[In the following essay, Latham provides historical context for a celebrated poem by al-Mutanabbi and analyzes its style and symbolism.]

1. ‘Alā qadr-i ahl-i l-‘azm-i ta'tī l-‘azā'im-u wa-ta'tī ‘alā qadr-i l-kirām-i l-makārim-u

2. wa-ta‘zumu fī ‘ayn-i l-ṣaghīr-i ṣighār-u-hā wa-taṣghuru fī ‘ayn-i l-‘azīm-i l-‘azā'im-u

With the worth of men of resolve are resolutions in accordance, and in accordance with the worth of the generous are generous deeds.¹

Great in the eye of the small are small deeds, and small in the eye of the great are great deeds.

It is with these two verses, now proverbial and as famous as their celebrated author, that al-Mutanabbī opens one of his best known qaṣīdas.² Perhaps because the poem is so familiar, its undoubted artistic merits have been taken very much for granted, or worse, they have passed the undiscerning unperceived.³ Such merits—as indeed the merits of much great Arabic poetry, which are only too often lost on Arabists⁴—can only be brought out and impressed on the mind by close reading of the Arabic with rigorous attention to structure and texture, diction and meaning, and all such other ingredients as go into the making of any true poetic work of art.⁵ Here is not the place to accord the qaṣīda the exhaustive treatment to which it could be subjected if limitations of space did not forbid. Of necessity, I must restrict myself to a limited number of points primarily calculated to alert the reader to the merits of a masterpiece and the artistry of its creator.

In order to understand and appreciate the qaṣīda in question, its historical context is not a mere desideratum; it is a sine qua non. The year is 343/954, and the source of inspiration Sayf al-Dawla's reoccupation, courageous defence, and refortification of al-Hadath al-Hamrā'.⁶ Wrested and demilitarized⁷ in 336/950 by Leo, son of Bardas Phocas, the Byzantine commander (“Domesticus”), al-Hadath was a strategically situated town which “owed its importance to its situation on the Arabo-Byzantine frontier, between Mar‘ash and Malaṭiya, at the entry of the saddle which guarded the route to Albistān. Its protection was assured by a fortress built on a hill called Uḥaydab [sic], ‘the little Hunchback’. To the north-west … was the darb al-Hadath, a narrow pass which was the scene of many battles and whose name the Arabs changed to darb al-salāma in an attempt to exorcise the evil fate which seemed to be attached to it.”⁸

Having surprised al-Hadath shortly after mid-October 954, Sayf al-Dawla had immediately set to work on the reconstruction of its fortifications, only to be interrupted in next to no time by the appearance of Byzantine forces led by Bardas Phocas with the assistance of his son Nicephorus and other senior officers from his own family.⁹ From all accounts the Byzantine army was, by mediaeval standards at least, vast and, moreover, calculated to overawe, with its core of regular troops reinforced by a motley array of Bulgar, Khazar, Slovene, Russian, and Armenian contingents recruited from the wilder provinces of the Empire. Before the end of October the decisive battle of the whole operation was fought out around the strategically crucial Uḥaydib. After a long day of heavy fighting, uncertainty of the outcome impelled Sayf, at the head of a dedicated company of troopers, to cut a way through the imperial ranks to Bardas Phocas. Thereupon the Muslims rallied, and the Christians fled, leaving as prisoners in Sayf's hands certain members of Bardas's family. The victory enabled the Hamdānid to resume work on the fortifications of al-Hadath, and, after putting the finishing touches to his work on 12 November 954, he had the pleasure of hearing Mutanabbī recite the qaṣīda which now claims our attention.

In the introduction to his Form and Structure in the Poetry of Al-Mu‘tamid Ibn ‘Abbād R. P. Scheindlin comments that “the one later poet whose poems are often said to have been composed with coherent structure, al-Mutanabbī, has never been studied from this point of view, and the assertion remains unproved.”¹⁰ It is axiomatic that the truth of the assertion cannot be demonstrated on the evidence of a single poem, but, if such a possibility did exist, it would be hard to find a more convincing witness to sustain the case for coherence than the poem on the battle of al-Hadath. That Mutanabbī has paid great attention to the structure and organization of the qaṣīda is, in my submission, so plain as to admit of no denial by anyone who has read it in its entirety. It is too long to quote here in full, but from the following analytical summary of its contents—to which it will be useful to refer later as we come to examine verses in detail—it will be seen that there is a clearly identifiable plan to the poem according to which its composition is logically developed to produce a coherent and harmonious whole:

I. PROLOGUE

1-2: General rule: High standards are set by men of high calibre. / Elaboration: Men's concepts of great and small vary according to their stature.

3-4: Particular example: Sayf, whose army has to bear the weight of his superhuman standards. / Elaboration: He expects of others his own standards of courage, though lions, for all their courage, do not have such expectations.

5-6: Result of his courage: Vultures would defend his armoury with their lives. / Explanatory elaboration: Their want of raptors' talons is supplied by Sayf's swords and men.¹¹

II. SAYF'S TRANSFORMATION OF AL-HADATH

7-8: Transition (rhetorical question): Can al-Hadath now recognize her natural redness, or know which of two liquids quenched her thirst? / Explanatory elaboration: Recent rainfall had been followed by the shedding of blood.

9-10: Elaboration to explain the blood: Sayf had had to throw up fortifications under attack, / and al-Hadath had been crazed by the devils of war. Yet, by dawn she enjoyed the safety of exorcizing amulets—enemy corpses.

11-13: Result of bloodshed: Al-Hadath, once driven off like pillaged camels, has been returned by you, Sayf, to the fold of Islam in Destiny's despite. / Explanatory elaboration of last three words: Fortune's vicissitudes are no match for you; they must repay whatever they take from you. / Further elaboration: Your actions (sc. unlike theirs) are positive, decisive, and irreversible.

III. PRELUDE TO THE BATTLE THAT TRANSFORMED AL-HADATH

14-15: Transition (rhetorical question): How can Byzantium's forces ever hope to destroy the al-Hadath rebuilt on Sayf's valour? / Explanatory elaboration: … now that they have lost the action they brought and fought before the Fates' Court.

16: Elaboration of v. 15, explaining the prelude to the action: The foe advanced on you, Sayf, weighed down with armour.

17-18: Elaborations of v. 16: (i) the visual impression left by the advancing army: a dazzling glitter (v. 17); (ii) the auditory impression: an ubiquitous, indistinct rumble and confused murmur (v. 18).

19: Elaboration of v. 18, explaining the rumble: the army is a multiracial, babbling horde.

