

His noble nature unsheathes him in war, and the habit of benevolence and mercy sheathes him.

When I saw that mankind were beneath his station, I knew that Fate [dahr] tries mankind and separates the true coin:

Most worthy of the sword is he who smites men's necks, and of secure peace he who takes hardships lightly.

Most wretched of lands is, thus, the land of Byzantium; none in it can deny your glory.

You have poured out your horsemen upon it, so that even beyond Faranjah [i.e., at the farthest end of the Byzantine empire] all eyes were sleepless.

The land is daubed with the saffron dye of blood; the people, although not at prayer, are prostrate on the ground; the land is like so many painted mosques.

You overthrow them though they take to the mountains—those are now their fast horses—and you thrust at them the lances of your stratagems.

You hew them to pieces though they hide beneath rocks as snakes hide in the belly of the dust;

And the lofty strongholds on the mountaintops are encircled by your horsemen, a necklace around their necks.

They [your horsemen] annihilated them [the Byzantines] on the day of the Luqan, and drove them at Hinzīṭ, till Āmid was white with captives;

They made [the fort of] Safsāf join in the fate of [the fort of] Sābūr and it fell; their people, their very stones, tasted destruction.

In the wadi there marched with them [with your horsemen] in the night a man of courage, of blessed face, devout,

A man [fatā] who desires that the land be broad and time long, for time is too narrow for him, and no goal is far enough,

A man of raids whose swords are never absent from their necks unless [the river] Sayḥān freezes over,⁴¹

So that not one of them is left except those whom their dark lips and high breasts protect from the sword [i.e. the women]—

The patricians weep over them in the gloom, while among us they are unwanted goods cast aside on the market.

This is what fate [al-ayyām] has decreed for those it rules: a disaster to one people is a benefit to another.

But, because of the nobility of your valour, you, though their killer, are loved like a benefactor among them,

And the blood you shed is proud of you, and the heart in which you strike fear sings your praise,

For everyone sees the ways of courage and generosity, but the mind is governed by its temper …⁴²

Poems of pure, general praise may rely on degrees of formal organization. The following seems a plausible breakdown of such a text (Y, i, 326-32/W, 245-51):

• A Introduction: gnomic verses leading into self-praise; eleven verses (of which the last is the hinge-line, takhalluṣ, included here because it depends syntactically on verse 10).
• B Patron praised in the third person; six verses.
• C His kin praised; eight verses.
• D Patron praised, addressed in the second person; six verses.
• E Poet and patron (in which it is explained why the poet has only now come to praise him); four verses.
• F Patron praised in cosmic and religious terms (Time would obey his bidding, God is his guide, etc.); six verses. (Grouping such terms of praise near the end of a poem is frequent practice with Mutanabbī.)
• G Poet and patron: some poetry is trash but this patron deserves (and gets) the best; two verses, end.

The recurrence of sixes may well be an accident, but the alternation of passages, and the rough proportions, are very likely planned (Blachère observes that as the young Mutanabbī's craft matures, the parts of the qaṣīdah—nasīb and the panegyric proper—achieve a certain equilibrium).⁴³ Besides supplying an armature, such organization allows the poet to move, as it were, in a spiral, re-working the same limited stock of virtues on level after level. Rhetoric may also organize smaller regions. A plain example is passage B of the same poem. The six lines quoted below illustrate how the poet orders his matter and manipulates syntax and sentence rhythms to give the passage shape:

Polished in learning (adīb), refined in manners, grave, a man of deeds, intelligent, magnanimous, noble, a hero,

The vicissitudes of time are among his captives, among those jealous of his hands are the rainclouds [symbols of liberality].

He cures his riches by impoverishing himself through generosity, as if wealth were an illness.

He is beautiful, but in the eyes of his enemies he is more abhorrent than a guest is to his cattle.⁴⁴

If anything protected a noble chief from death, death's veneration and exaltation of him would protect him,

Along with gleaming naked swords, whose religion is to permit all, although they are bare as pilgrims observing the sacred prohibitions.⁴⁵

The design is built on asymmetries and symmetries. The passage starts with the choppiest, most percussive kind of syntax and winds down with a leisurely, but syntactically complex, two-line period.⁴⁶ After the catchall chain of adjectives in the first verse, two lines are devoted to the addressee's generosity, then a turn-line ingeniously combines generosity and valour into a single conceit; then two lines follow about valour alone. The symmetry is pointed up by the chiastic arrangement, around the turn-line, of the verbs in the couplets about generosity and valour. The most arresting conceit is placed at the end, making the formal break there also into a pause for thought.

In the following passage grammatical parallelism, and the like, are somewhat obscured in translation, but the shaping by imagery remains:

He has two armies: his cavalry and his birds of prey [which scavenge after the battle].

When he hurls them against the enemy, only skulls remain.

Their horse-cloths are the clothes of every impious ruler; their hooves trample the face of every unjust usurper.

The light of morning is weary because of the jealousy you excite in it; the black of night is weary because you press it hard.

The spears are weary from your breaking their points; the Indian steel is weary from your striking it against steel.

A cloud of vultures beneath which a cloud marches … If they ask for a drink, their swords offer it to them.⁴⁷

The last line ties it up neatly: it resumes the opening metaphor, the antithesis between light and dark from the third verse, and the clashing weapons from the fourth (for the swords are lightning in the dust of battle, promising a certain rain). The sense that a circle is being closed is strengthened by the symmetry in the metaphorical extensions: army from cavalry to birds, cloud from birds (its primary metaphorical referent) to cavalry. The rhetoric delights in shifting relations: bright weapons against the light, a dark mass of soldiers against the dark; then weapon against weapon; then bright weapon against dark cloud. Or: above and below, on and under, and the strange inversion where the cloud that brings rain is beneath the cloud that absorbs it.

