Episode 113: Antarah ibn Shaddad

Episode 113: Antarah ibn Shaddad

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 113: ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad. In this program, we will consider the writings of the Pre-Islamic Arabic poet ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad, who likely lived during the second half of the 500s CE. A warrior from Najd, or the central part of the Arabian Peninsula, ‘Antarah’s works are a window into the tribal culture of Bedouin Arabia during Late Antiquity. ‘Antarah’s poems are brutal and beautiful. Raised during a long conflict called War of Dahis and al-Ghabra, ‘Antarah came of age in the saddle, wielding spears and swords against the enemies of his tribes and their allies. His most famous poem, the Mu‘allaqa, or “hanging poem” of ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad, is one of the great treasures of classical Arabic literature. But who exactly ‘Antarah was has been hard for posterity to determine with any certainty.

‘Antarah ibn Shaddad, like the other poets of Pre-Islamic antiquity from Arabia, is largely shrouded in mystery. He likely lived, once again, during the second half of the 500s CE, but he does not appear in literary or historical sources prior to the 800s CE. To medieval Islamic writing during the 800s and afterward, ‘Antarah was larger than life – an Arab Odysseus or Cyrano, wrapped in legend – a lover, a killer, an outcast, a wanderer, a bard – a halfblooded upstart who made a name for himself via violence and verse. His corpus, or to use the Arabic term, diwan, of poetry was probably edited and augmented in later centuries. And ages after the real ‘Antarah lived, some time between 1000 and 1200, a popular Arabic epic about ‘Antarah was also produced, weaving 500 or so years of legends about the poet into a vast story, which itself contained a great deal of poetry. The real ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad, then, exists somewhere underneath centuries of later narratives, commentaries, and forgeries alleged to have been written by him. While we won’t sort out exactly who ‘Antarah really was in this podcast episode, we will take a long look at his poetic output, with an emphasis on earlier recensions, to learn about why he has been such a totemic figure in Arabic literary history.

The Life of ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad

Let’s begin by talking about what we know about ‘Antarah. There are many different stories about ‘Antarah, but they agree on several points. The first is that ‘Antarah was black – born a slave to a black mother who was also a slave. He announces in one of his poems, “I’m the Half-Blood, ‘Antarah!”¹ Elsewhere, he writes, “[My] mother / descends from Ham / her brow dark / as the Black Stone [of the Kaaba]” (88). Antarah’s roots were with the ‘Abs tribe in the north-central region of the peninsula, though, being a slave of African descent, ‘Antarah was not an equal with others in the tribe. Perhaps as a result of this discrepant treatment, ‘Antarah learned to fight at a young age, and by adulthood, he was such a fearsome warrior that he earned himself freedom through warfare. As he puts it in another poem, “The noble line of my tribe / accounts for some of what I am – / my sword takes care of the rest” (22). ‘Antarah’s sword, however, wasn’t his only weapon. His poetry also records self-conscious confidence in his abilities as a writer, as when he warns an adversary, “Like a volcano, I’ll spew / poems that long / after my death / will find and hold you / up to shame” (42).

Beyond these central points – that ‘Antarah was a half-blooded scion of the ‘Abs tribe, a juggernaut of a warrior, and a brilliant poet – a constellation of other anecdotes about ‘Antarah were set down hundreds of years after his death, many of them as entertaining as they are likely fictitious. ‘Antarah’s name may be an onomatopoeic translation of the sound of a blowfly, or it might mean “valorous,” or “valiant,” or it might mean “thrust,” as in the thrust of a spear.² There are also discrepant explanations regarding his parentage. ‘Antarah was one of three “crows” or “ravens” in Jahili Arabic literature, a title applied by later literary historians to describe the sons of black women and Arab men. The medieval Arabic Book of Songs, a massive work of literary history written in Baghdad during the tenth century, contains a number of stories about ‘Antarah. This famous anthology tells us that Antarah was born with a cleft lip, and that his mother’s name was Zabibah.³ The Book of Songs also notes that ‘Antarah’s mother had other sons who were slaves and not the children of ‘Antarah’s father, and that it was customary for sixth-century Arab men to only accept their children by slave women if those children distinguished themselves to some unusual degree.

Even from what you’ve heard so far, the myths and scraps of autobiographical poetry surrounding ‘Antara ibn Shaddad’s life paint a vivid picture of a young person disadvantaged from the beginning – someone too smart and scrappy to keep his head down, but too stigmatized by race and birth to be given equal treatment by his tribe – a young man held down, always, by his parentage. On the subject of that parentage, however, there is more confusion than clarity. His name has come down to us as ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad, but the Shaddad in question, though he himself was a warrior of renown, may have been a grandfather, or paternal uncle. And speaking of ‘Antarah’s extended family, one of the most prominent stories about him has to do with a woman named ‘Ablah.

‘Ablah gets mentioned a number of times in ‘Antarah’s corpus of poems as the object of the poet’s love. However, who exactly ‘Ablah was remains uncertain. According to later traditions, ‘Ablah was ‘Antarah’s cousin, and when he asked her to marry him, a father and an uncle prevented the union.⁴ Their refusal was not due to the blood relationship between the cousins, but, seemingly, the circumstances of ‘Antarah’s birth. ‘Antarah’s own poetry never gives us a narrative history of the couple – in other words, ‘Antarah doesn’t tell us how they met, how he courted her, how she turned him down, and that kind of thing. Instead, we learn about the poet’s lover at several intense junctures of his poetry. In his most famous ode, ‘Antarah’s beloved ‘Ablah leaves him, but her scent lingers in his memory. In another poem, when he’s returned to the tribe after a long period of warfare, ‘Ablah disparages his appearance – he is grimy, thin, and bedecked with rust, and in her words, “worthless” (25). In another poem still, ‘Antarah writes that some of his greatest achievements were undertaken at ‘Ablah’s behest, whoever exactly she was.⁵ In later Arabic literary history, the fraught relationship between the couple took on a life of its own, inspiring works of literature, including the aforementioned epic. To be clear, though, ‘Ablah is an ambiguous figure in ‘Antarah’s poems – an object of romantic desire, but otherwise unknowable from the earlier sources.

I first encountered the poet ‘Antarah in translator A.J. Arberry’s book The Seven Odes, published back in 1957. As we learned last time, Pre-Islamic Arabic literature, sometimes also called Jahili Arabic literature, has as its core seven poems called the Mu‘allaqat. The Mu‘allaqat, or “hanging poems,” are, according to tradition, so-named because they were once hung in the Kaaba at Mecca, though, today literary scholars think the name may come more simply from the fact that they hang suspended in your memory, or that they are precious enough to be held aloft, like gemstones.⁶ The seven Mu‘allaqat are qasidas, or Arabic odes, following certain conventions. The poems, like other works of classical Arabic literature, do not have names, and sometimes later translators give them names so that Anglophone readers, unfamiliar with the poets themselves, can better remember the contents of their works. In the case of the 1957 Arberry anthology I mentioned a moment ago, ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad’s poem is translated as “The Black Knight,” and that’s “knight” with a “k.”⁷

The title, at first, seems an anachronism. The armored cavalrymen who ruled medieval European battlefields up until the proliferation of the longbow, after all, were generally European Christian folks, wearing heavy armor, and galloping around grasslands and forests – not pagan Arabs, riding camels as well as horses, in the arid expanses of the Arabian Peninsula. However, I think the title “Black Knight” for ‘Antarah is still useful. He was indeed black, both in terms of his race, and in terms of being a proverbial dark horse due to his race. He also lived in something like a feudal society, in which tribal leaders, while they didn’t live in castles, still controlled the resources of fiefdoms, quarreled with their powerful peers, and had alliances to nearby monarchs. Like the knights of chivalric romance, ‘Antarah fought, at least in part, to distinguish himself for the sake of his beloved, writing in one poem that “She demands great things of me / and I don’t disappoint” (68). And finally, ‘Antarah was part of a distinct warrior class – one that had mounts, gear, and equipment of a certain standard ilk – a warrior class that was governed by a general ethical framework that mandated generosity and mercy in addition to martial skill, and that was governed by ties of fealty to regional leaders. In fact, before we get into ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad’s poetry, let’s take a moment to learn a bit more about the world of this Arab “Black Knight,” and what we know about the warrior culture of Arabia toward the end of the 500s. [music]

‘Antarah’s Home and the War of Dahis and al-Ghabra

While ‘Antarah’s love life and his upbringing will, in all likelihood, remain uncertain, modern historians know a bit more about the warrior and raiding culture of Late Antique Arabia, and since ‘Antarah was ultimately most famous as a warrior poet, it’s worth considering the military culture of the central peninsula around 550 CE. As we learned a couple of episodes ago, by the mid-sixth century, central Arabia was at the axis of three states – Himyar to the south, in present-day Yemen, the Byzantine Roman empire to the northwest, and the Sasanian Persian empire to the northeast. Closer to home, the Ghassanid client kingdom ruled out of what is today Syria, and the Lakhmid client kingdom ruled out of modern-day Iraq – these were buffer states, controlled by Arab kings who worked for the Byzantines and Sasanians, respectively.

When we think of the central Arabian Peninsula, specifically what is called the Najd, or central peninsula, where a belt of sand called the Dahna connects the Empty Quarter, or al-Rub al-Khali, to the south with the Nafud desert to the northwest, we don’t envision a bustling and crowded place – especially 1,500 years ago. Late Antique Arabia had urban centers and ports, but the territory of ‘Antarah’s ‘Abs tribe was not exactly overrun with inhabitants. Still, what survives of his poetry suggests a region connected with all three states that hemmed in Arabia.