IV. THE BATTLE AND ITS PHASES

20-21: Transition (ejaculation): How well was the combatants' metal proved in the fire, and the base destroyed! // Elaborations: (i) Only a sharp blade and its fearless wielder survived the test (20b): / (ii) The test was failed by swords that could not cut through arms and by champions who would not fight. (Phase 1.)

22-24: Elaboration of vv. 20-21, explaining Sayf's survival of the test: (Phase 2.) You, Sayf, stood fast and tempted Death / as routed champions fled past your smiling face. / You were valiant to the point of indiscretion as if you knew the successful outcome.

25-32: Elaboration of v. 24 explaining the consequences to the enemy: (Phase 3.) 25-26: You, Sayf, crushed the army / Elaboration: with increasingly devastating blows.

27-28: You abandoned lance for sword. / Elaboration: You were right, for swords are the keys to truly great victories.

29-32: You scattered the foe across the heights of Uḥaydib like coins over a bride. / Elaborations: (i) Your horses were up in eagles' nests, distributing meat from the kill: / (ii) the eaglets thought your steeds their mothers; / (iii) you drove your horses willy-nilly over precipitous slopes.

V. THE DOMESTICUS LAMPOONED

33-35: Transition (rhetorical question): Can the Domesticus be so stupid as to attack you as regularly as he does? / Second, reinforcing, rhetorical question with elaborations: Does he not recognize the lion's scent (i) when even brute beasts can smell lions, / and (ii) when he has suffered the loss of close male kin?

36-38: Statement defining the Domesticus's role in the battle: He deserted his companions // Elaborations: (i) thanking them for shielding him in struggling for their own lives (36b); / (ii) understanding the otherwise unintelligible language of swords; (iii) delighted at having cheated Sayf of his spoil, viz. his life, which he saved in flight.

VI. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SAYF'S ACHIEVEMENT

39-40: Transition (negative statement with following adversative): Sayf is not just any monarch defeating his peer; // Primary elaborations: (i) He is the champion of monotheism against polytheism (39 b); / he is the pride of all the Arabs, not just a local frontier hero.

41-43: Secondary elaboration (to orient Sayf's achievement towards the poet): Sayf's success is raw material for the present poem and, as such, a gift to Mutanabbī, who is grateful to him. / Sayf's other gifts—horses—rush him to the fray when battle calls, etc. (A hint at the poet's hope for royal bounty.)

VII. PERORATION

44-46: Transition (laudatory apostrophe): O sure and ever-ready Sword (= Sayf), / may martial qualities and deeds, your subjects and Islam, rejoice that you are safe! / Elaboration (invocatory rhetorical question): As God's weapon against His foes, why should you not always be preserved by Him as long as you serve Him thus?

Slight modifications to the foregoing scheme could be envisaged, but these would in no way undermine the proposition that we have to do with a natural sequence of ideas that is in itself cohesive. There are, of course, syntactical structures and other technical devices which make for cohesion in no uncertain manner, and some of these will emerge as parts of the poem come under closer scrutiny.

At this point it seems to me appropriate to return to our point of departure: the first two verses of the poem. Before considering them in detail it is worth recalling that Mutanabbī was not the sort of poet to be deprived of all manoeuvre within the tightly circumscribed bounds of the classical qaṣīda as conceived by certain literary theorists.¹² To be sure, he was by no means unique in this respect, but he is more conspicuous if only because of the edifice of criticism raised against him by his detractors. One area in which his freedom to manoeuvre found expression was the nasīb, or amatory prelude, which at times he manipulated in a manner wholly unacceptable to his critics or discarded altogether.¹³ In a panegyric whose central core is, in one sense at least, comparable to that of the one we are considering, namely the qaṣīda celebrating Sayf's victory over the Byzantines at Mar‘ash in 342/953,¹⁴ Mutanabbī does lead up to his main theme with an unexceptionable nasīb of some thirteen verses.¹⁵ This feature stands in striking contrast to the verses with which he opens the al-Hadath poem. Here, as we see, he discards the nasīb in favour of a gnomic prelude in a manner reminiscent of Abū Tammām, who frequently opens his panegyrics with gnomic musings¹⁶ and whose comparable and equally famous qaṣīda in praise of al Mu‘taṣim's conquest of Amorium in 838 a.d. opens with the reflection “The sword is an intelligencer more truthful than the written word”.¹⁷ The inevitable question arises: Did Mutanabbī seek to evoke in the mind of his hearers a comparison between al-Mu‘taṣim's achievement at Amorium and Sayf's at al-Hadath and accordingly open his qaṣīda in a manner calculated to evoke just such a comparison? Certainly, an implied comparison of this order would magnify Sayf's achievement and project an acceptable hyperbolic concept: in no way inferior to a caliph, Sayf had taken a fortress in no way inferior to a formidable Byzantine stronghold that had successfully resisted the might of Islam for well over half a century.¹⁸ Indeed, Sayf's achievement was in one respect greater than the Caliph's: it had not had to rely on treachery from within the stronghold. Of course, no matter what we may care to believe, we have no means of knowing that that was what our poet intended or that he was consciously or unconsciously influenced by his predecessor. Of one thing only can we be sure: the two verses constitute a perfect unity in themselves and, as such, constitute a fitting prelude to a poem remarkable for its structural and conceptual unity and of a coherence reflecting the occasion's essential unity of place and, in a sense, time.

The formal unity of our two opening verses is achieved by the studied use of bonding devices. One such device is the skilful use of the rhyming consonant to reinforce the framework of the hemistich rhyme-scheme aaba that follows naturally from the poet's observance of the taṣrī‘¹⁹ demanded by convention. Thus, to this rhyme-scheme there exactly corresponds the sequence (not positioning): a. -mi -mu // a. -mi -mu; b. -mu // a. -mi -mu. Interlocking of the first and second verses is effectively accomplished by (i) the immediate proximity of wa-ta‘zumu at the beginning of v. 2 to (i)l-makārim-u at the end of the second hemistich of v. 1 in anticipation of the juxtaposition of the cognates (il)-ṣaghīr-i ṣighār-u-hā and (i)l-‘azīm-i l-‘azā'im-u at the end of the first and second hemistichs, respectively, of v. 2. The bond between the two verses is effectively consummated by the rhyme-word of v. 2, viz. ‘azā'im-u, which not only reproduces the morphology of ‘azā'im-u in v. 1, but also comes near to generating the same acoustic effect.