TRANSMISSION OF MUTANABBī'S POETRY

Mutanabbī himself oversaw a recension of the poems he wished preserved and helped his scholarly admirers on difficult points; a commentary (partially preserved) by the grammarian Ibn Jinnī, who followed Mutanabbī on his journeys after the departure from Aleppo, was heavily used by later commentators. The best-known medieval commentaries are by al-Wāḥidī (d. 468/1075), and al-‘Ukbarī (d. 616/1219); Wāḥidī is regarded by Blachère, and indeed generally, as the best medieval commentator; ‘Ukbarī lacks his finesse, but his commentary quotes from several other scholars. Among modern commentaries, pride of place belongs to the extremely clear work of Nāṣīf al-Yāzijī, first published in Beirut in 1882 and reprinted many times since then.⁴⁸ Among scholarly works, the ones by Blachère and Gabrieli, quoted in this chapter, are indispensable. Tāhā Husayn's Ma‘a ’l-Mutanabbī, not intended as an academic book, is a thoughtful reading with a most learned and sensitive eye for the nuances of Arabic poetry. A selection of poems in English translation was published by A.J. Arberry (Poems of al-Mutanabbī) in 1967. A bibliography of studies in Arabic and in European languages is Rā’id al-dirāsah ‘an al-Mutanabbī, edited by G. and M. ‘Awwād (Baghdad, 1979).

Notes

1. Cf. pp. 318-19.

2. Badī‘ī, Subḥ, 71.

3. Ibid., 72.

4. Ibid., 177-9.

5. Ma‘a ’l-Mutanabbī, i, 203.

6. Cf. p. 351

7. Al-Qāḍī ’l-Jurjānī, Wasāṭah, 228.

8. Yatīmah, i, 163, 165.

9. Gabrieli, Studi, 55.

10. Un Poète arabe, 47. On Mutanabbī's use of the conventional divisions of the qaṣīdah, see Gabrieli, Studi, 53-5.

11. Y = Dīwān with the commentary of al-Yāzijī; W = Dīwān with the commentary of al-Wāḥidī.

12. Un Poète arabe, 58, 85.

13. Y, i, 208-9/W, 138. Khaṭṭī (from Khaṭṭ in Arabia): a conventional epithet of lances.

14. See p. 268.

15. Badī‘ī, Subḥ, 92, 78-9.

16. Ibid., 175, 178; Ibn Khallikān, Biographical Dictionary, i, 106-7.

17. “Mutanabbī”, 13; for the Carmathians and the events alluded to in the verses which follow, see pp. 197-8, above.

18. Y, i, 141/W, 60.

19. Y, i, 137-8/W, 56-7.

20. Badī‘ī, Subḥ, 52; Y, i, 158.

21. Gabrieli, Studi, 68-78; Blachère, Un Poète arabe, 30, 72, 278.

22. Ma‘a ’l-Mutanabbī, i, 239; for a brief analysis of this poem, see p. 157, above.

23. Y, i, 456, 159/W, 364, 85.

24. Y, ii, 132, 211/W, 490, 556.

25. Yatīmah, i, 101; for Mutanabbī's relations with Ibn ‘Abbād, see pp. 105-6, above.

26. See e.g. Badī‘ī, Subḥ, 313-37.

27. Tha‘ālibī, Yatīmah, i, 173; Y, ii, 438/W, 752; Y, i, 337/W, 254.

28. Y, ii, 258/W, 599; Y, i, 224/W, 153.

29. Badī‘ī, Subḥ, 89-91.

30. I.e. “salute” (the expression is a polite form of address to superiors, equivalent to “your humble servant”). The birds are vultures, which do not have powerful claws.

31. Or “her”: the city is feminine; cf. Abū Tammām's personification of the city of Amorium, pp. 159-61, above.

32. The Byzantines had earlier taken the fortress and razed it; the Muslims were rebuilding it as the attack came.

33. Madness: the city's possession by the Byzantines, which the Muslims “cure” with amulets.

34. Byzantine mercenaries.

35. Long chain-mail reaching almost to the ground.

36. The pun (“wings of an army”/“wings of a bird”) is the same in Arabic as in English.

37. An antique poetic term of uncertain origin.

38. The sword (sayf, a play on Sayf al-Dawlah's title) is the weapon of a braver man than the lance, because it is used in close combat.

39. Y, ii, 202-8/W, 548-54; trans. Arberry, Arabic Poetry, 84-8. For further analyses, see Latham, “Toward a better understanding”, and Hamori, “Reading al-Mutanabbī's ode”.

40. Un Poète arabe, 187.

41. It was the freezing weather that had checked Sayf al-Dawlah's campaign.

42. Y, ii, 99-105/W, 460-7.

43. Un Poète arabe, 93.

44. Because the guests will eat the cattle.

45. In the sacred enclosure no blood may be shed and the pilgrims, although not bare, may not wear sewn garments.

46. Cf. Scheindlin, Form and Structure, 102, 125.

47. Y, ii, 20/W, 380-1.

48. Yāzijī omits several lines from two poems, see Blachère, Un Poète arabe, 303.