Love in Arabic Poetry

The heroic strain in poetry is the first of its purposes among all nations, just as love in poetry is the last of all its chapters and stands at the very summit of the poets' purposes.

Man began by showing his ardor in dance, exulting at the defeat of his enemies and mimicking their movements — the movements that betrayed cowardice — in order to mock them. When words were coined, sounds and cries turned into syllables and then into words, and man mounted, in the display of his ardor, the ladder of music, expression, and song, until poetry became what it is in its advanced stages, gathering up such meanings as bespeak turbulent natures and feeling souls.

Some of those who have studied the history of love say that it, like everything else, has phases in which its aims and its substance have varied.

In its first phase love was material and nothing more, stopping at the expression of sex. Then it passes into the second phase, in which it is at one time material, concerned with describing beauty and pursuing it wherever it may be, and at another time spiritual, concerned with beauty of mind and character — this by reason of the appearance of the Virgin Mary and the fascination with chastity and maidenly modesty that spread in the wake of her appearance, which led to the separation of the two sentiments: the sentiment of admiration for comeliness of feature, and the sentiment of passion for the lofty spirit. A man would wed a wife to bear him sons, and then join himself, beside her, to another — a woman of cultivation — in a violent spiritual union, which before long drew after it a sweeping flood of corruption. Matters remained so until Jean-Jacques Rousseau appeared and composed romances whose heroines united beauty of form with beauty of character; people then recognized the barrenness of separating the two sentiments, and how far such separation departs from what nature has laid down for mankind. So beauty in both its kinds was united in the person desired — and this is the third phase, the phase of true love.

Since the individual is liable to be affected by the phases through which society has passed, he must needs traverse the three phases of love just described in the course of his climb up the ladder of mental advancement. Thus you see the wish of the raw, untaught youth confined to material love alone: he seeks in the girl he chooses nothing but beauty of body and face. But if he does not marry before experience has schooled him and learning refined him, he passes into the second phase, admiring the beautiful girl for her comeliness and loving the well-bred girl for her spirituality; and then he marries none but the girl who unites the two beauties — beauty of qualities and beauty of features — and so spares himself the worst of regret and heartache.

Love in poetry is a kind of worship of beauty, in which a man gives voice to the ferment of youth within his soul; nay, it is a kind of prayer, for in it are supplication and imploring, entreaty and the begging of pardon, and an exaltation born of a hallowing that approaches, nearly or remotely, the degree of deification.

I have set down this preface in order to ask: where does love in Arabic poetry stand among its three phases?

You will surely find that what was written down of the poetry of the first Jahiliyya — and only the least of it was written down — is not without indication that the Arabs knew love in its third phase. If you read al-Shanfara, that master poet and fearsome brigand who used to waylay travelers by night in the desert, you find him yearning after his beloved only to describe her chastity and gravity. He said:

Umayma — talk of her brings no shame upon her husband;
when women are spoken of, she is chaste and exalted.

But the poets of the second Jahiliyya sing more of the beauty of face and body — or perhaps they did so in imitation of the Greeks in their carving of statues. Al-Nabigha al-Dhubyani, famous for his elegance and his constant journeying between Palmyra, Baalbek, and Damascus, stood before those temples marveling at the splendor of their statues — nude and draped, full figures, half figures, and beautiful heads — only to return and sing of al-Mutajarrida, wife of al-Nu'man, queen of al-Hira; and

al-Dhubyani was one of the king's boon companions and intimates. He composed on her a qasida — or say rather he carved her a full statue, not of marble and stone, but of rhymes and meters.

Of the same kind is the famous "Yatima" qasida, which opens:

Do the ruins hold an answer for him who asks?
Or have they any covenant with speech?

And the latest to compose in this genre is the fretful poet Tamer Mallat.

Another poet, al-Munakhkhal al-Yashkuri, rises to compose on an adventure in which he came in upon a girl on a rainy day, describing the conversation that passed between them. Imru' al-Qays follows him, caring little for the description of beauty; his concern is rather to describe the perils he faced whenever he sought a meeting. He touches on features and describes their forms, and on conversations, dwelling upon them at length.

And how often the Arabs imitated the Greeks in depicting Cupid the archer! The Nabigha of Banu Shayban said:

Sulayma's arrows have undone my heart,
for she shot me with shafts that did not go astray.

And A'sha Hamdan said:

Her arrow did not miss my heart when she let fly —
oh, wonder at her well-aimed arrow!

Among the statues carved in verse are those that treat of dress: certain poets describe the slenderness of the waist beneath the sash and the swaying of the willowy figure beneath the robe, and what shows of bracelet and anklet, earrings and sleeves, half-veil and necklace, howdah and jewels, and all the rest of women's garments and conveyances.

If the Arabs fell short of the Spaniards and the Greeks in the arts of painting and sculpture, it was because of the barrenness of the desert, its emptiness of colors and forests, and its want of marble. And for this very reason they excelled in literature, which is the most difficult of all the arts, for it combines them and surpasses them in the portrayal of movement and life; all the fine arts are powerless to render the changes that pass over a single scene — all save literature, which goes beyond even that to the description of voice and gait and the emotions.

From the foregoing it is clear that the poets of the second Jahiliyya did not pass beyond the first phase of love, for all the dialogue and story woven through it. But Islamic poetry, however abundant its material description, is shot through with the spiritual — as in Hassan's description of the Lady Aisha (may God be pleased with her): "Chaste and grave, no suspicion touches her." The loftiest of the poets are the poets of the desert, and their chief is Jamil of Buthayna.