Our poet for today describes fighting with swords from Syria, Yemen, and India.⁸ Other references in his poetry to the southern peninsula indicate the poet’s familiarity with this region, including south Arabian camels. We know from Byzantine sources that the primary auxiliary troops employed by the Ghassanid buffer state were cavalrymen. During the 500s, Arab warriors astride horses, or more often camels, could patrol, protect and attack in order to defend Byzantine interests in what’s today Syria, Jordan and Iraq. The fifth and sixth centuries, then, saw war becoming an increasingly lucrative business in northern Arabia. By ‘Antarah’s lifetime, several generations of Arabs had served imperial interests to the north, which led to military tactics and technologies infiltrating the central peninsula. On one hand, in the late 500s, the Bedouins of the central peninsula had in common shared culture, language, and fluency with the topography and ecology of the region. On the other hand, tribal groups in ancient Arabia, and confederations of tribal groups, had always used raids to bolster their fortunes, sometimes out of greed, and at other times, out of desperation. With new military technologies trickling down from the imperial north, along with new rifts borne from strife between Arab client kingdoms, the normative warfare between tribes on the peninsula had increasing accelerants over the course of the 500s.

Two 40-year wars broke out on the Arabian Peninsula during the 500s. The first, the al-Basus War, stretched from the 490s until the 530s – we discussed it a couple of episodes ago. The second, called the War of Dahis and al-Ghabra, lasted from the 560s to the first decade of the 600s.⁹ This second conflict was one of the defining events in ‘Antarah’s life. And it was named after a pair of horses. The origin of the War of Dahis and al-Ghabra, related in a ninth century anthology called the Hamasa, is as follows – this is one of the most famous sagas in Pre-Islamic Arabian history, by the way.

One day in the 560s, the chief of the ‘Abs tribe – again ‘Antarah’s tribe – decided that he’d place a bet with the chief of a rival tribe. The rival tribe in question was the Dhubyan tribe. The head of the ‘Abs bet the head of the Dhubyan tribe 100 camels that ‘Abs could beat Dhubyan in a horse race. The length of the race was 100 bowshots – perhaps a couple of miles or a few kilometers. When it began, the leader of the Dhubyan tribe immediately took the lead. Soon, though, the head of the ‘Abs tribe passed him, surging ahead. Although the chief of the ‘Abs tribe maintained his lead, little did he know that the Dhubyan tribe planned to cheat. An ambush of Dhubyan warriors managed to lead the ‘Abs leader off course, and so the Dhubyan leader crossed the finish line first. However, the head of the ‘Abs knew that he had been cheated, and he claimed victory. When the Dhubyan tribe refused to pay him the promised camels, the ‘Abs chief murdered one of the Dhubyan chief’s brothers. In retaliation, the Dhubyan leader killed one of the ‘Abs leader’s brothers. The war that resulted, once again, is said to have stretched for 40 years.¹⁰ The conflict is called the War of Dahis and al-Ghabra because Dahis was the name of the horse of the ‘Abs tribe, and al-Ghabra that of the Dhubyan tribe’s horse.

Our main source text for the story of this war, as I mentioned, is a literary anthology known as the Hamasa, a text written three hundred years after the War of Dahis and al-Ghabra took place. Accordingly, we have little sense of whether four decades of bloodshed actually ensued over a horse race. Such an event, like so many other larger-than-life anecdotes about Jahili Bedouin culture that we find in later Islamic sources, might have been significantly exaggerated to paint the pagan past with a sensationalist lacquer, and render Pre-Islamic tribespeople as romantic figures, overly caught up in matters of honor and vengeance. Real Bedouin groups in the sixth century had plenty of reasons to feud with one another, from competing for scant natural resources to being caught up in the reverberations of northern proxy wars, that did not involve squabbles over horseracing.

In any case, though, the tribes of the central peninsula, like ‘Antarah’s, living in a place unregulated by any central authority, inhabited an unstable world – a world made more tumultuous by a new caste of cavalrymen who identified more with one another than with any geographically anchored tribe. These soldiers of fortune, hardened by imperial proxy wars in the Byzantine-Sasanian borderland, or having otherwise adopted armaments and tactics from the region, formed new confederations based on shared military experiences as much as kinship, being a sort of northern coalition of what scholar Michael Zwettler calls “the ‘progressive’ northern Arabs.”¹¹ This warrior caste has often been imagined as analogous to European knights of the later Medieval period, hence Arberry’s translation of the poet ‘Antarah’s most famous ode as “The Black Knight.” So let’s keep these so-called “knights” of Arabia in our minds for just a moment longer.

Jahili Poetry and the Mercenary Poets of Sixth-Century Arabia

In the previous episode, we discussed some of the traditional scholarly questions about Pre-Islamic poetry in Arabic. The main question frequently posed is how much of the corpus of Jahili poetry that we now possess was actually written during the Pre-Islamic period. One of the main cases against its legitimacy is that what was compiled as Jahili poetry is largely composed in the Qurayshite Arabic dialect in which the Qur’an was written. This consistency is indeed exceedingly suspicious. The Arabian Peninsula is the size of Western Europe. Arabic was certainly, to our knowledge, the chief spoken language there during the 500s, but there were multiple dialects of Arabic, which makes the relative uniformity of Pre-Islamic poetry seem peculiar. We explored some solutions to this puzzle last time. One is that a lot of, or all of Jahili poetry was rewritten or entirely forged by later poets during the 800s and afterward. But to make the case for the legitimacy of the oldest Arabic poetry, we can also imagine that a formal, trans-peninsular language of verse may have existed – the language of poetry competitions and other official occasions, used in particular by itinerant, ambitious bards – a dialect itself not immune to evolution and permutation, but that nonetheless, by the second half of the 500s, had solidified into the one in which the Qur’an would be composed.

One question we can ask is who might have been the engineers of this pan-Arabic poetic dialect. Modern scholarship on Late Antique Arabia tends to understand the peninsula as a more settled society than earlier historians imagined. The qasidas, or odes, that we read last time frequently begin with the images of abandoned desert camps, evoking a nomadic civilization in which tribes were moving around all the time. However, the majority of Arabia’s population, by the 500s, lived in permanent settlements, and even Bedouins remained stationed in place for long stretches of the year.¹² The question remains, then, how a poetic language might have emerged by 600 – one fairly consistent between poets like Tarafa and al-Harith from the northeast, Labid and al-Khansa from Mecca, Kulthum and al-Nabigha from the Byzantine-Sasanian borderland, and others from the south peninsula. And one of the answers to this question takes us back to the so-called “knights” of the sixth century – those armed and armored cavalrymen, steeled in conflict from serving as mercenaries to the north, footloose and free to circulate among the more settled herders, foragers, merchants, and landed noblemen. Perhaps this elite, wandering group, as the 500s stretched into the 600s, and Rome and Persia grew increasingly addicted to using Arab auxiliary groups, was the main engine of Jahili poetry – both as audiences and producers.

The warrior-patrician is the ultimate figure of Pre-Islamic Arabic literature, a person with all of humanity’s capacity to love and fight, to survive and express for posterity, and to ruminate on a fatalistic universe prior to salvific religion. They were products of their parentage and tribal inheritance, bearing a nasab, or genealogical name as all Late Antique Arabs did. But warfare, and the Byzantine-Sasanian hot zone to the north gave them the opportunity to rise above the circumstances of their birth, and poetry offered them the capacity to set down their own legacy for posterity.

And among the warrior poets of ancient Arabia, ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad stands nearly alone. Born a slave, it was against prejudices of race and caste that the poet rose to become a revered figure in Arabic literary history and culture. 1,500 years of later literature concerned itself with him, including the aforementioned medieval epic, and over the past two centuries he has been the subject of a symphony, an opera, visual artwork, and dozens of films. Yet what is most extraordinary about ‘Antarah is his poetry. We have read thousands of pages of ancient poetry in this podcast. We have never read anything like ‘Antarah. His figurative imagination is restless and jagged, generating impenetrable images and metaphors. He depicts war and love with an intensity that is almost hallucinatory, calling to mind old diehards like Homer and Virgil, but also the conceits of the metaphysical English poets, the haunting strangeness of French symbolism, and the indelible clarity of modernist imagism. So let’s take a long look at the work of ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad. Let me make a quick note on translations before we get started.

Most Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry remains, to my knowledge, untranslated. Many of the translations that do exist are older ones – I haven’t been able to find a translation of the Mu’allaqat, or the twelve or fourteen golden odes, done in the past fifty years. However, the Library of Arabic Literature series, done by New York University Press in collaboration with the NYU Abu Dhabi institute, is hard at work getting strong scholarly translations out there to those of us who don’t speak Arabic. One of these translations, published in 2018, is called War Songs, and it’s a full anthology of ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad’s surviving poems, with the translations done by scholar James Montgomery, a prolific translator of Medieval Arabic literature whose work we’ll see more of in future episodes. Most of the quotes from ‘Antara’s poetry will be taken from this recent translation, excepting ‘Antarah’s most famous poem. So let’s first look at the most famous poem of one of classical Arabic literature’s most famous poets, the Mu’allaqa of ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad, translated by A.J. Arberry in 1957 as “The Black Knight.”

The Mu’allaqa of Antarah ibn Shaddad

The Mu’allaqa of ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad has an extremely well-known first line. We actually began the entire season of this podcast with this line. That first line, in the Arberry translation, is “Have the poets left a single spot for a patch to be sewn?”¹³ Alternately, James Montgomery renders the line as “Did poetry die in its war with the poets?”¹⁴ The meaning of the line is generally thought to be “Have poets left anything unwritten?” It’s quite a wonderful line to begin with. On one level, if you’ve ever tried to write something original, you, too, have probably contemplated the fact that writing is quite an old thing, in which there is nothing new under the sun. On another level, the artistically weary sentiment with which ‘Antarah begins his poem – again, “Have the poets left a single spot for a patch to be sewn?” – this sentiment demonstrates that Arabic poetry, by the late 500s, was already such an established medium, and the domain of so many different writers, that it seemed as though everything to do had already been done.