The monotony of uniformity within a framework of unity is avoided by the poet's resorting—appropriately enough, given the sententious nature of what he has to say—to techniques as old as pre-Abbasid pulpit oratory.²⁰ In the first verse an element of chiasmic balance is presented both by the syntax (‘alā qadr-i … ta'tī // (wa-) ta'tī ‘alā qadr-i …) and by the sense (by synthetic parallelism, whereby the thought of the first hemistich is taken further and completed by the second²¹). Diversity is further achieved by the contrast between the periphrastic ahl-i l-‘azm-i of the first hemistich and by the simple l-kirām-i, its counterpart in the second. In the second verse the two hemistichs are semantically antithetical, the danger of unrelieved duality being averted by the contrast in morphology, meaning, and mode of definition between ṣighār-u-hā and l-‘azā'im-u.

To sum up, the formal structure of the first two verses is such as to weld them into a unified entity. As the evident product of careful structuring of form and theme, the couplet does not constitute an isolated phenomenon: it prefigures an apparently sustained effort by the poet to achieve structural unity by formal devices. Here it is not practicable to take the reader through the entire qaṣīda to show how far and by what variety of means the poet achieves his ends: one or two examples must suffice.

Since vv. 3-8 are quoted in full below (p. 13), our first examples may conveniently be taken from those verses. In vv. 3-4 Sayf is indirectly magnified by a thread of subtly achieved contrasts between singular and plural running between the verses. The contrast is consistently between the hero in the singular and others in the plural (actual or implied): Sayf-u—l-jaysh-a—(hamm-a)-hu // ‘an-hu—l-juyūsh-u l-khaḍā-rim-u; [huwa] (implicit in yaṭlubu)—l-nās-i—nafs-i-hi // l-ḍarāghim-u. Syntactically, the verses are parallel to the extent that (i) the first hemistich of each constitutes a complete main clause followed, in the second, by a subordinate clause introduced by the particle wa-, (ii) both the first and second hemistichs of each verse are grammatically capable of standing alone. On the other hand, the risk of monotony has been overcome by the avoidance of syntactic equivalence in the following manner: (i) the analogue in 4a of hamm-a-hu in 3a is not a morphologically equivalent noun with an identically vocalized identical suffix, but a clause incorporating, in the corresponding final position, a noun of slightly different morphology with identical suffix dissimilarly vocalized by reason of case, namely nafs-i-hi (the effect is to preclude internal rhyme); (ii) the circumstantial clause in 3b is a verbal sentence introduced by wa-qad followed by a verb in the perfect, whereas that of 4b is a nominal sentence introduced by wa- and characterized by the absence of a logical copula expressed by a finite verb; (iii) the verb in 3b is formally positive even though negative in sense, whilst that of 4b is negated by the particle lā. As can clearly be seen, the avoidance of syntactic equivalence has been so managed as to create formal contrasts within a framework of general syntactic parallels. It remains only to add that the subtle blend of unity and diversity so achieved extends to the rhyme-words binding the two verses together: sharing three out of four consonants as well as all four vowels, the quadriliterals l-khaḍārim-u and l-ḍarāghim-u produce acoustic effects that are different, yet not dissimilar.

In vv. 5-6 the most obvious formal link uniting the verses is the virtual identity of pattern presented by the last two and half feet of the second hemistichs, viz. aḥdāth/u-hā wa-l-/qashā‘im-u and asyāf/u-hu wa-l-/qawā'im-u. In vv. 7-8, on the other hand, it is the bond developed between ayy-u l-sāqiy-ayni l-ghamā'im-u and saqat-hā l-ghamām-u l-ghurr-u … saqat-hā l-jamājim-u, the nature of which speaks for itself.

What has been said so far on formal and structural aspects of our poem represents only a fraction of all that needs to be said, and, even when account is taken of such additional comments as may be offered in the course of this paper, it is not too much to say that the surface of the subject will barely have been scratched. There are, however, other aspects to be considered, and it is to these that we must now turn.

Returning to vv. 1-2 as our most natural point of departure, we may with profit begin by considering their content, function, diction and syntax. As regards content, it could be plausibly argued that what Mutanabbī has to say in these two verses is hardly worth saying since the sentiment is platitudinous and trivial, and does not even enjoy the saving grace of Pope's view of “true wit” as “what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed”. But to place too much emphasis on such particulars would be to miss the point. One must, rather, attempt to identify the poet's aim, and, having identified it, to determine how far and how well the end is achieved. In other words, we must concern ourselves with function.

Reading of the qaṣīda in its entirety reveals what it might not perhaps be inappropriate to describe as an epic in miniature (even if it does lack certain ingredients of the true epic²²)—in Virgilian terms an “arma virumque cano”. Sayf is the hero, and certainly it is around Sayf and his martial prowess that the poem unfolds and revolves. Nevertheless, his achievement is not a purely personal affair, nor even a Hamdānid affair; Sayf's victory transcends the boundaries of tiny worlds and local loyalties: it is the business of Islam, and its scope the macrocosm of the Muslim world.²³ Of this there is evidence enough within the poem. As early as v. 11 we are apprised of Sayf's religious purpose and attainment, and, to ensure that the point is taken, the poet has contrived to secure for the words ‘alā l-dīn an emphatic position at the beginning of the second hemistich by means of a syntactic manoeuvre calculated to disengage them from radadta-hā at the end of the first, thereby allowing for a rhetorically effective pause, albeit momentary, at the metrical break:

11. Tarīda-tu dahr-in sāqa-hā fa-radadta-hā ‘alā l-dīn-i bi-l-khaṭṭiy-yi wa-l-dahr-u rāghim-u

[Al-Hadath] the pillaged herd²⁴ that a [vicissitude of] Time drove off and you then handed back // to the Faith by means of Khaṭṭī lances²⁵ in Time's despite.

The religious and universal character of Sayf's heroic mission is taken up in greater detail and with more obvious insistence as he moves towards his peroration:

39. wa-lasta malīk-an hāzim-an li-nazīr-i-hi wa-lakinna-ka l-tawḥīd-u li-l-shirk-i hāzim-u

40. tasharrafu ‘Adnān-un bi-hi lā Rabī‘a-tun wa-taftakhiru l-dunyā bi-hi lā l-‘Awāṣim-u

You are no sovereign just vanquishing his peer,²⁶ but Belief in God's Unity vanquishing belief in gods' plurality, one with whom [all] ‘Adnān, and not Rabī‘a alone is honoured,²⁷ and one in whom the [whole] world glories, not just The Covering Strongholds.²⁸

Finally, the poem concludes in a vein that leaves no doubt that Sayf is seen as the champion of all Islam, the instrument of the Almighty:²⁹

44. a-lā ayyuhā l-sayf-a l-ladhī laysa mughmad-an wa-lā fīhi murtāb-un wa-lā minhu ‘āṣim-u

45. hanī'an li-ḍarb-i l-hām-i wa-l-majd-i wa-l-‘ulā wa-rājī-ka wa-l-Islām-i anna-ka sālim-u

46. wa-lim lā yaqī l-Raḥmān-u ḥadday-ka mā waqā wa-taflīq-u-hu hāma l-‘idā bi-ka dā'im-u

O Sword that is never sheathed, on whom there falls no [shadow of] doubt, from whom there is no cover [of protection],

Let the smiting of skulls and glory and qualities sublime, and him who looks to you, and [all] Islam rejoice that you are safe!

