a rebellious, indignant one:

If I am counted among the slaves, yet my aspiration is above the Pleiades and unarmed Spica; And if you deny my lineage among the horsemen of Abs, my spear-point and my sword bear witness for me.

Antara, then, was a horseman and a poet; knighthood and poetry contended over him until he settled upon both their thrones together. As for his knighthood, it is a matter never disputed; and were we to strip his life of the embroideries added to it and take only the accounts of the trustworthy — indeed, were we merely to return to the incident of his father's acknowledging him, an acknowledgment of the slave that came only by way of pride in his courage and knighthood — we should rightly count him a hero. He lived ninety years and died on the field, as most of the transmitters say, though some hold that he was assassinated.

As for his poethood, that too is undisputed. He was born more than half a century before Islam; his ode rhyming in mim was hung upon the walls of the Kaaba, and it — and its author with it — were counted among the foremost of the masters of the Mu'allaqat. In his verse, besides the mournful ring, the pride, the disdain, and the heroism, are lines whose delicacy of meaning and fluency of expression have made them pass from tongue to tongue like proverbs, among them his saying:

They said: the meeting is tomor-row, at the winding of the sands — and how long is the yearning of the lovestruck for the morrow!

I have passed the night on an empty belly, and kept it so by day, that I might thereby attain a noble repast.

And I lower my gaze when my neighbor-woman appears, until her dwelling hides my neighbor from my sight.

It is said that the last of these verses was quoted before the Prophet, and he said: No man of the desert was ever described

to me whom I longed to see, save Antara... But what was woman's part in the life of this masterly poet?

In his life were two women. The first was his mother — that Abyssinian, noble of character, who fulfilled her mission as a mother who would not accept humiliation for her son. She kept telling him of the nobility of her stock until the blackness of his maternal uncles became a boast to him, as when he says:

I am the one proven in every field: from the house of Abs are my station and my deeds; of them, in truth, is my father — they are father to me — and my mother is of the line of Ham, so they are my uncles.

The second was Abla — she who was mingled into every last detail of his life. She is in his Mu'allaqa, every line of which brims over with sorrow, love, and longing; she is in his fervor and his pride, in his war and his peace, in the pasture and in the battle. It is as though he composed for her, and for her alone; as though he had scarcely begun to compose before her image stormed the poem and enthroned itself in every one of its lines — nay, as though it were she herself who stood over him, breathing into him the idea, the imagery, and everything.

And we ask ourselves: had Antara been placed in other than this cruel circumstance — had there not been his slavery and the lofti-ness of her station, his blackness and her beauty — had there not been these differences that made the poet taste deprivation and kindled in him the spirit of bound-less ambition, would he then have become the hero-horseman and the masterly poet?

Someone may say: but many poets rose to genius and fame though they were not in circum-stances like Antara's. Yes — they rose to genius and fame precisely because they were not in his circumstances. Each of them was born free, with nothing between him and glory but to pave the road and then walk it. But how far from Antara lay the roads he had to pave!... It would have been more plausible for him to grow up a slave content with his slavery, herding the camels and composing verse if he could

— slaves' verse, to speak more exactly. But to make war upon the world and wrest his freedom by force from those around him; to compel men to bow their heads before his genius, and so win from his fate all that he desired — that requires a spirit driving him without cease, and forever hardening his resolve...

And finally, it is only fair to say that other factors joined in the making of the poet-horseman, chief among them the blood of the men of Abs that ran in his veins, and the sufferings of that noble woman who guided him. But the greatest factor, as I believe — the factor that refined his feelings, exalted his character, strengthened him to surmount hardships, and made his heart and his tongue drip sweetness, pride, and grandeur — was love; or, more exactly, the kind of woman he loved... She looked down upon him from on high, chaste, proud, lofty of character, never ceasing to whisper in his ear: "Try to reach me... try." And so he kept trying — kept soaring on his two wings, surmounting the hardships, until he arrived...

• Your conscience today is what your mother made known to you when you were a girl of six.

• When you educate a man, you have educated a single individual; when you educate a woman, you educate an entire family!

• If a woman wishes to succeed in some profession, she must possess ten times the gifts a man has. For the man has friends who work together with him, while the woman has nothing but obstacles, which the man sets up with his own hand so as to climb upon them in order to reach his goal.

• Few are the lessons we gain from our victory; but the lessons we gain from our defeat are very many indeed.