The speaker of ‘Antarah’s most famous poem, then, begins by remarking that poetry is threadbare and exhausted. Then, he looks around a deserted Bedouin camp. As you might remember from last time, this is a convention in the Arabic qasida, or ode – these classical poems very often begin with a speaker arriving at a deserted place where he used to live, and then reminiscing. ‘Antarah writes, “there [at the camp] I halted my she-camel, huge-bodied as a castle, / that I might satisfy the hankering of a lingerer. . .All hail to you, ruins of a time long since gone by, / empty and desolate” (179). The abandoned camp, as with so many others in classical Arabic poetry, elicits memories of bygone days, and ‘Antarah’s lost love, the aforementioned ‘Ablah. The poem tells us that the poet ‘Antarah met ‘Ablah during a war. In this war, ‘Antarah was fighting ‘Ablah’s tribe. Though later literature retrojected the story of a great romance between ‘Antarah and ‘Ablah, ‘Antarah’s most famous poem is quite terse on the subject of their actual relationship. The poet ‘Antarah writes “I fell in love with her, as I slew her folk. . .and [she has] occupied my heart, make no doubt of it, / the place of one dearly beloved and highly honored” (179). As much as these lines seem to suggest a star-crossed romantic relationship, ‘Antarah immediately afterward writes that ‘Ablah’s people now live elsewhere, and that he will not get to see her any time soon.

What follows in the Mu‘allaqa of ‘Antarah is an incredibly dense sequence of lines, with similes nested within other similes. ‘Ablah, he reveals, has left, she and her people having departed on an inky black night on a herd of camels “all black / as the inner wing-feathers of a sable raven” (179). The recollection of ‘Ablah’s departure leads the poet into a reminiscence of ‘Ablah’s smile, and her scent, and then a cluster of similes begins. ‘Ablah’s scent, the poet writes, is like the escaping fragrance of a merchant’s bag of musk. Her scent is like the smell of strong wine, aged in faraway foreign kingdoms. ‘Ablah’s scent, he writes, is like “an untrodden meadow [of flowers] that a good rain has guaranteed / shall bear rich herbage. . .visited by every virgin raincloud bountiful in showers / that have left every puddle gleaming like. . .silver. . . / deluging and decanting, so that at every eve / the water is streaming over it in an unbroken flow” (179-80). On one hand, a poet comparing his beloved’s scent to the smell of flowers doesn’t exactly feel very original. On the other hand, though, if we continue reading this simile all the way to the end, we see the restlessness, and strangeness of ‘Antarah’s poetic imagination in full color. This is the 2018 Montgomery translation of the first big simile in ‘Antarah’s most famous poem – again the beloved’s scent compared to a field of flowers, and listen closely to the strange turn the simile takes. The poet remembers ‘Ablah,

her scent wafting before her smile,
     sprung from a merchant’s musk pouch. . .
or from a rain-soaked field of flowers
     known to few beasts of the wild
where showers have been kind
     and pools glint like silver coins
it downpours from the clouds –
     evenings when water flows unchecked
and the lone [grasshopper], look,
     screeches its drunken song
scraping out a tune
     leg on leg like a one-arm man
bent over a fire stick. (5)

To be clear, then, the analogy compares ‘Ablah’s scent to that of a flowery meadow, saturated with recent rain – and then continues – a flowery meadow, saturated with recent rain, where a grasshopper scrapes out a madcap melody, like a man with one arm rubbing sticks together to start a fire. The simile has within it an additional simile – we move from a fragrant, flowery, rain-drenched meadow, to a grasshopper within this meadow, to an amputee scratching a fire stick. It is a strange, haunting transition – a move from gorgeous natural plenty to a lunatic insect to an amputee hunkered over, trying to stay warm, and by the end of the passage, we’ve left ‘Ablah behind.

The extended simile may have had some specific analogical meaning in sixth-century Arabia – perhaps inebriated grasshoppers and one-armed fire starters were parts of the metaphorical imagination of central Bedouin society. But perhaps not. The comparison of a beloved’s scent to a rain-soaked field of flowers, where a grasshopper screeches – like a one-armed man starting a fire – this is almost a stream-of-consciousness procession of images that goes from aromatic nature to shrill insects to a disabled, lonely person. It is a compressed burst of images, jagged and weird, that might show the workings of the poet’s memory – sweet nostalgia, mad addiction, and then fraught loneliness. If nothing else, this rich little passage in ‘Antarah’s ode demonstrates that sixth-century Arabic poetry had tremendous metaphorical sophistication – that comparing one’s love to the scent of flowers was, figuratively, at least, only the beginning.

Moving on, then, and zooming out, it is immediately clear in ‘Antarah’s Mu‘allaqa that the poet had complex and volatile feelings for ‘Ablah. And the next juncture of the poem is almost as cryptic as the one we just looked at together. We learned last time that the qasida, or ode, had various conventions – the poet stops at the abandoned desert camp. Then the poet recollects a lost love, or a bygone period spent with a woman or women. Then, the next thing happens. That next thing is, very basically, that the poet cheers himself up a bit. This cheering up often takes the form of the poet extolling the virtues of his horse, or camel, or, the poet extolling his own virtues in some way or another. ‘Antarah’s Mu‘allaqa proceeds in just this way – in other words, we’ve heard the poet describe the abandoned camp, and then his lost love. Now, ‘Antarah is going to describe his camel, and a bit later, why he’s not just some broken-hearted wanderer, but indeed, quite a formidable person. Let’s start with the camel.

Thinking of his lost love ‘Ablah, the poet ‘Antarah asks, again in the 1957 Arberry translation, “[Could] I indeed be brought to [‘Ablah’s] dwelling by [my] she-camel?” (180). His camel, he emphasizes, is not a milk camel, but instead a feisty, strong traveler, her tail still swishing back and forth even after a night of journeying, her feet as thunderous as hammers over the sandy trails. Beginning another simile, the poet writes that riding his camel is like being astride an ostrich – a male ostrich running to guard his eggs by night, with a head like that of an earless slave wrapped in particolored furs. Another simile within a simile there, by the way. You don’t see that very often in literature. To continue, ‘Antarah’s camel, after being compared with an ostrich, drinks deeply from an oasis. The camel, the poet writes, looks at the wells of another settlement with enmity, as if avoiding a cheetah or other big cat, clawing and biting at her right flank. At her journey’s end, ‘Antarah writes, his camel is still strong and imperious, sweat sliding down her neck like syrup, or pitch from a boiler. ‘Antarah’s panegyric to his camel concludes with an image of the animal kneeling to drink among some reeds, a groaning sound coming either from the crackling water plants, or her great, creaking legs, and he concludes that she is “angry, spirited. . .proud-stepping. . .the match of a well-bitten stallion” (181).

‘Antarah’s camel, then, is many things in this famous poem – a castle, a fortress, an ostrich – an enigmatic creature, steady only in her orneriness and great stamina. When he finishes extolling her, ‘Antarah turns back to the poem’s other main female figure – his love ‘Ablah. ‘Ablah, he writes, can spurn him, but she knows that he is not a man to be trifled with. ‘Antarah tells ‘Ablah, “Praise me therefore for the things you know of me; for I / am easy to get on with, provided I’m not wronged; / but if I am wronged, then the wrong I do is harsh indeed” (181). As if by way of prelude, ‘Antarah says he is not always a harbinger of war. He writes,

It may. . .be mentioned how often I have drunk good wine,
after the noon’s sweltering calm, from a bright figured bowl
in a glittering golden glass scored with lines
partnered to a lustrous filtered flask on its left,
and whenever I have drunk, recklessly I squander
my substance, while my honor is abounding, unimpaired,
and whenever I have sobered up, I diminish not my bounty. (181)

Sober, ‘Antarah writes, he consumes not wine, but enemies. His spear splits the necks of husbands and good men such that they hiss blood like a harelip. In war, astride his horse, he swims among troops, among spear-thrusts and fusillades of bowshots, fighting with great fierceness, but not asking to share in any booty.

‘Antarah reports that one cavalryman, heavily armored, faced off against him. ‘Antarah recollects killing enemy warrior with a single spear thrust – a strike which tore a double-sided wound into his foe, describes the thud of the weapon and hiss of escaping blood sounding like music to hyenas and wolves. Another formidable enemy was a champion and standard-bearer – a man with ring mail, famous among his people, wealthy, mighty, and privileged – known, even, for his generosity. This man, too, ‘Antarah writes, fell to him – his curved Indian sword split the man’s expensive armor, and a spear thrust took the bannerman down for good.

In the midst of these reminiscences of battle, ‘Antarah returns, in his most famous poem, to the subject of ‘Ablah. ‘Ablah, he writes, was not an enemy soldier, nor a hunted animal, but something unattainable. He sent a slave to investigate her whereabouts, and the slave confirmed that ‘Ablah was unguarded. The next lines of the poem are ambiguous – the poet writes, “As [‘Ablah] turned, her throat was like a young antelope’s, / the throat of a tender gazelle-fawn with spotted upper lip” (182). This is a complex couplet. First, comparing female lovers to gazelles, and their necks to the graceful necks of gazelles, was commonplace in sixth-century Arabic poetry. What we see here might be nothing more than a lover admiring his beloved’s alluring looks – the contrast of a beautiful lover with the terror of war. But inset as this gazelle simile it is in a bunch of stanzas about war, and death, and blood hissing from necks, the focus on ‘Ablah’s throat could be read as forecasting her demise, too.

Moving on to the poem’s final stanzas, ‘Antarah returns to the fray of combat. Heroes, he writes, make no complaint about physical agony other than a suppressed grunt. The poet remembers being used in the first ranks of battle, and riding out ahead like a shield to soak up lance strikes, his black horse bloodied from the blows, wearing sheets of its own and enemy blood like red robes, and horses around them collapsing into the crumbling turf. If there is a climax to ‘Antarah’s Mu‘allaqa, it is perhaps at this juncture of intense combat, as the poet and his horse, wounded, continue fighting, and he writes, “oh, my soul was cured, and its faint sickness was healed / by the horseman’s cry, ‘Ha, Antara, on with you!’” (183). Stricken by lovesickness and uncertain of how to pursue the unattainable ‘Ablah, the poet hurls himself into warfare, and the esteem of other cavalrymen is enough – in that moment, at least – to make him forget the pangs of heartsickness.