Why should the Compassionate not protect your two-edged blade as long as He affords protection, for, through you, He splits the skulls of His foes?

Such then—in this poem at any rate—is our poet's vision of his patron, and it is in the light of this vision of the greatness of the man, his mission, and his destiny and of the magnitude of his achievement that we must appraise its first two verses. It is their function to strike the keynote of such greatness and magnitude prior to elaboration in vv. 3-4, in which Sayf is introduced as a concrete example of what the poet has in mind; and, with an evident combination of artistry and planning, Mutanabbī sees that they discharge that function in as effective a manner as he can devise. One can scarcely fail to note in them the preponderance of terms expressing, implying or suggesting greatness, whether of achievement or of human character. It is only in v. 2 that the vocabulary of smallness and insignificance appears, and then only to serve as a foil to greatness in the sequence ta‘zum—ṣaghīr—taṣghur—‘azīm—‘azā'im, in which ta‘zum and ‘azā'im have most emphatically the first and last say, respectively. To lay positive stress on the keynote of the poem, whether in this or any other way, is particularly appropriate if we can accept that concept of the gnome which assigns to it the function of dispelling doubt and uncertainty.³⁰

One of the most striking features of vv. 1-2 is the simplicity of diction. Little learning would have been required to grasp the sense of what is said, and it is almost as if the poet is proclaiming his intention of bringing the achievement of Sayf before a much wider audience of the faithful than would otherwise have been possible. In other words, one cannot help but feel that Mutanabbī senses that the immediate purpose and context are best served by clarity and simplicity of style and expression. By this stage in his career—he was in his late thirties—he was an experienced poet who could avoid equating style with wealth of ornament, verbal exuberance, strange words, and grandiloquence. Consequently, in a total of forty-six verses there are no more than some fifteen words or thereabouts which any good Honours student of Arabic in an English university would not be expected to know or guess from radicals after three years of sustained study. In short, the simplicity of diction observable in the first two verses is maintained throughout the main body of the composition.³¹

Mutatis mutandis, what is true of diction is to a greater or lesser extent true of syntax: the keynote struck in vv. 1-2 is simplicity. Assuredly, we have the anastrophe of rhetoric, but the sentence structure is basically uncomplicated, and, as the poem develops, the syntax is all but that of unadorned, straightforward prose with minimal or non-existent disturbance of word order:³²

3. yukallifu Sayf-u l-Dawla-ti l-jaysh-a hamm-a-huwa-qad ‘ajizat ‘an-hu l-juyūsh-u l-khaḍārim-u

4. wa-yaṭlubu ‘inda l-nās-i mā ‘inda nafs-i-hi wa-dhālika mā lā tadda‘ī-hi l-ḍarāghim-u.

5. yufaddī atamm-u l-ṭayr-i ‘umr-an silāḥ-a-hu nusūr-u l-malā aḥdāth-u-hā wa-l-qashā‘im-u

6. wa-mā ḍarra-hā khalq-un bi-ghayr-i makhālib-in wa-qad khuliqat asyāf-u-hu wa-l-qawā'im-u.

7. hal-i l-Hadath-u l-ḥamrā'-u ta‘rifu lawn-a-hā wa-ta‘lamu ayy-u l-sāqiy-ayni l-ghamā'im-u?

8. saqat-hā l-ghamām-u l-ghurr-u qabla nuzūl-i-hi fa-lammā danā min-hā saqat-hā l-jamājim-u.

Sayf al-Dawla imposes on his army [the burden of] his [high] ambition, though armies, multitudinous and mighty, have proved unequal to it.

He expects of men that [same valour] of which he is himself possessed, though that is that which [strong, bold] lions [wont to prey]³³ do not presume to find.

To his armoury “Our lives be your ransom!” cry the longest-lived of birds, the vultures³⁴ of the open desert, both young and old [alike].

No harm has come to them from creation without talons inasmuch as his swords and hilts have been created [in their stead].

Does Red al-Hadath recognize her colour? Can she tell which of the two cup-bearers [who gave her drink to sup]³⁵ was [in fact] the clouds?

The white-shining clouds gave her drink before he too descended, and then when he drew near her, she was given drink by skulls.

The syntax of plain Arabic prose is not restricted to the verses quoted: it is a phenomenon that recurs. In the majority of verses, however, it is the first hemistich that is remarkable for natural word order—understandably so, since it is immune from the pressures exerted on its counterpart by the need to accommodate the rhyme-word. The first hemistichs of the following verses will serve to illustrate the point:

9. banā-ha fa-a‘lā wa-l-qanā taqra‘u l-qanā wa-mawj-u l-manāyā ḥawla-hā mutalāṭim-u

10. wa-kāna bi-hā mithl-u l-junūn-i fa-aṣbaḥat wa-min juthath-i l-qatlā ‘alay-hā tamā'im-u

12. wa-tufīt-u l-layālī kull-a shay'-in akhadhna-hu wa-hunna li-mā ya'khudhna min-ka ghawārim-u³⁶

14. wa-kayfa turajjī l-Rūm-u wa-l-Rūs-u hadm-a-hā wa-dhā l-ṭa‘n-u asās-un la-hā wa-da‘ā'im-u

16. ataw-ka yajurrūna l-ḥadīd-a ka-anna-hum saraw bi-jiyād-in mā la-hunna qawā'im-u

[Sayf] built her and upraised [her], as shaft beat against shaft, / while the waves of doom clashed all around her.

She suffered [a derangement] the like of madness, but came to dawn / with amulets upon her—to wit, the corpses of the slain.³⁷

The [predatory] Nights put everything they have taken beyond [the] reach [of the owners thereof,] / yet they are bound to repay the debt of what they take from you.

How could the Byzantines and Russians ever hope to destroy her, / when such thrusting [of your army's weapons] afforded her foundations and pillars?