In the science of language the Arabs set degrees for love: hawa, inclination; then 'alaqa, attachment; then kalaf, infatuation; then shaghaf, passion — and akin to it law'a and la'ij, the burning pangs; then sha'af, ardor; then jawa, consuming grief; then tatayyum, enslavement; then tabl, love-sickness; then tadlih, dotage; then huyam, distraction. Majnun Layla said:

Meeting you makes me forget, whenever
I meet you of a day, to pour out what is in me.

And how many Majnun Laylas there are among the nations of the East, such as the Indians and the Persians!

And al-Husayn ibn Mudar said:

I love you, Salma, beyond all suspicion —
and what good is a love whose secrets are not chaste?

As for the rest of Umayyad town poetry, most of it is material; and such too is the poetry of the Abbasid state.

The critics stipulated that the poet, in his amatory prelude, should include much mention of longing, and the recalling of the haunts of the beloved at the blowing of winds and the flashing of lightning and whatever runs their course — the mention of abodes and traces — in the footsteps of Imru' al-Qays.

They stipulated too that the prelude should contain the utmost self-surrender and the extreme of obedience to the beloved, and that it should carry the marks of infatuation and bewilderment.

There is yet another condition: that the prelude comprise intense ardor and excess of passion, utter abandon in youthful folly, and deep sorrow and regret; and that it be free of the tokens of harshness and hardihood, and of the signs of pride and self-esteem.

One man was asked: "How far has your love for So-and-so gone?" He answered: "I find the sun upon her walls fairer than upon the walls of her neighbors."

Toward the end of the Umayyad age playfulness entered the ghazal, and it multiplied in the Abbasid age until it reached the pitch of folly and libertinism.

Abu Nuwas said:

O moon I glimpsed at a mourning,
lamenting her sorrow among her companions:
may death remain ever the way of those she loves,
and the sight of her remain ever my way.

The poet has, as the sculptor has not, the power to portray the beauties of nature in the course of his love poems. Abu Bakr ibn 'Abd al-Rahman al-Zuhri, the poet of all the Muslims of Andalusia, was the first among them to describe the gardens. He said:

When we alighted at a resting-place besprinkled with dew,
graceful, a garden bright with blossom,
the sweetness of the place and its beauty stirred
new longings in us — we wished, and you were the wishes.

And it seems to me that the poet who said:

I am you, and you are I: we two are one,
two voices in the world gathered up by the echo

had anticipated the invention of the radio; and Shawqi Bey imitated him in a qasida that opens: "I am Antonio, and Antonio is I."

After all this — where is true love in poetry? Where is the poet who utters a sincere feeling that none before him has uttered? Where is the poetry at which every heart trembles, be it full of love or empty of it? Where is the poet who dips his pen in the blood of his heart and not in the ink of his inkwell? Where is love in poetry? It is in such lines as Majnun's:

As if my heart, the night it was said
that Layla al-'Amiriyya would set out at morning or at evening,
were a sandgrouse beguiled by a snare, tugging
at it the night through, its wing held fast.

And Ibn Abi Rabi'a said:

He who bears the old longing, though he be consoled,
longs anew whenever he meets with lovers.

And he said:

For love of you I love even one who is
no bosom-friend of mine, nor companion;
I lavish my wealth to win your good pleasure
and reproach whoever comes to you reproaching;
and were mankind to take one side
of the earth, and she to withdraw to a side apart,
I would make for her side, for I
find in her nearness the wonder of wonders.

And Suhaym said:

My cloak kept the sweetness of her garments
a full year, till the cloak wore through to rags.

And 'Urwa ibn Hizam said:

I have borne for 'Afra what neither I
nor the firm-rooted mountains have hands to bear.
As if a sandgrouse hung by its wing
upon my heart, so hard does it beat.

And when he met her in Syria he said:

I have only to see her all at once
and I stand dazed, scarce able to answer;
I turn from the judgment I had formed,
and forget what I resolved while she was away.

And Ibn al-Mawla, one of the mukhadramin, recited:

I weep — but no Layla has wept from ardor
for me, nor does Layla grant her love to the devoted;
I bow to make amends whenever I am at fault,
and when she offends, it is I who beg the pardon.

And Hujayya ibn al-Mudarrib said:

When she draws near, her nearness heightens your longing;
and when she keeps aloof, aloofness brings no forgetting of her.

And Abu al-Shis said:

Passion has a bell that drives off slumber:
whenever I am about to doze, it shakes the bell.

And I delight in what al-Farazdaq said after divorcing Nawar:

She was my Paradise, and I went out from it
as Adam went, when defiance drove him forth.

And in Abu Nuwas's:

His face grows more beautiful
the more you look upon it.

And in al-Sharif al-Radi's:

My eye turned back — and when the dwellings
were hidden from me, my heart turned back.

But ever since al-Wa'wa' said:

She let fall pearls from narcissus, and watered
roses, and bit upon jujubes with hailstones,

people have been bewitched by artifice, and so they remained throughout the age of decadence.

Mention of the watcher, the chider, the talebearer, coquetry, and all the other attributes of woman multiplied in Abbasid poetry, for the veil sharpened the pain of love, just as it was a cause of the barrier between woman and the ghazal. What she does best in her own poetry is the elegy: if you hear her mourn a husband or a son, the warmth of the feeling, the sincerity of the sentiment, and the beauty of the expression will win you.

As for love in modern poetry — that is another story.

(From a talk on the Near East Radio)