The closing lines of ‘Antarah’s hanging poem continue to pursue the subjects of war and death, rather than love. ‘Antarah tells us that he has feared death only insofar as it might stop him from winning his war. He has killed the father of two powerful sons – sons who are pursuing him, as he well knows they are honor-bound to do. In ‘Antarah’s own words, his poem concludes with these lines:

I greatly feared that death might claim me, before
war’s wheel should turn against the two sons [who pursue me, and]
who blaspheme against my honour, and I have not reviled them,
who threaten to spill my blood, [only in my absence];
and well they may, it being myself that left their father
carrion for the wild beasts and all the great vultures. (183-4)

The poem ends, then, with the image of a warrior who self-consciously has blood on his hands, but who at the same time is still trying to win a war. ‘Antarah, then, in his most famous poem, is not a morally spotless figure – no innocent Perceval smiting various clearcut villains, nor guiltless champion of the good and just. ‘Antarah’s speaker is, however, probably a more realistic portrait of a combat specialist than many other depictions of such figures in medieval literature. He is proud of his martial ability – of being a bulwark out in front of other cavalrymen in the heat of combat. He has seen and caused a lot of carnage. He has also loved, and loved deeply. His memories of peacetime are full of longing, and they are complicated. ‘Antarah deeply reveres ‘Ablah, but within this reverence there is a maelstrom of bitterness – a bitterness that comes across in the poem’s metaphorical complexity, in which a rain-damp field of flowers is torn by the shriek of a besotted bug; in which a gazelle-necked beloved appears in a sequence about warmongering and sliced throats.

But just as there is ugliness in the poem’s beauty, there is also beauty in its ugliness. His camel is an almost unearthly thing, giant and finicky, steady and irascible, invincible and odd. War in the poem is gruesome and gorgeous – an arena in which language can wrap itself around new extremes of human experience, and stanzas can change subject with the rapidity of sun glinting on spearpoints. ‘Antarah’s Mu’allaqa opens by asking whether poetry has died in its war with the poets – whether there is a tear in the fabric of metaphor and figurative language where an aspiring poet might put something original. ‘Antarah’s answer seems to be that poetry can tear just as much as it can patch, that a vigorous poet can bruise and disintegrate outworn metaphors to suit his own experience, and that poetry itself was a war all along. [music]

‘Antarah ibn Shaddad’s War Poetry

So that takes us through ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad’s most famous poem – his Mu’allaqa, or “hanging poem.” It is, first of all, a nice reminder of the basic form of the qasida, or Arabic ode. It begins with musings at an abandoned camp, moves on to amatory reminiscences, and celebrates the poet’s mighty steed, as the qasida so often does, and then moves on to acclaim the poet’s own martial abilities. Not all qasidas do the latter – some conclude with more abstract contemplations, or panegyrics to patrons, or all manner of things, but knowing that ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad is one of the most legendary warriors of ancient Arabian history, we should not be surprised that his most famous poem engages extensively with the theme of war.

It’s time for us to go deeper, though. We have about 40 other poems from ‘Antarah that are generally understood to be about as genuine as most Jahili poetry is. As we learned last time, the oral poetry of sixth-century pagan Arabia was generally not written down and compiled until the eighth century and after, by which time those doing the anthologizing were Muslim scholars working in towns and cities. Thus, some tampering has likely gone on with this poetry, and it may not reflect the exact lines that ‘Antarah composed during the late 500s. There is, however, plenty of linguistic and tonal consistency to ‘Antarah’s oeuvre, and it’s not unreasonable to assume that a substantial amount of the poetry we’re about to go through originated as the oral compositions of one person.

It would be impossible for us to go through 40 poems in the remainder of this program, so I’ll do what I’ve done before with authors like Catullus and Horace. Over the next hour or so, we’ll consider the main recurring contents of ‘Antarah’s poetry. While ‘Antarah’s poems cover a breadth of subjects, perhaps the most common of them is war and combat. So let’s begin by putting all 40 or so of ‘Antarah’s surviving poems on our desk – about 120 pages of dense Arabic poetry, if that helps you picture it. Let’s look at all of those poems at once, and see what ancient Arabia’s most famous war poet has to say about war itself.

One of the main traditions of Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry is the fakhr, or “boast” poem. Fakhr poems can emphasize different virtues, depending on their authors, and thus a fakhr – or “boast” poem – might boast of the poet’s tribe, or his sex appeal, or his capacities as a writer. In the case of the warrior poet ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad, the vaunting in his boast poems is most often about his capacities as a fighter on the battlefield. Let’s look at a few representative examples from the Montgomery translation. This translation, again, was published by NYU in 2018 in a book called War Songs – there’s a link to it in the episode notes of this podcast, and I highly recommend it.

The majority of ‘Antarah’s poems feature references to combat, and our poet for today was clearly quite confident about his abilities as a fighter. He writes in one of his poems, “My sword cuts deep / with a sure-sinewed hand / my sparkling bride is a weapon / never dented or dull. . .my spear shaft straight and true / its head burns bright in the night” (18). Elsewhere, ‘Antarah tells us, “With the sun at its hottest pitch / I fell upon an enemy knight / and hacked him down at the head of his column / then locked horns with their chief / and slashed my way into their midst / as the black horses ran red with wounds / wading through a swamp of blood” (68). Many of the poet’s battle boasts are on behalf of himself and his fellow fighters together, rather than himself alone. He writes, “I’ve floored many a warrior. . .Posh lumps of flesh in the saddle / sprawled in dirt . . .we, mounted / or dismounted, / fought on to the kill, / our spears bloodied / black to the haft / our swords reaping / skulls like gourds” (26). Elsewhere, the poet remembers, “We harried their fate / and fearless, raced / our mounts / through rock-strewn wastes, / charging deep in their midst / and spearing them hard” (38). Sometimes sounding like the Iliad, and sometimes like Beowulf due to translator James Montgomery’s alliterations, ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad’s battle narratives capture the ferocity and violence of mounted combat in Bedouin Arabia. Similes frequently intensify ‘Antarah’s combat narratives, as when he writes, “My cavalry crushed [the enemy], / arms aglitter, hearts high. . .as sudden to strike as dry / wood bursting / into flame” (67).

To some extent, these terse narratives we’ve just heard about the poet’s battle prowess are boasts – brief tales about how he and his cavalry bested their foes. Elsewhere, though, ‘Antarah’s poems capture outright vaunts – insults such as we might hear warriors exchange on the battlefield of any epic poem. In one stanza, ‘Antarah taunts an adversary who has attempted to kill him, and failed, growling, “Man up, Ḥuṣayn! / You’ll never rise to the task. / Your spear missed my eye / leaving just a scratch / on my face. . .Pathetic!” (114). ‘Antarah warns another rival, “‘Amr ibn Aswad, you / foul-breathed clan of shabby old camels – / Your last gasp is near!” (48). Similarly, to a different enemy, ‘Antarah thunders, “Has your sorry ass come to kill me? / ‘Umarah, I’m right here! / Shall we have a go at it, you and I? / Or will you run, butt shaking with fear?” (18). While sometimes ‘Antarah’s combat vaunts are voiced to specific enemies, at other junctures, they are to collective groups of foes, as when he warns opposing forces, “‘Our spears are. . .hard iron to make you whine / like dogs at the sight of vipers!’ You bolted, rumps in the air like old camels sniffing a corpse” (13). Another simile caps off another combat boast, when ‘Antarah writes, “I slew your chief / and sent you scurrying / like rabbits into your holes” (71).

These are ferocious lines of poetry, capturing the awful intensity of combat with arrows and bladed weapons, and at the same time, a literary culture that valued tales of combat prowess. The speaker of these war poems is a seasoned veteran, undaunted by front line warfare and almost incredulous at those who try to best him. As fiery as ‘Antarah’s war poetry is, however, a lot of it sounds like things we’ve heard before – war bursting out like fire, blood turning a battlefield into a morass, heroes taunting one another prior to combat – these were old poetic traditions by the late 500s, and they likely arose independently in many places and times.

War and ‘Antarah’s Figurative Language

Where ‘Antarah’s war poetry is the most memorable and distinct is in the intermittent strangeness of its figurative language. The metaphor-rich battle descriptions that ‘Antarah left behind depict war as having a terrible, hallucinatory beauty – a thing that stretches human perception to its very edges. Some of ‘Antarah’s similes are marvelous but fairly conventional, as when he writes, “the iron-weight warriors / fought to the death / in chain mail flowing / like sheets of raging / floodwater” (64). Some of ‘Antarah’s battle similes are marvelous to Anglophone readers like us, in that they use the ecology and topography of the Arabian Peninsula, as when the poet describes his horse, “his mane as if / from a palm’s stripped trunk / he snorts from nostrils / deep and round / as a hyena’s den” (27). Others, though, are eerie in their sheer inventiveness. In one battle narrative, the poet writes, “We drive our horses / hard, their manes / matted like. . .the heads of women who have lost their [lice] combs” (13, 193).¹⁵ It is a turbulent simile, in which infesting insects swarm in uncombed hair, women misplace their daily accoutrements, and warriors gallop into battle. In another strange war simile, the poet writes, “I planted my cold / arrow in Jurayyah / forcing [his men] to swarm around him / like worshippers rushing / round an idol” (44). The comparison here is rich and complex – a man torn through with an arrow becomes an idol of worship, doomed and exalted by death, a ritualistic object of pity and reverence. Elsewhere, the way that ‘Antarah writes about battlefield deaths is similarly sacral, as when he writes that he “left my challenger / dead – his hair / a bloody redbud, / the vultures praying / over him, / dancing their bridal / dance” (60). A slain foe in these lines becomes a flower, and an object of reverence, hovered over by carrion birds who, in an internal simile, are themselves akin to dancing brides. In a different poem, ‘Antarah writes that a man “died on the field of battle / grasping at spears / like a slave girl / gathering wood for a fire” (58). Homeric similes – just like these compressed descriptions in ‘Antarah’s poetry – they compact images of peace together with images of war – drifting dust from warhorse hooves is likened to wind-winnowed chaff in the Iliad (V.497-504), and the fires of a war camp are akin to bright stars watched by a shepherd, also in the Iliad (VIII.553-61). But ‘Antarah’s similes are more abrupt and jarring.