They came against you hauling [such a mass of] iron [armour that it was] as if they / crawled³⁸ on coursers with no legs [to hold them up].³⁹

The verbal sentence⁴⁰ that is the predominant syntactic characteristic of vv. 1-2 and thereafter a prominent feature of so many of the first hemistichs of this qaṣīda's verses is reduced to its simplest form by compression into a single word as the poet, having brought us to Sayf's moment of truth, chooses a simple intransitive verb to sum up, powerfully in a single foot, his patron's heroic reaction:

22. waqafta wa-mā fī l-mawt-i shakk-un li-wāqif-in ka-anna-ka fī jafn-i l-radā wa-hwa nā'im-u

You stood [your ground] when death was not in doubt for anyone who did so; / it was as if you were in the very eyelid of Destruction as he slept!⁴¹

As the poet continues his laudatory apostrophe of Sayf, waqafta is echoed in analogues: verbs in the initial position with zero connective and in the same tense, person, and gender. There is, however, the difference that these verbs are transitive and, as such, incomplete in themselves. In the present context this fact is only of secondary importance; what matters is the syntactic simplicity that they generate—a simplicity thrown into relief by a word order that is nothing if not perfectly natural and normal: 24. tajāwazta miqdār-a l-shajā‘a-ti wa-l-nuhā //; 25. ḍamamta janāḥay-him ‘alā qalb-i ḍamma-tan //; 27. ḥaqarta l-rudayniyyāt-i ḥattā ṭaraḥta-hā //; 29. natharta-hum fawqa l-Uḥaydib-i kull-i-hi //.

Consonant with a relatively straightforward vocabulary and a style based on a natural mode of expression is Mutanabbī's avoidance in this poem of anything that might cripple his verse. His use of figures and tropes is restrained, and, in refreshing contrast with Abū Tammām and his imitators, he eschews all that is artificial or strained, pedantic or precious—and here I make no exception for a grammatical image (v. 13)⁴² which, however incongruous it may seem to modern Western tastes, must be judged by the criteria of the culture and period.⁴³ What is particularly striking perhaps is the great artistic discrimination he exhibits in the matter of adjectives and other qualifiers. They are used sparingly, and neither the lazy adjective nor the idle phrase finds any place in the qaṣīda. Thus, when he speaks of al-juyūsh al-khaḍārim (“armies multitudinous and mighty”; above p. 13), he aims at pointing the contrast between al-jaysh and al-juyūsh—a contrast deliberately contrived to heighten Sayf's achievement. Likewise, when the poet defines the “longest-lived of birds” as “vultures of the desert” and divides them into young and old (aḥdāth, qashā‘im; above p. 13), his purpose is not to fill out a hemistich with padding, but to project an appropriate image of Sayf in a Bedouin environment living up to the Bedouin ideals of physical courage and success in war, on the one hand, and unstinting hospitality, on the other: so lavish a provider of food to vultures has Sayf become by his martial prowess that, even the young on the threshold of long life no less than the old with but a little time to live, would gladly die for him. Again, the epithets are used advisedly when, by way of comment on Sayf's decision to abandon lances (vv. 27-8) and engage the foe with swords, the poet says: “Whosoever seeks a glorious victory (fatḥ jalīl) [must realize that] victory-keys⁴⁴ (mafātīḥ) are nothing less than light, keen-edged effulgents (bīḍ khifāf ṣawārim).”⁴⁵ In the first place, not every victory is gained by clean and honourable fighting; a welcome victory might be won by treacherous means (Amorium, it will be recalled, was only taken by co-operation from within) or by overwhelming odds or in some other way not worthy of the style jalīl. Secondly, the point is made that sharp, light swords in hand-to-hand combat had the advantage over the heavy armour of the encumbered Byzantine troops.

Mutanabbī's qaṣīda on al-Hadath ranks, in my view, among his greatest poetic triumphs. In the foregoing pages I have, of necessity, touched briefly and, in some respects, inadequately on a mere handful of points which I see as illustrative of the merits that are of the essence of the poem's artistic stature. Note has been taken of such features as coherence and unity and formal techniques calculated to secure the cohesion of verses, as well as lexical straightforwardness, simplicity of syntax and style, and so forth. But neither individually nor collectively are such features sufficient in themselves to account for the savour and vitality of the total composition. In the final analysis the source of its vitality and character is Mutanabbī's concept of the occasion and his consequent exploitation of the possibilities of a theme for him so sublime as to have no need of formalism. In his treatment of a theme so congenial to his spirit and ideals Mutanabbī is at his best, but some aspects of his consummate literary skill in handling his material are not readily perceived by modern eyes, and not least because both his narrative and eulogy depend as much on what he leaves out as on what he puts in. His practice of artistic economy to realize the possibilities of a situation is well illustrated by his thumbnail sketch of Sayf's victorious charge (vv. 25-26):

25. You pressed both their wings upon the heart in a grip / dealing death to the secondaries and primaries beneath it,

26. with blows that fell on skulls while victory was not yet won / and which went down to lower throats as victory came.⁴⁶

Here we have nothing to destroy the event; there is no interruption to ruin the image; there is no mention of the raptor that has pounced on its prey, let alone a systematic description of the bird, detailing its stoop, its talons, or whatever. Indeed the conception and execution of the image is such that the commentators seem not to have grasped its full implications. Knowing the nature of the Byzantine formation from the use of the term khamīs in v. 18, they have no difficulty in explaining the “wings” as the squadrons on the right and left flanks of the centre.⁴⁷ Likewise, they offer more or less accurate explanations of khawāfī and qawādim (“secondaries” and “primaries”). But what seems to elude them is the precise vision that the verses would conjure up in the mind of anyone at all familiar with that much-revered Bedouin sport of bayzara (falconry/hawking). The picture is remarkably accurate: in a swift and sudden movement the predator fastens on its prey; the prey is no small bird and, so to speak, such easy meat that it is instantly dispatched by the lacerating impact of the stoop; it is held on the ground in a vice-like grip as blows are delivered to the skull from behind to give it the coup de grace, and then followed by rending of the lower throat.⁴⁸

Even more strongly illustrative of Mutanabbī's capacity to stir the imagination by suggestion and encourage it to close the gap between the expressed and the perceptible is his sketch of Sayf's devastating rout of the Byzantines on mount Uḥaydib:

29. You scattered them all over Uḥaydib // as dirhams are scattered over a bride,

30. as, under your command,⁴⁹ the horses trampled nests upon the peaks //—though fare there was in plenty round those nests—

31. the chicks of the supple-winged [eagles] supposing that you had brought them // their mothers on their visits, though [in fact the latter were] thoroughbreds of strong and sure foot,⁵⁰

32. which, whenever slipping, you drove onward on their bellies // like [speckled] serpents slithering on the surface of the earth.

Nowhere in these verses is there any explicit reference to colour, yet the very first line paints a landscape in miniature: the simile projects a picture of silvery flashes of flying arms and armoured bodies against a background as colourful—after recent rain—as a bride bedecked with variegated clothing in her bridal procession. But that is not the end of the landscape; Sayf's drama is developed against a setting that matches the height of his attainment—the heights of Uḥaydib. Yet the scenery is not allowed to crowd out the event; the terrain is subordinate to the man, and there is no attempt to describe it directly. A lesser poet might have seized the occasion to detail each feature of the setting. Not so Mutanabbī. The nearest he comes to explicit description is his reference to “the peaks”. It is, however, from these peaks that the mind's eye surveys the scene in downward angles, as it were. The impression of height is conveyed by the mention of birds that are known to nest on crags; by the allusion to the eagles' supple wings, which, as those familiar with them know, enable them to end high, soaring flight in steep dives with folded wings; and, last but not least, by the sense of precipitous movement communicated by the glimpse we have of horses slipping over the slopes on their bellies like snakes (arāqim; sing. arqam).

To liken Sayf's slithering horses to snakes sliding over top-soil is to enhance the perspective of height by the introduction of the element of movement. But there is more to the simile than just transformation of the static into the dynamic. The connotations of arāqim have a role of their own that would not have been lost on the poet's audience: arqam denotes a snake that was, on the one hand, reputedly aggressive, tenacious and fearsome, and was, on the other, predominantly associated with black and white markings.⁵¹ To the Western mind the significance of the first point will now be self-evident and readily commend itself for aptness. The second point is less obvious, but a little thought will reveal it as the last brush-stroke on the poet's diminutive canvas: once again we are shown the brightness of arms and armour—this time contrasting with the darkness of the horses and whatever other dark patches occur in the background. An implied contrast of this kind is not, I think, coincidental, but intentional, and that for the very reason that earlier in this same qaṣīda there is a comparable contrast in v. 10: “She (sc. al-Hadath) … came to dawn with amulets (tamā'im) upon her—to wit, the corpses of the slain.” Now, tamā'im is the plural of tamīma “a speckled bead, black speckled with white or the reverse, which is strung on a string.”⁵² It is hard, then, not to believe that our poet here pictures the unretrieved enemy dead strung around the bounds or walls of al-Hadath in the dark but luminous setting of the dawn when light would catch the armoured bodies and throw them into sharp relief against the heightened darkness of the ground between them.

Mutanabbī's success as interpreter of the event of al-Hadath owes much to his keen sense of atmosphere and the technical adroitness with which he generates sounds and rhythms and manipulates pace and flow according to the demands of the episode. For him, the advance of the Byzantine army has all the atmosphere of a gathering storm, and he ensures that we capture it as such. Without so much as a mention of clouds or lightning, slowness or heaviness, he communicates a sense of all such as he spreads out the advance and then, at the appropriate moment, onomatopoeically fills our ears with the buzz of polyglot babble commingled with the reverberations of low thunder: // wa-fī udhun-i l-jawzā'-i min-hu zamāzim-u (v. 18).⁵³ Where sound effects such as these are called for Mutanabbī is not slow to use them, and they are unlikely to be lost on the listener. Poor indeed would be the ear that could not catch the clash and cut of arms and the sound of turbulence in … wa-l-qanā yaqra‘u l-qanā // wa-mawj-u l-manāyā ḥawla-hā mutalāṭim-u (v. 9),⁵⁴ or the rending clatter of taqaṭṭa‘a mā lā yaqṭa‘u l-dar‘-a wa-l-qanā (v. 21).⁵⁵ Again, who could not detect the underlying staccato rhythm of searing contempt as the poet spits out his taunt at the stupid Domesticus who does not know that discretion is the better part of valour:

33. a fī kull-i yawm-in dhā l-Dumustuq-u muqdim-un qafā-hu ‘alā l-iqdām-i li-l-wajh-i lā'im-u?

No attempt to identify the ways in which Mutanabbī has succeeded in giving life and colour to his verses must be allowed to divert attention from the manner in which he fulfils the central purpose of the poem, namely panegyric. In general terms, his treatment of the hero is no less deft than his treatment of the setting. As much is implied as expressed, and the consequent impression of controlled and well-balanced eulogy is pleasing. The indirect approach to encomium can be served by different means, some more easily identified than others. One that is recurrent in the poem on al-Hadath is the magnification of the hero by contrast, a technique particularly appropriate to the theme of the Arab David in combat with the Byzantine Goliath. As we have already seen …, the end can be attained quite simply and briefly by the straight opposition of singular and simple or intensified plural (jaysh / juyūsh khaḍārim; al-nās/nafsuh, etc.). Alternatively, the contrast can be operated on a larger scale. An illustration of this extended use of the technique is afforded by the magnification of Sayf through the contrast drawn between the numerical strength of the Byzantine host (vv. 16-19) and the courageous and successful stand soon to be made by him—one man—in the face of overwhelming odds (vv. 22 ff.). Here it is worth noting that in close-up at the crucial moment magnification of Sayf's stature is intensified as, in the second person singular (waqafta), he is brought, solitary and motionless, into sharp and sudden contrast with the pell-mell (cf. marra, farra below) of champions in flight. The effect is achieved by superb technical skill: the whole sentence packed into the single word waqafta is placed in a firm, emphatic and isolated initial position in a verse (v. 22) immediately preceded and followed by space-occupying sentences with expressed plural subjects: // wa-farra mina l-abṭāl-i man lā yuṣādim-u (v. 21b) … tamurr-u bi-ka l-abṭāl-u kalmā hazīma-tan // (v. 23a).⁵⁶

A more elusive way of magnifying Sayf lies in the inferential technique: his expectations of valour are higher than those of lions (v. 4), and this by implication makes him greater than lions; vultures have been created without the normal raptor's talons (v. 6), a fact implying, in the context, that the Creator in His wisdom has provided for their sustenance by His creation of a man predestined to kill on their behalf; the “Nights” cannot cheat him (v. 12), and so, by implication, he stands above the vicissitudes of these fickle entities that determine other men's destinies. And so on. Very much more could be said of the poet's treatment of Sayf, to say nothing of his brief but withering treatment of his foil, the Domesticus; but here a line must be drawn.

The foregoing adumbration of the poem's merits cannot be expected, nor indeed is intended, to do full justice to the composition. It is, rather, intended to suggest that the qaṣīda is the product of planned artistry. I should not be interpreted as holding that all details were calculated; many were probably not, but were more the spontaneous products of long poetic experience. It is this experience, combined with genius, that has bequeathed to us a poem of fine texture into which the craftsman has dexterously woven a pattern of traditional Bedouin ideals (e.g. valour, masculinity, martial prowess) enlivened with symbols of the old Arab battlefield (e.g. lions, vultures, eagles). In it the poet has magisterially invested his hero with the aura of the perfect warrior fighting “in the cause of God”.

Notes

1. “Generous” is well suited to the Arabic since it conveys the two senses “munificent” and “noble-minded”.