As much as Homeric similes can seem new to us when we first encounter them in ancient Greek poetry, they quickly become familiar – set pieces of a sort in a bardic performance. ‘Antarah’s figurative language is less self-conscious, bursting up in the space of a single line, as when he writes, “The Battle of ‘Urā‘ir was a healing. . .Nourished by grim battleswords” (16). That’s it. The metaphor is otherwise undeveloped – hand-to-hand combat heals, and the poet moves on to the next line. In a line unrelated to combat, ‘Antarah writes, “I shed my tears – / silver balls or pearls / that scatter when string – / knots unravel” (22). Here again we have an extremely compressed image – tears are silver balls, or are they pearls, or are they baubles on corded jewelry, fated to fall all over the place when the jewelry loosens, just as untying our own knots can make us cry? In another battle narrative, the poet writes, “the sleek mares swarm / like locusts, sweat-flecked saddles / ridden by hawks” (34). Homer might compare a warrior to a hawk, or a lion, but the intense, sawtoothed concision of ‘Antarah’s description here creates an image we might see in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch – hawks riding locusts on sweat-splattered saddles – a war in which humanity itself is gone.

‘Antarah, at several junctures, reveals how much the experience of war has changed his perception – how peacetime life has become as incomprehensible to him as he has to it. And in a final marvelous and strange metaphor, the poet records his impressions of his beloved ‘Ablah’s camp after being out on a campaign for a long time, writing “‘Ablah’s camp. . . / traced like tattoos / on a bride’s wrists, / engraved now / like Persian mumbled / at [Khosrow’s] court” (32). The Sasanian emperor Khosrow, by the way, ruled from 531-579 CE, and so his name would have been familiar to the Arab world. To repeat, though, the lines “‘Ablah’s camp. . . / traced like tattoos / on a bride’s wrists, / engraved now / like Persian mumbled / at [Khosrow’s] court” – these lines show that ‘Antarah no longer finds his beloved’s home an intelligible place. Once as clear and familiar as a bride’s tattoos, ‘Ablah’s camp has become as unfamiliar as a mumbled foreign language. Changed forever by a world in which horses become locusts and men hawks, or dying idols, and war is therapeutic, the poet ‘Antarah finds his former realm of peacetime, together with its outworn language, muted and inarticulate. [music]

The Real ‘Antarah and ‘Ablah

So, that should give you a good general sense of ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad’s war poetry – how it sometimes like epic war poetry from the ancient Mediterranean basin, but also, how it sometimes doesn’t. ‘Antarah wrote about more than combat, however. While he frequently depicts himself as a powerhouse on the battlefield, at other times he paints himself as a reluctant combatant, as when he tells an addressee “I didn’t start this / war that engulfs you. / For generations / [others] / fanned its flames” (52). In fact, a lot of the poetry that ‘Antarah left behind on subjects other than warfare has an overall atmosphere of gentleness, and melancholy fatalism. His poetry emphasizes that he never tried to seduce women beyond what was proper, though he had entranced attractive girls, that he was charitable and gave much during drought years, that he ruled over his desires and was judicious in dividing up booty, and that he and his men were quick to ride out to help those in need.¹⁶ He emphasizes especially that he gave his horse plenty of milk, unlike certain family members who let their mounts grow lean so that they could enjoy milk.¹⁷ And occasionally, he writes, as we heard earlier, about a woman named ‘Ablah.

Posterity proved extraordinarily interested in ‘Antarah’s relationship with ‘Ablah, whoever in the world she actually was. We’ll talk about the ‘Antarah and ‘Ablah tradition a little later in this program, but to take a lot of the fun out of that, I can tell you that in the early recensions of ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad’s actual poetry, she’s not really a major presence – not like Lesbia in Catullus, or Cynthia in Propertius, anyway. Let me quote what I think is definitely the most substantial and revealing verses about their relationship for you – this is again the Montgomery translation. Writing in the third-person, in a passage that describes how the poet came home from being deployed for an entire year, ‘Antarah recollects the following about ‘Ablah:

Blade-thin, war-spent
he shocked ‘Ablah
with sinewy hands
and matted hair
in a year’s grime
and coat of mail
its battered iron
so long worn
he had turned to rust.
And looked a wreck.
“You’re worthless,” ‘Ablah said
shocking me
by the laugh she got
from gathered friends
as she cast a scant glance
at this glorious warrior
this brave lion
famed for largesse. (25)

These are heartbreaking lines of poetry. A speaker has been away at war. He has distinguished himself there both through fighting, and through generosity, but when he arrives home, he is seen as gaunt, dirty, and meritless. In the same poem, ‘Antarah tells ‘Ablah, “all your henna / and your [makeup]. / Who cares if I’m thin? / I’ve been hard at it / dodging spears” (25). This reprimand, however, seems to go unheeded.

Now, later literary history embroidered all sorts of stories around these lines of poetry. ‘Antarah, during and after the Caliphates, became a half-caste suitor, devastated first that his race made him ineligible in the eyes of his beloved, and then, later, that his formidable reputation on the battlefield did not make him similarly esteemed by the patricians of upper Bedouin society. Elsewhere, ‘Antarah writes, “If you ask ‘Ablah about me / she’ll say I want her, and her alone. / She demands great things of me / and I don’t disappoint” (68). And again, these seem to be lines that support that later story – the tale of a warrior who fought for love, and of a mistress who spurned him at first, but was slowly won over by his amorous consistency, and his irrepressible strength and fortitude.

However, and a big however, the lines that I just read you, together with the lines we already heard that survive in his Mu‘allaqa, are the full extent of our primary sources on ‘Antarah and ‘Ablah. They certainly invite us to imagine what happened, and reading an underdog courtship story into them isn’t too farfetched. But ‘Ablah, for all we know from the primary sources, could have also been merely one of the poet’s lovers. One of ‘Antarah’s other poems, after all, mentions his wife.¹⁸ Another poem mentions two other lovers by name.¹⁹ And another poem mentions another lover by name.²⁰ Later, and considerably embellished narratives about ‘Antarah might have shown him as a lovelorn warrior-poet, forever hung up on winning the heart of one woman. His poems, however, suggest a person who, while he had unreciprocated feelings for someone, moved on, had other relationships, and was eventually married to someone else.

Fatalism and the Boast Poem

To put it very simply, ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad was not a love poet, inasmuch as later narratives about a “Black Knight” with a chip on his shoulder courting an aloof mistress proved captivating to Medieval Arabic readers. His works are almost always, on the contrary, about war – war and its capacities to transform the individual. If there is a recurrent preoccupation other than war in ‘Antarah’s poetry, it is not love, but instead time, and death. On one hand, we would expect a belligerent war poet to speak often of death with a certain degree of plucky indifference. Some of ‘Antarah’s poems do just this. He writes “Death is a cup we all must drink of. . .Death I know – it looks like me / grim as battle. . .With no qualm or care / I embrace the terrors of War” (23). The poet often identifies with death, writing in one poem, “I smile, / commanding Death. . .gripping the reins / in hands that killed” (61). But while there are junctures of ‘Antarah’s work that boast doughty indifference toward death, more often, elsewhere, he regards it with considerably more ambivalence. ‘Antarah also writes, “The crow, / beak like a pair of shears, / croaked. . .I won’t be able / to outrun Fate / when she comes / Cowards run. / I stand / my ground” (30). As the years went by, and the War of Dahis and al-Ghabra spilled into a new generation, ‘Antarah must have known his epoch was passing, as when he wrote, “Time, not war, / has made me weak” (60). Time appears again in another, perhaps later poem, when ‘Antarah reflects, “The years passed / and the East Wind blew. / Even the ruins / fell into ruin – / tired playthings / of Time / and the thunder / and rain” (78). And finally, in lines that can be read as equally tragic and serene, ‘Antarah writes, “Wishes rarely / come true. . .Death always / finds a way” (116).

When ‘Antarah isn’t writing rousing verses about war, then, his verses are often fatalistic, like the ones we just heard. While, in ‘Antarah’s imagination, a general determinism grinds all of us toward inevitable closure, he also believes that there is room – though it requires severe effort and considerable risk – to assert ourselves, and in doing so change not only our own lives, but also the lives of others – to assert ourselves in love, or war, or most of all, language. Everything we know about ‘Antarah, after all, is rooted in the poems attributed to him, which may indeed record the supernal combat abilities of a Jahili Arab warrior, but may also be a layer cake of various later Arabic poets riffing verses on what they imagined it might have been like to be a Jahili Arab warrior. The act of leaving poetry behind for posterity is, in itself, an act of violent defiance and an attempt to spit in the face of time and death, inasmuch as it is also a process of craftsmanship for a refined audience.

Although we have little of it from ‘Antarah, satire was a major part of Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, and verse competitions between poets were major public entertainments. In the educated circles of global modernity, undisguised self-aggrandizement is most often regarded as boorish. If I walked into a room yammering about the number of books I had read, I would, naturally, come across as an idiot. However, if you have ever attended a slam poetry contest, or a real rap battle, and watched participants compete, and in doing so actually demonstrating their verbal dexterity in the act of bragging about it, then you know that boasting can actually be quite a high art. ‘Antarah writes to an adversary, “Like a volcano, I’ll spew / poems that long / after my death / will find and hold you / up to shame” (42). These lines communicate a daring, swaggering notion – the notion that a few of us do manage to dodge the ruination of time to put the ephemera of our lives into meter and rhyme. Though ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad is hardly a household name to modern Anglophone audiences, the figure of the warrior poet, brazen with the sword as well as the pen, is one of the central icons in modern music in many languages. To quote American rapper Nas, and one of the most famous rap songs, and my favorite rap album in history,

I’m like Scarface sniffin’ cocaine
Holding an M-16, see with the pen I’m extreme, now
Bullet holes left in my peepholes, I’m suited up in street clothes
Hand me a nine and I’ll defeat foes. . .
It’s only right that I was born to use mics
And the stuff that I write is even tougher than dykes
I’m taking rappers to a new plateau, through rap slow
My rhymin’ is a vitamin held without a capsule.²¹

The explosion of muscular double rhymes and half rhymes here demonstrates the poet’s ability just as he describes it. Just as in the poetry of ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad, in rapper Nas’ 1994 song “New York State of Mind,” a speaker attests to his own martial and poetic abilities, the virtuoso capacities of the latter seeming to corroborate a similar prowess in the former. Same stuff, different continent and century.

To return to ‘Antarah, and change subjects slightly, I wanted to note that it’s important for us to remember that not all Jahili Arabic poetry sounds like ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad – he just happens to be the only one who, as of the time of recording this, has had his works made available in a scholarly English translation. Other Pre-Islamic Arabic poets were associated with the luxuries of court life, or satire, or eulogy, or panegyric, or incidental poems recording this or that scuffle between tribes or client kings, or diplomatic ventures between such individuals. If all we read of Greco-Roman theater was Senecan tragedy, we would walk away from ancient Mediterranean drama gawking at its seeming preoccupation with vengeance and bloodthirsty cruelty, and in just the same way, focusing just on ‘Antarah in this episode may give the inaccurate impression that all Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry is bloody and martial and fatalistic. On the contrary, Jahili Arabic poetry beyond just that of ‘Antarah is quite a big body of work, and it covers many subjects. [music]

The Ayyam al-‘Arab and Arabic Literary History

Now, this could be a good stopping point for today. We’ve learned a bit about the Pre-Islamic Arabian warrior culture of ‘Antarah’s world. We’ve learned about the tantalizing possibility that a trans-peninsular class of poets might have existed by the year 600, poets who, as two 40-year tribal wars destabilized life in Arabia, and Byzantine and Sasanian conflicts in the north destabilized it further, roamed the peninsula as military and literary mercenaries, carving reputations with swords, words, or both. And we’ve looked at a lot of ‘Antarah’s poetry, a body of work that, even in translation, gives us a sense of the generic, metaphorical, and figurative sophistication of Arabic poetry before the dawn of Islam. However, even though we haven’t covered the Prophet Muhammad and the Qur’an just yet, I actually want to jump forward and talk a bit about why and how ‘Antarah’s poetry, and later, the legend of ‘Antarah himself, was so popular in later Islamic history.

I have already emphasized that later Islamic scholars undertook the general project of resuscitating Jahili poetry for the sake of celebrating the grandeur of a bygone culture. The hardy Bedouins of the Arabian Peninsula, and their poetry, or in some cases their alleged poetry, were resplendent to later literary scholars, just as Japanese culture perennially reveres samurai, Denmark Vikings, America cowboys, Ukraine Cossacks, and on and on, regardless of the historicity involved in such idolizations.

But there was a bit more to the resurgence of ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad in Arabic literary history than generally romanticizing the past. Now, this will get just a bit complicated for a moment. It’s hard for me to offer a detailed reception history of ‘Antarah during the Middle Ages when we haven’t even looked at the Qur’an yet, let alone the caliphates. Nonetheless, let’s go over a couple of final reasons why ‘Antarah’s poetry became particularly interesting to the Muslim world during and after the 800s.

To repeat the obvious a final time, all Jahili poetry to some extent symbolized the glorious, simple past of Islam’s Arabian heartland – I’m sure you’ve got that by now. Cultural conservatives, like ancient Romans idolizing the stout farmer-soldiers of the old republic – cultural conservatives always like stories about simpler, hardier times before people became pansies, and the caliphates had plenty of conservatives who liked imagining Jahili poets as rugged dudes bench pressing their camels. There are two other reasons, however, why ‘Antarah himself became particularly popular during and after the 800s.

The first is pretty easy to explain. Devout Muslim philologists, or language scholars, were interested in Jahili poetry for linguistic reasons. Due to its relative brevity and its beauty, the Qur’an may very well contain the most heavily trafficked lines of verse in all human history. For later scholars and interpreters of the Qur’an, any morsel of poetry from the Pre-Islamic world, including ‘Antarah’s verses, was to be treasured for its nearness to the Prophet Muhammad’s world. By studying the Arabic poetry of the 500s, the theologians of the medieval period could get a clearer sense of what poetry had sounded like around the time of Muhammad’s revelations. A chance verb, noun, or conjunction might provide the key to unlocking a cryptic Qur’anic verse, or challenging an accepted interpretation, and thus, for reasons of faith as well as personal ambition, the devout linguists of the caliphates had multiple reasons to be interested in the pagan poetry of the Pre-Islamic period. And with this philological research – in reading Jahili poetry and comparing its nuts and bolts to what they saw in the Qur’an, the scholars of the 700s, 800s, and afterward were already undertaking the same sort of comparative linguistic analysis that various humanities departments still do today.

In addition to their general interest in Pre-Islamic Arabia as a time of simple and hardy virtue, and a time that had given rise to the Qur’anic revelations, later Muslim scholars were also interested in the period for the sake of its martial history. The tribes of the Arabian Peninsula, before Muhammad brought so many of them together, each had their own legends, their own heroes, and their own sources of pride. The Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates, which persisted from 632-750, were a time of new relative unity for Arabs, but underlying this unity was, quite literally, tribalism – a series of stubborn genealogical and political fissures that had roots in pre-Islamic Arabia, and did not suddenly vanish following the theological unification that Islam brought. During the early caliphates, a record of Jahili warfare came together called Ayyam al-‘Arab, literally, “Days of the Arabs,” though we might translate it as “Battle Lore of the Arabs.” This was not a modern narrative history of battles between Arab clans prior to Islam, but instead an evolving bundle of prose mixed with poetry, in which the prose gums together the bits of poetry. In the Ayyām al-‘Arab, prose passages first introduce the circumstances of each battle. We learn the topography of a dispute, and the tribal and genealogical identities of the disputants. Then, often, as Arab warriors of different tribes square off, they issue poetic taunts and they grandstand in front of one another, just like Homeric heroes. Subsequently, often other poems, frequently excerpts, are quoted about the actual battle, excerpts that are framed with prose that explain them. The Ayyam al-‘Arab, or again “Battle Lore of the Arabs,” were pseudo-historical, hybrid documents in which poetry itself seemed be assumed to carry weight, due to the very nature of its existence. This guy and this guy met in a gulch and they had a dispute over a freshwater spring, and look at their surviving remarks to one another – see, they’re quoted in full, accurate-sounding Arabic verse, so this all must be true – and also, look, some other poet left behind two dozen verses about their subsequent swordfight, so they really must have met and dueled in that gulch.

The Ayyam al-‘Arab, for those of us new to ancient Arabic literary history, is a fascinating body of work to consider. Everyone who studies literature can understand readily enough that literature began as oral poetry recited by bards – in Arabic literary history, rawis – poetry full of mnemonic features like regular meter, rhymes, epithets, and other tools that helped performers remember long works. Everyone who studies literature can also understand that later on, literature existed as ink on pages. What about the in-between period, though? What if there weren’t some magical, generational moment when all of the oral poetry was set down, and abracadabra, turned into written poetry? What if it took a long time? The Ayyām al-‘Arab, those mixed blocks of prose and poetry, show us how this transition took place early in Arabic literary history – how compilers took bricks of preexisting centuries-old verse, sometimes from other texts, and sometimes from living bards, and situated these bricks in a mortar of explanatory prose.

By the year 784, a collection of poetry and battle narratives had come together that’s commonly called al-Mufaḍḍaliyyāt, named after the literary scholar Mufaḍḍal al-Ḍabbī, who lived in Kufa, in present-day Iraq. al-Mufaḍḍaliyyāt, one of the most important anthologies of Arabic literature, was a product of its times, and it followed previous examples by situating centuries-old Arabic poetry within narratives, and also adding interpretive commentary to that poetry. If you opened the al-Mufaḍḍaliyyāt to, for instance, an entry on ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad, you would find each poem prefaced by a paragraph or so on when, where, and why the poet wrote each poem, and unfamiliar place names or archaic diction would be accompanied with helpful notes. The historical accuracy of the accompanying material is unknown, and we can assume that it involves some guesswork. The poems themselves, as we learned in the previous episode, may not have been perfectly preserved records of Jahili verse, and indeed in some cases, may have been forgeries. But, in spite of the factual shakiness of Arabic literature’s first anthologies, they were long, serious, scholarly efforts to capture Arabic poetry as the Umayyad Caliphate gave way to the Abbasid Caliphate.

Arabic literature’s early anthologies, in their structure and contents, were also influential. The battle narratives of the 700s and 800s gave way to anthologies in which editors preserved and commented on the work of earlier editors, and poets became increasingly storied figures, known for their poetry, but also the prose anecdotes that had evolved about them over the years. Our primary sources on ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad today are documents from the 1000s CE, set down all the way over on the Iberian Peninsula. When we look at them, we see a poet mediated by 500 years of evolving legends and literary scholarship. Let’s take a moment to read ‘Antarah in the way that he would have been encountered during the Middle Ages. This will be an introduction to one of ‘Antarah’s poems from the literary scholar al-Baṭalyawsi, done some time in the late 1000s. Here it is.

‘Antarah addressed the following poem to ‘Umārah ibn Ziyād, who was known as “the Munificent.” ‘Umārah envied ‘Antarah and would tell his people that they mentioned his name too often. “God, if I could confront [‘Antarah] face to face,” [‘Umārah] said, “I’d show you that he’s no more than a slave.” For all his generosity and his propensity to give everything away, ‘Umārah was a man of great wealth and he owned many camels, whereas ‘Antarah could barely hold on to a camel, for he always gave them away among his brothers. ‘Antarah learned of what ‘Umārah had been saying about him, so he composed the following poem.²²

The verses that follow in the medieval anthology are taunts. ‘Antarah asks ‘Umārah if the latter really wants to fight him, or whether ‘Umārah is going to run away in fear, ‘Antarah praises the glint of his own sword, the straightness of his spear shaft, the sharpness of his arrowheads, and the poem concludes with the exceedingly Homeric warning that “I lead the charge of mounted lions / who snap the necks of their prey.”²³

During the Middle Ages, then, readers of Jahili Arabic poetry did not encounter ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad’s poems on blank pages. The poems were embedded within contextual narratives. They might tell you a story like the one above, prior to a poem, or they might tell you that ‘Antarah had had his heart broken in just such a fashion before he voiced a subsequent lament about his beloved ‘Ablah, or that he was wandering in just this stretch of wilderness when he wrote some subsequent lines about the mercilessness of fate. The effect is a fascinating one. Literature, in a word, is yoked to history, or at least, an attempt at history. Authorial intention is made unambiguous. Poetry is glued to specific situational points of origin, such that medieval Arabic literary scholars encountered verse as an unfolding component of history itself.