2. The principal sources of the poem are noted in A. J. Arberry, Arabic Poetry: a Primer for Students (Cambridge U.P., 1965), p. 84. Additional information on editions of the Diwān of Mutanabbī as well as on principal studies of the poet and his work (to which add F. Gabrieli, Studi su al-Mutanabbī (Rome, 1972) may be obtained from Arberry, Poems of al-Mutanabbī (Cambridge U.P., 1967), which does not, incidentally, include the text earlier reproduced in Arabic Poetry. As Arberry's text is that to which most people in the English-speaking world are likely to have access, it is the one which (with corrections where necessary) I use for present purposes (op. cit., pp. 84-91). The translation will be my own since Arberry's (contained in Arabic Poetry on pages facing the Arabic text) is only too often regrettably inaccurate or infelicitous.

3. I find it surprising that Blachère should have dismissed the literary aspect of the poem in less than three lines (R. Blachère, Un poète arabe … : Abou ṭ-Tayyib al-Motanabbî (Essai d'histoire littéraire) (Paris, 1935), p. 176), and that it should not have claimed more of Gabrieli's attention than it has (cf. op. cit., p. 21).

4. Many who would describe themselves as such know surprisingly little and care less about what R. Scheindlin rightly describes as “the chief aesthetic experience of an entire civilization” (Form and Structure in the Poetry of al-Mu‘tamid ibn ‘Abbād (Leiden, 1974), p. 1). I have spoken more fully to this point in my review of Scheindlin's book in BSO AS, xxxviii, 3 (1975), p. 631, where I have suggested some reasons for the general Western neglect of Arabic poetry. This, of course, is not to deny that some notable contributions have been and are continuing to be made to the subject, despite the fact that some of those who have made them seem not to have as sound a knowledge of Arabic as they ought!

5. Among noteworthy contributions to the understanding of Arabic poetry the following may be mentioned as material appearing since 1970: M. C. Bateson, Structural Continuity in Poetry (New York, 1970); R. Jacobi, Studien zur Poetik der altarabischen Qaṣide (Wiesbaden, 1971); A. Hamori, On the Art of Medieval Arabic Literature (Princeton U.P., 1974); R. Scheindlin, op. cit.; G. E. von Grunebaum (ed.), Arabic Poetry: Theory and Development (Wiesbaden, 1973) (not all contributions are of equal merit). The Journal of Arabic Literature (Leiden, 1970-) (= JAL) contains valuable articles.

6. See EI² (= Encyclopaedia of Islām. New edition), iii, 19 f.

7. I.e. by dismantling its fortifications.

8. EI², loc. cit.

9. Cf. Blachère, op. cit., p. 176.

10. P. 5.

11. I supply “raptors'” for reasons that will be made apparent below …, n. 34. Also, “men” is my interpretation of qawā'im as “hilts” (see below, … n. 34).

12. Cf. Scheindlin, op. cit., pp. 17-19. See also J. D. Latham, “Arabic Literature” in D. M. Lang (ed.), Guide to Eastern Literatures (London, 1971), pp. 13 f.

13. On Mutanabbī's willingness to flout convention in introductory verses see Hamori, op. cit., pp. 136 ff.

14. See Blachère, op. cit., p. 169. (First line: Layāliyya ba‘da l-zā‘inīna shukūl-u // ṭiwāl-un wa-layl-u l-‘āshiqīna ṭawīl-u.)

15. Twelve in the edition used by Blachère.

16. Cf. Latham, op. cit., p. 32.

17. “The written word” is my rendering of al-kutub (= the writings of astrologers in the context). (First line: Al-sayf-u aṣdaq-u inbā'-an mina l-kutub-i // fī ḥadd-i-hi l-ḥadd-u bayna l-jidd-i wa-l-la‘ib-i. See Dīwān Abī Tammām, ed., with Tibrīzī's commentary, by M. A. ‘Azzām, i (Cairo, 1951), 45-79.)

18. EI², i, 449.

19. This required the first hemistich of the first verse to end in the rhyme syllable.

20. On which see A. F. L. Beeston's excellent little article “Parallelism in Arabic Prose” in JAL v (1974), pp. 134-46.

21. See O. Eissfeldt, The Old Testament: an Introduction, tr. by P. Ackroyd (Oxford, 1965), pp. 57 f.

22. E.g. the embodiment of early history and traditions. What precisely constitute the ingredients of an epic is a controversial question. See, for instance, C. M. Bowra, Heroic Poetry (London, 1952) and especially Homer (London, 1972), in which he rejects the term “epic” even for the Homeric poems (pp. 2 f.).

23. For reasons which I cannot go into here J. Lecerf seems to me to push a half-truth to extremes when he writes “… Mutanabbî ne songe que des succès arabes, oubliant que ce sont aussi des succès musulmans” (“La signification historique du racisme chez Mutanabbi” in Al-Mutanabbi: Recueil publié à l'occasion de son millénaire (Beirut, 1936), p. 41).

24. Pace Arberry, who translates as “exile” (op. cit., p. 84), and those who—after Arab commentators—see in this verse a hunting image and take ṭarīda as “prey”. Such views are not impossible, but they are highly improbable. To my mind, that meaning of ṭarīda which makes most sense in this context and requires least explanation is that of “stolen camels” (= “pillaged herd”). As I point out elsewhere, “Bedouin would frequently resort to raids. These were mostly aimed at the seizure of camels …” (Latham, op. cit., p. 3).

25. On the sense of Khaṭṭī as commonly understood by commentators and lexicographers see C. J. Lyall, Ancient Arabian Poetry (London, 1930), p. 13.

26. In the English “vanquishing” I retain the participial form as in the Arabic, but the tense to be assigned to the timeless Arabic participle is, as Arberry sees, the past.

27. ‘Adnān: “ancestor of the Northern Arabs according to the genealogical system which received its final form in the work of Ibn al-Kalbī about 800 ad” (EI² i, 210). The name is used here to denote all northern Arabs. Rabī‘a was the name of the particular north Arabian tribe to which Sayf al-Dawla belonged. On Rabī‘a and Muḍar as a comprehensive term applied to the tribes of Najd and the Hejaz see Lyall, op. cit., p. 119.

28. Pace Arberry, who, not grasping the sense of al-‘awāṣim, has mistranslated it as “the capitals”. The meaning of the word is, as rightly explained in EI² i, 761 the “name of a part of the frontier zone which extended between the Byzantine Empire and the Empire of the Caliphs in the North and North-East of Syria. The forward strongholds of this zone are called al-Tugūr … whilst those which were situated further to the rear are called al-‘Awāṣim, literally ‘the protectresses’ …”

29. The manner in which structure apprises the hearer that a poem (of the same general kind as that we are considering here) is drawing to a close has been analysed by Scheindlin (op. cit., pp. 110 ff.). It is in the light of his observations that these verses of ours, whose pattern communicates that “sense of lengthening” which draws the qaṣīda to a natural and rhythmical close, should be viewed.

30. Cf. Qudāma b. Ja‘far, K. naqd al-shi‘r (ed. S. A. Bonebakker, Leiden, 1956), p. 81.

31. It is mainly certain rhyme-words that are likely to be unfamiliar (e.g. khaḍārim, ḍarāghim, qashā‘im), but in most cases the sense can in fact be derived from the context.

32. We must, however, take account of the fact that because of limitations imposed on the length of the verse, etc., word order in Arabic poetry can never be disturbed to the degree that it often is by Latin and Greek poets, for instance.

33. The words in square brackets are supplied from Lane's definition of khaḍram (Dict., s.v.).

34. Pace Arberry nusūr does not mean “eagles” (op. cit., p. 84). His mistranslation makes nonsense of vv. 5-6, as also does the suggestion of some commentators that qawā'im may mean “legs” (= horses) (cf., for example, Sharḥ Majānī al-adab (on L. Cheikho's edn.) iii (Beirut, n.d.), p. 1324. As regards vultures, the main point to be made is one of ornithological fact, namely that, whereas eagles have powerful feet with sharp, highly curved claws that have a great capacity for grasping and holding, vultures, though possessed of hooked and powerful bills, have only weak feet adapted for walking and running rather than for clutching (cf. A. L. Thomson, A New Dictionary of Birds (London & Edinburgh, 1964), pp. 431, 865)—hence the notion, current in old Arab folklore, that vultures—to which the same folklore attributed a mythical phoenix-like lifespan—had no claws. Once we understand this fact, it becomes clear that qawā'im must be taken as “hilts” (= the men who make the swords operative). The vulture image is most apt since these birds not only frequent wide, open spaces, but they also feed on the part-eaten portions of fresh kills made by such predators as lions (cf. Thomson, op. cit., p. 886)—beasts to which Arab poets regularly compare great warriors like Sayf and his men.

35. The full implications of this cup-bearer image have not, I think, been put by any commentator. Mutanabbī's intention as I see it is to portray a personified al-Hadath in festive mood headily surveying her own site with the two conventional “companions” of Arabic poetry—here, the clouds and enemy skulls that have plied her with refreshment—cast in the role of cup-bearers. They are, it should be noted, indubitably so cast by the poet in v. 6 of his satire on Kāfūr composed on the festival of 9 Dhū al-Hijja 350/19 January 962 (see Arberry, Poems of Mutanabbī, pp. 110 and 111, n. 1).

36. akhadhna-hu is a variant of akhadhta-hu read by Arberry and others. If we read akhadhtahu, the subject of tufītu is taken to be “you [Sayf]”, the sense being: “You put beyond [the reach of] the [predatory] Nights everything you have taken [from them]”. If akhadhna-hu is read, however, the subject of tufītu is taken to be al-layālī, and the sense as indicated in my translation, which, on balance, seems to give better sense since it is the Nights, not Sayf, who are given to plundering. (NB: In v. 12b li-mā is a correction; Arberry's text carries the misprint la-hā.)

37. I reject Arberry's translation “amulets consisting of corpses of the slain thereafter bedecked it” (Arabic Poetry, p. 84). The sense of aṣbaḥat as indicated by me is more meaningful: the battle had raged all day long, and calm would have come only with the approach of night. The dawn of the following day would have seen peace and quiet.

38. Pace Arberry, who—intending what sense I know not—assigns to the verb sarā its primary meaning “travel by night”.

39. Pace Arberry, who translates qawā'im as “feet”.

40. In the strict Arabic sense of the term (on which see Wright, Arabic Grammar, ii, 251).

41. It will be noted that waqafta, as a complete sentence in a single foot, allows for a dramatic pause, however fleeting. The whole structure of this verse (quadri-partite: waqafta / wa-mā … li-wāqif-in // ka-anna-ka … l-radā / wa-hwa nā'im-u) seems to me to have been deliberately contrived to generate a sense of unstable equilibrium, reflecting the uncertainty of the moment as expressly indicated in “it was as if you were in the very eyelid of Destruction as he slept”. (Not “and death was asleep” as in Arberry, who here, as in several other places, misses the circumstantial nature of the clause.)

42. Arberry's translation of jawāzim (“particles governing with the apocopate”) in this verse as “conditional particles” is inaccurate and misleading.

43. One of Mutanabbī's most admired lines is that in which he says in praise of Sayf al-Dawla's deceased mother that it is no disgrace for the sun to be of the feminine gender nor any source of pride for the crescent moon to be masculine (see Arberry, Poems of Mutanabbi, p. 61, v. 35).

44. It is hard to render the play on the radicals FTH.

45. I translate bīḍ as “effulgents” rather than just “swords” in an attempt to bring out, however infelicitously, the flavour of the Arabic.

46. Arberry mistranslates ḍarb as “a [my italics] blow”. In v. 25 “under-feathers” and “wing-tips” are inaccurate renderings of “secondaries” and “primaries”.

47. The khamīs was a cruciform formation made up of: (1) centre; (2) vanguard; (3) rearguard; (4) right wing; (5) left wing.

48. An excellent photograph of a falcon gripping a cowed bustard on the ground prior to slaughter can be seen in Falconry as a Sport by Zaid Bin Sultan Al Nahayan (Sheikh Zaid), (Abu Dhabi 1396/1976), Pl. 4. Immediately below it Pl. 5 shows how the falcon after the kill has overturned the bird and set about the lower throat/upper chest. My friend Ian Prestt, Director of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, tells me that the lower throat is a common point of entry as the bird makes to devour its prey.

49. bi-ka, lit. “through you”, which perhaps gives somewhat better sense than if we follow Arberry and take bi as “with” in conjunction with the verb tadūs.

50. Since ‘itāq (“thoroughbreds”) also denotes eagles as well as the sporting birds so admired by the Arabs (‘itāq al-ṭayr; see El² i, 1153), the use of the word is doubtless deliberate as also is ṣalādim, which would imply that the horses' feet were no less strong than those of eagles and falcons.

51. See Lane, Lexicon, s.v.

52. Ibid., s.v.

53. We must not overlook the possibility that the Syrian pronunciation of jīm may have been pronounced as ž (as in modern Syrian dialects) and thus have intensified the phonetic effect of the verse.

54. Translated above ….

55. Trans.: “Shattered to bits was all that could not cut (not “break” as Arberry translates) through armour and lances.”

56. “Of champions there fled those who would not strike …” … “with champions passing you wounded and in rout.”