From the perspective of those of us who are interested only in factual accuracy, the prosimetric, or prose and verse compilations of scholars like al-Baṭalyawsi are, in all likelihood, wildly inaccurate. Arabic poetic anthologies covering the Jahili period, by 1000 CE, were products of the telephone game of history, even though each generation that participated may have earnestly sought sound scholarship. And while medieval Arabic anthologists sought at least some fidelity to the original poetry of ‘Antarah and his contemporaries, in Arabic popular culture, bards still continued to sing, and audiences still sought folkloric sagas about ancient heroes, and so stories about al-Jahiliya continued to unspool, century after century. One of the most famous of these was Sirat ‘Antarah, a medieval epic of monumental proportions that had been completed by about 1200. [music]

The Sirat ‘Antarah: A Later Medieval Epic about ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad

Medieval Arabs, as we’ve learned, romanticized the Bedouin world of the 500s CE as a place of solitary poets and windblown expanses; of hardy virtues and close-knit clans; of violence, ardor, loss, and resolution, creating what scholar Peter Cole calls “[a] time which is always past, yet somehow now.”²⁴ Many premodern Arabic epics have survived, epics rooted in real historical events. Some are about Achaemenid Persian and Greek antiquity.²⁵ Some tell of the early years of the Caliphates, and the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties.²⁶ The ‘Antarah epic, focusing on Pre-Islamic Arabian history, is perhaps the most widely known of all of these epics. Compiled some time between 1000 and 1200 CE, it is a monolith of world literature, although, to be clear, it is a work of fiction, about a guy whose legend grew and evolved for five centuries due to poems which might not have been particularly original in the first place.

Sirat ‘Antarah, or the “Biography of ‘Antarah,” or the “Path of ‘Antarah” is a formidable brick of text. Scholar Peter Heath describes the story as stretching to precisely 5,607 pages in a 1961 Arabic edition, and even the summary that he includes of the book in an appendix to a scholarly monograph is 63 pages in length.²⁷ A few seasons from now, I would like to offer episodes on this epic, as well as other medieval Arabic epics. For now, let me give you a very quick summary of the Sirat ‘Antarah, as ‘Antarah remains a cultural monolith in much of the Arabic speaking world.

The Sirat ‘Antarah, in its opening passage, offers its protagonist an extremely important place in Islamic history. The text tells us that during the Jahiliya, the Arabs were conceited and thickheaded, and in order to take the Arabs down a notch before Muhammad arrived, God sent ‘Antarah. Once the Arabs were clobbered in battle by a half-African slave, God reasoned, they’d be softened up a bit, and be ready for Muhammad’s revelations. It’s a great opening and back story, and the epic only gets better from there.

The Sirat ‘Antarah opens near the beginning of the Torah’s creation story, with Noah’s descendent Nimrod eventually perishing due to hubris against God, after which Abraham and his slave Hagar have a boy named Ishmael. Ishmael, who grew up around the famous Zamzam well in what is today Mecca, eventually saw his father Abraham build the Kaaba nearby. Ishmael, or Ismail, the patriarch of the Arabs in Islamic history, had many songs, and after a stretch of begats, we learn of how ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad came to be. The long and short of it is that a raider named Shaddad captured a black slave named Zabia, together with her baby sons, and raped her, resulting in the birth of ‘Antarah.

From the beginning, in this later medieval epic, ‘Antarah is a bruiser, working as a shepherd who kills predators that assail his flock with his bare hands. ‘Antarah feuded with, and killed another slave – the slave of a local prince, making himself a powerful enemy. But ‘Antarah also made a friend – specifically, this same local prince’s brother. With powerful enemies and powerful friends, then, and already becoming enmeshed in intratribal politics, ‘Antarah also fell in love. Love for his cousin ‘Ablah inspired the young man to begin writing poetry, an occupation which brought him both fame and trouble in later parts of the epic. And speaking of trouble, both ‘Antarah’s biological father, and ‘Antarah’s paternal uncle, the father of ‘Ablah, were disgusted that the young half-breed was writing love poetry to ‘Ablah, whom they considered far too good for the lowborn ‘Antarah. ‘Antarah’s uncle and father planned to kill him. They reconsidered when they see ‘Antarah kill a lion with his bare hands.

Being a juggernaut in battle soon became useful to ‘Antarah in other ways. The young man made new friends when he saved some women from marauding raiders, and even endeared the affection of a local king. But the king’s favor was counterbalanced by the enmity of the king’s son, who tried to have ‘Antarah killed, and failed. Young ‘Antarah, in between strangling lions and fending off various assassins, managed to find out who his father was. ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad confronted his father Shaddad, who refused to acknowledge the brawny youngster, and so off ‘Antarah went, leaving the ‘Abs tribe and wandering into the desert, where he fell in with a party of marauders, beginning his youthful adventures in earnest. And that summary, by the way, takes us through Book 2 of 58 books of the Sirat Antarah.

‘Antarah is a magnetic presence in the epic that ensues. He is a hero with a chip on his shoulder, fluent in poetry and murder, with an enduring and tragic soft spot for his cousin ‘Ablah, and born into a tumultuous world full of violent and entrenched factions – an Othello with his own epic, rather than just a play. He ends up in Persia, Constantinople, Damascus, Andalusia, and Rome. He faces off against a powerful clan leader, first, and then he takes a central role in the famous war of Dahis and al-Ghabra between two major Arabian tribes. And up and over these intra-Peninsular conflicts, the Lakhmid and Ghassanid kings pull puppet strings from present-day Iraq and Syria, and behind these client kings are the power of the Persian Shah and the Byzantine Emperor. And in the background, too, is the more nebulous rivalry between the northern Arabian tribes who declare themselves descendants of ‘Adnan, and the southern Arabian tribes who trace their lineage to Qahtan, Adnan and Qahtan being legendary Islamic patriarchs both descended from Abraham. The ‘Antarah epic, though fiction, and littered with anachronisms, is also soaked through with real Jahili history, most notably these onion layers of factional strife that characterized real Bedouin life during the 500s CE. There are silly elements of the Sirat ‘Antarah – a total of eleven different lion fighting scenes, formulaic enough to be weirdly fascinating, although Sirat ‘Antarah isn’t nearly as full of devils and sorcery as other medieval Arabic epics.²⁸ As a whole, though, the Sirat ‘Antarah remains one of the masterworks of Arabic epic literature, and as I said, on down the road we’ll take a longer look at the epic, being no strangers to epics ourselves at this point in the podcast.

Poetry in the Sirat ‘Antarah

The ‘Antarah epic, in addition to having the narrative events that you just heard, also contains poetry – poetry ostensibly done by ‘Antarah himself, and often poems modeled on the verses we’ve already read together in this program. Let’s take a look at some of the poetry from the ‘Antarah epic for a moment, because I think that in doing so, we can learn a handy lesson about Arabic and Islamic literary history, before we even get to Islam itself.

We’ve learned in this and the previous episode that part of the qasida, or Arabic ode, is the nasib, or erotic recollection. Five or six hundred years after ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad lived, when later poets were writing what we might call “fan fiction” about him, these poets wrote verses in which ‘Antarah recollected his beloved ‘Ablah. Here are some erotic verses from the ‘Antarah epic, in which later poets imagined ‘Antarah remembering his lover. The hero ‘Antarah, in the medieval epic, remembers,

     How good life was,
how I played
     with that coy gazelle
that sweet-voiced
     dark-eyed flirt –
so serene,
     eyebrows arched
like pen strokes,
     teeth like daisies
in a row,
     shapely, full,
leggy, silky,
     delicate waist,
smooth skin –
     a tender rose
hid by the curtain
     of a night whose stars
glittered against
     the dark like quicksilver
in a bottle –
     I played with her
till daybreak
     clasped tenderly
in braceleted arms.²⁹

That was the Montgomery translation, and to repeat, that was a poem from the ‘Antarah epic, written some time between 1000 and 1200, and definitely not the work of a Jahili poet. Nonetheless, the poem certain sounds like the other work of ‘Antarah. A lonely poet looks back into the past, remembering a love that’s come and gone. He recalls her voice, her eyes, her teeth, her body, and the complex similes in the poetry – eyebrows like pen strokes, and stars like quicksilver in a bottle, seem to admit that the poet’s very memories of his beloved are artistic constructions, mediated by the distortive power of his imagination. The later epic poets who wrote these lines knew ‘Antarah’s small corpus of love poetry well.

They also knew his war poetry. Let’s take a quick look at another excerpt from the ‘Antarah epic – this is an inset poem in which ‘Antarah voices his indifference to life on Earth without ‘Ablah. ‘Antarah says in the epic,

Men find glory in chains
     women in strings of pearls.
I get drunk on the murky binge
     of battle, not strong wine.
Fate, don’t go easy on me!
     What I seek lies close at hand.
Without ‘Ablah
     my comfort is Death.
Death, ‘Ablah, is near.
     Weep if you have any tears
and mourn me more
     than jealous Fate does.
Let them kill me –
     my deeds will live.³⁰

These lines, like the previous ones, sound like verses ‘Antarah would have written. A warrior poet who has lost his love expresses indifference to life and at the same time vows that he’ll continue to live on, known by posterity for his deeds in war if and when he perishes on the battlefield. These could have been the words of Achilles upon the death of Patroclus. And that, really, takes us to the point that I wanted to make.

Five hundred years after the real ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad lived, the epic poets who told tall tales about his deeds, and imagined new poems for him, lived in a different world. ‘Antarah, a denizen of the Arabian Peninsula in the 500s, was a pagan, and a fatalist of the old Greek epic stamp – a figure who fought and lived and loved with indifference to heaven or hell or any all-governing deity. The writers who told and embellished his story centuries later obviously revered him. They deftly set him in the context of Islamic history at the epic’s outset, and later, they made ‘Antarah do some precociously Muslim things, and after ‘Antarah’s death in the epic, ‘Antarah’s brother joins Muhammad’s new religion.³¹ But the authors of the Sirat ‘Antarah did not make the story’s hero into a pious Muslim, somehow honoring the five pillars of Islam before the religion ever came to be. ‘Antarah’s splendor, like that of the Jahili period more generally, lay partly in its difference from the securer centuries of the caliphates. In ‘Antarah, the poets of the 1000s and 1100s in the Abbasid caliphate saw an ancient mirror. Here was a person who, like they themselves, revered Arabic poetry, but unlike them, lived in a lawless, protean period before the revelations of Muhammad. ‘Antarah’s splendor, to Islamic posterity, lay partly in the fact that he was not a Muslim. Half a millennium after ‘Antarah lived, he was a legend from a lost time, and the emblem of a world that was ruthless and beautiful, and that crackled with ancient magic – a world that had engendered the Qur’an itself. The professional bards who sang ‘Antarah’s epic saga to gatherings before and the five daily prayers were voiced all over the Islamic world – these bards knew that Arabic was older than Islam, and that the ubiquitous Qurayshite verses revealed to Muhammad, though divinely inspired, had also not been the beginning of all history. [music]

Jahili Literature and Islamic Posterity: A Long Legacy

So, we have just explored, with reasonable depth for a podcast episode, how ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad’s poetry, and the legend of the poet himself, traveled down through the centuries. The tail end of this show has been fairly dense, so let’s back up and review what we’ve learned. We learned Jahili poetry, to later readers and scholars, had numerous attractions. First, it invited its audience to remember the early days of the Arabs, when luxuries were scarce, folks were tough, and times were simpler. Second, Jahili poetry offered later Muslim scholars a wealth of primary materials to research Arabic literature and language from the period of the Prophet Muhammad. Third, Jahili poems were puzzle pieces of the complex relationships between Arabia’s tribes during antiquity, pieces that later writers and statesmen could use to stage proxy feuds against one another in the early days of the caliphates, when tribal fissures could still very keenly be felt. And finally, Jahili poetry was eventually transmogrified, under the pens of anthologists, into an accepted canon of standard works and accompanying legends. The latter process took a long time. By the year 1200, around the time the Sirat ‘Antarah was completed, it was so commonplace to write colorful myths and legends about bygone heroes that the historicity of epic as a genre was probably of little interest to anyone. Greek writers had written a romantic epic about Alexander the Great, centuries after his death, and before this, Christian writers wrote apocryphal Acts books about the Apostles, and before this, Plutarch wrote short fiction about Rome’s historical heavyweights, and in all cases, it was expected that writers would invent speeches, fill in gaps, and make stuff up in order to tell a good story. ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad, like warmongering Alexander, like the innocent Apostle John, like valorous Scipio Africanus, is a magnetic figure, and it’s no wonder that various narrative orbitals have gathered around him and been compacted together into the figure we now have today.

But as fantastic as some of the legends about ‘Antarah surely are, and as spurious as some of ‘Antarah’s poetry today surely is, he still serves as an excellent introduction to the earliest Arabic literature. This literature, as we’ve learned in this and the previous program, is always mediated by the first few centuries of Islamic scholarship, scholarship that had various tribal, theological, intellectual and artistic agendas that we explored in this program. It is still, however, a rich and diverse body of work. We’ve learned about the qasida, or ode – the most quintessential form of classical Arabic poetry, and the subcomponents that it typically has. We’ve learned about the sa’alik, or vagabond poem, and read some of ‘Antarah’s, and we’ve learned about the fakhr, or boast poem, and seen examples of those from ‘Antarah, as well. While we didn’t take a long look at the madih, or panegyric, nor the hija, or satire, we’ve learned that these were poetic forms that also predated Muhammad.

And while you may walk away from these introductory episodes on early Islamic history forgetting a lot of these details, I want you to remember something very simple as we move forward. By 570, the year often given for the Prophet Muhammad’s birth, there was already a massive amount of Arabic poetry out there, poetry that reflected the size, diversity, and complexity of Arabia itself. A century later, Arabic poetry was already being compiled from professional bards into loose groupings of poems and explanatory material. A century later still, in the late 700s, the first mature anthologies of Arabic poetry were underway, and soon thereafter, Arabic literary scholarship was flourishing everywhere there were people who spoke Arabic and liked to read, and that, by the 800s, was a lot of places. So the biggest takeaway from these opening programs on early Islamic history is, again a simple one – that a variety of Arabic poetry predated Muhammad, and that it of course kept being produced during and after Muhammad, and that Arabs have always taken enormous pride in its quality and its vintage. [music]

Moving on to the Life of Muhammad

100 episodes ago, we began our history of the Tanakh, or Old Testament, with an overview of how the Bronze Age Collapse had affected the Levant and the Ancient Near East. It was important to me, in the episode titled “Canaan,” to emphasize that Judaism was the product of a cultural crossroads – that it arose from a seedbed or other religious ideologies that were collectively trending toward monotheism. Over these past three programs on early Islamic history, I hope I’ve been able to do something similar with Islam. Far from being an isolated place generating endogenous ideologies, Muhammad’s Mecca was a commercial lynchpin between Europe, Africa, and Asia. Historian Tamim Ansary coined the term “Middle World” as an alternative to “Middle East,” as, for much of recorded history, the Arabian Peninsula and its neighboring regions have indeed been at the geographical center of much of the human population.³² Born and raised, then, in what we can better call the “Middle World,” and exposed to various sects of Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Arabian polytheism, and a whole lot of tremendous Arabic poetry, Muhammad, like Mani and Jesus before him, lived in a place and time conducive to well-informed prophetic revelations.

Muhammad’s story, and the Qur’an, which we’ll learn about over the next bundle of episodes, are central to the history of the Middle World. The Prophet’s biography is a cherished story for about two billion of us today, its hero, perhaps a bit like ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad, being a person of middling birth whose fortitude and intelligence; whose percipience and tenacity, are the stuff of legend. Muhammad was a prophet, certainly, but he was also an orphan, then a common worker, talented with camels; then a businessman, an arbitrator and a husband; a reluctant visionary terrified that his revelations were madness, and then, gradually, a religious leader, an adjudicator, a general, a sage, and a legend. Within his biography is the tale of a orphaned child, an up-by-the-bootstraps narrative, an unlikely but moving romance, the saga of a seer who doubts his own visions, a David and Goliath narrative of a tiny band who grows to stand against a powerful commercial and military oligarchy, and eventually, the beginning of a movement that completely changed history.

The early history of Islam, as we come to the actual story of Muhammad and the Qur’an, is, like the history of Christianity’s inception and Judaism’s beginning, an intimidating subject. Sacred to billions, and of great importance to all of us, the story of Islam’s prophet is long and historiographically complex. However, coming to the year of Muhammad’s birth in about 570, as we are, in the wake of hundreds of hours of episodes on the ancient history that led up to it, we do have some advantages. Islam, as the Qur’an emphasizes again and again, is a part of the prophetic tradition of Judaism and Christianity, a prophetic tradition with which we are familiar at this point. Islam was born at a period when the Byzantine and Sasanian empires had exhausted one another, and we have traced the course of Mediterranean and Persian empires, and their cultural history, since the 500s BCE. Islam was born at a moment when Europe and North Africa had transitioned into a decentralized patchwork of evolving kingdoms – Franks, Visigoths, Lombards, Byzantine exarchates, Papal States, and others, and during our long season on Late Antiquity, we learned about how and why this happened. Thus, while I can’t offer you the prestige and polyglot expertise of a trained Islamic studies scholar, I think that the journey we’ve taken so far, including the first three programs of this season, will be excellent preparation for learning about Muhammad and the Qur’an.

So in the next program, Episode 114: The Life of the Muhammad, Part 1, we’ll learn about Muhammad’s biography up until a little after his first revelation, focusing on the years between 570 and 610. Muhammad’s story is the saga of one of the most influential people who ever lived, but it’s also the tale of a generation. Over the next three programs, we’ll not only meet Muhammad, but also his younger cousin ‘Ali, the future caliphs Abu Bakr, ‘Umar, and Uthman. We’ll learn about the fissures in the Meccan Quraysh tribe that were later central not only to Islamic, but also to world history. And we’ll explore the roots of how a small population of merchants and tradesmen from western Arabia created the largest empire the world had yet known, in a little less than a century.

Parker’s Song

And stay on a minute more here, if you could – I have a pretty big announcement. First of all, of course there’s a quiz available on this episode in the Notes or Details section of your podcast playing app, and there’s some bonus content available for you Patreon supporters. The announcement, though, is this. My co-host – my Chocolate Lab, Parker, died recently. I know I just talked about him a few shows ago. He was fourteen – a ripe old age for his breed – and it was time. Ever since I started this podcast, he’s been here – literally here, in this room, while I talk into the mike. He was a big guy – 85 pounds, but he was also gentle and quiet. Often he’d get up and go do something in the middle of a take and I wouldn’t even have to redo or edit it out, he made such little noise. He was, I can say, without reservations, my best friend and my family as much as any human – even in his senior years I was taking him for long, long walks every day, and the day before he died, he still took a stiff-legged old man walk down to the river to go swimming, and that’s about as good as it gets.

Anyway, the announcement is that I wrote him a song – it’s called “Parker’s Song.” Parker was his name – they named him that at the animal shelter where I adopted him in 2011, and so we kept it. I spent a lot of time on this tune, and I guess I hope it shows. I’ll play it for you in a moment, but let me also say I made a video of this same song that I also spent a lot of time on – a video that’s mostly Parker himself, filmed in probably a hundred different locations over the years, running, playing, swimming, goofing, and being his lovable self. I just released that video on YouTube today, and there’s a link to it in your podcast app, and across my social media accounts, as well. He was a beautiful dog, with really expressive, intelligent eyes and a brown coat that glowed ochre and bronze in certain kinds of light. So, listen to “Parker’s Song” if you’re in the middle of something, but if you’re not, or if you have time later, I hope you’ll watch the video version. It would mean a lot to me if you could see him, doing his thing, and being himself. So everybody, here’s the audio version of “Parker’s Song,” and next time, we’ll hear the important, and really pretty touching and human story of the Prophet Muhammad’s early years.



References

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