The Beautiful Woman in Arabic Poetry

... And by Arabic poetry I mean, here, the poetry of the Jahiliyya and of early Islam — not merely to avoid prolonging the study, but because that period represents the pure Arab temper more than any other period does; whence it followed that the poetry of that time was stamped with the pure Arab stamp, and the description of woman accordingly matched the taste of the ancient Arab in her, before he was influenced by the taste of the sons of other nations, and before woman herself was influenced by others, so that her beauty altered and changed.

In this study I have relied on no sources other than the poetry itself, for our ancients did not know the various arts that other nations knew and by which they portrayed woman's beauty, such as the painting and the statue; almost all they knew was the qasida. So it was fitting that we take poetry as the essential spring from which to draw. And what a noble spring it is: for who, like the poet, can see what cannot be seen, can feel the beauty of things, plucking that beauty as the bee plucks the sweetness of the flower, and offering it to us as a honey the Promised Land never knew — and in all this sending out no buzzings to vex the ear, nor preceding his gifts with stings that bloody the silken fingertips? Who, like the poet, sees existence in nothingness, builds pyramids out of nothing, and grows rapturous, so that his lips close upon murmurings whose meaning no one can fathom, while his fingers strike chords of thin air? Who, then, like the poet, can describe woman's beauty where it exists, and imagine her beauty where it does not, describing it as though it were real — as the first poet did before the creation of Eve?

Nor is it strange that poetry should treat the beauty of the body and dwell long in singing it. How could we expect it to speak of all the other aspects of dumb nature, and be silent about the finest thing God created and the most beautiful thing nature fashioned? About the body, which belongs to man more than nature itself belongs to him: is not the body the one part of nature in which the soul has taken up dwelling? For when it came to earth it lodged in no tree or brook, but entered the body of man — despite the fragrant tales of the Greeks.

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I shall now display a woman's body (in words, of course!) and relate how the poets of the Arabs described it in its fairest states:

The hair: the Arab poets took pains in describing their beloveds' hair. They required it to be long and abundant, likened for its length to black serpents; if the woman let it fall freely it trailed in the dust. And it must be black in color, like dark black clusters of grapes. Some loved crisp, coarse curls, in whose branches the comb perishes; others the smooth, flowing hair, sleek as the bodies of gliding serpents; while others pictured the woman as having hair at once curled and flowing, like Imru' al-Qays:

(The combs lose their way in it, in tresses doubled up and hanging loose...)

But in either case it must be thick as a forest: it is luxuriant and dense, the comb goes astray in it for its thickness and breaks for its coarseness; it is matted and heavy, likened therefore to vines and to the branches of the palm. The woman braided her hair for its length, and took pains over its plaiting, its combing, and its dressing. In the books of literature we read that certain noble Arab women were artful in arranging their hair, and that Sukayna bint al-Husayn dressed hers in a particular lovely style known afterward as the Sukaynian coiffure. But we read nothing of dyeing the hair or of the use of henna.

We descend a little, and the forehead meets us. The Arab poets were sparing in describing it, content to insist that it be broad, filling a notable part of the whole face, and that its whiteness harmonize with the whiteness of all the complexion — a whiteness radiant as a shining moon. The Arabs described the eyebrows as fine (naturally fine!), set well apart, arched and curved like the letter nun. We read nothing of the Arab woman's fussing over the state of her brows or her lids.

As for the eyes, I believe the Arab poets' description of them fell short of what it ought to have been, particularly since the eyes, of all the members of the body, most mingle body and soul. They preferred the eyes to be: black — most of the verses treat this, and call the eyes deep-black; and wide — hence they likened them to the eyes of the cow, the gazelle, the wild cow, and other animals. They must be dark as though rimmed with kohl, holding a lustrous contrast that works destruction on the beholder — and who does not know Jarir's line:

(The eyes whose glance holds that dark luster slew us, then did not bring our slain to life)

— and they should hold languor and drowsiness, so they are described as languishing and heavy-lidded. As a result of these qualities the eyes came to have great power over the beholder: they slay him and do not revive him, and strip the sanctity from a monk, as Imru' al-Qays says:

(She has an eye which, had she turned it upon a monk who had fasted for God and prayed devoutly,
he would have woken infatuated and lovesick for her, as though he had never fasted a day for God nor prayed)

It appears that the eyes of the women of the Hijaz surpassed in beauty the eyes of the women of other lands, so that they became proverbial: (Hijazi-eyed).

As for the cheek, it is required to be smooth as a plate of polished silver or a burnished leaf, free of furrows, moderate in size, neither huge nor tiny — though if it must be one or the other, better that it be large and ample, in keeping with our ancients' love of plumpness and bigness. Its color is a blend of white and red — there are roses in it, as Antara says — and it is clear, gleaming, pure and limpid of hue: Tarafa described it by saying the sun had cast its own robe over it, and another said it was the sun itself. If it bore a beauty-spot, its loveliness was increased, and the playful poet Omar wished he could take its place!

Cheeks were likened to gold dinars, and were taken as an emblem of purity and gentleness, by which the rains were besought to water the earth. We do not read that the woman used powders for the face or pastes to remove its wrinkles.

They described the nose as long, the ornament of the face, into which beauty is poured.

They did not expatiate on the fair one's lips; almost all they required of them was that they be dark in color — described as brown or la'as-tinged — and that they smile well.

As for the mouth, it should be white, pure of teeth, clear as crystal, as camomile, as the flash of lightning when it gleams, as the crescent moon at its setting, as radiant pearls, as though scented powder had been sprinkled over it. It is dark of gum — in Tarafa's saying, the sun gave it light and whiteness to drink, all but its gums, which remained dark. It is sweet to kiss and delicious to sip, exhaling fragrant musk; Antara finds in it a cure for the lovers' disease, and Omar finds in it a balm that raises the dead:

(Had the dead been given her saliva to drink, after the cup of death, they would have risen again)

The poets lavished many descriptions on the mouth's moisture: it is wine, and pressed grapes, and a cool qarqaf liquor whose drinker is seized with a shiver. It is chilled honey mixed with snow; it is honey and ginger, ambergris and cloves, and sweet-smelling musk.

The salient qualities of the teeth are that they be white and bright, finely notched, sharp-edged, evenly gapped, polished, well spaced and not crowded one upon another. When the mouth opens in the flash of a smile they have been likened to camomile after rain, to quince and apples, to hailstones, and to the ray of the sun breaking from the clouds. We read that the Arab woman polished her teeth with the miswak to keep their whiteness and their sweet scent.

The chief thing in the neck is length: hence they likened it to the neck of the gazelle, the antelope, the fawn, and the white antelope, and described it, for its length, as the neck of a gazelle that can reach the treetops when it stretches its neck. It must be white, bright and luminous, polished like a mirror (and the mirror, in Imru' al-Qays's tongue, is the sajanjal!). Nor should it remain bare of ornament; and no harm if a pendant hangs at its middle.

We come to the arms: they are long, white, quick of movement.

And to the fingers: these too are long, and tender, soft and delicate — likened therefore (and again by Imru' al-Qays) to soft caterpillars and to miswak twigs.

And to the nails: the woman took pains to adorn them, staining them with henna till they reddened and grew lustrous like kindled flames.

Then we return to the chest: it is packed with flesh — al-Mirar describes it as full of flesh, not gaunt. It is dazzling white, gleaming like the sun.

As for the breasts, they are like two caskets, white as ivory, high-set and unbowed, with no sharpness at their tips. They are small, of scarcely any bulk, in the words of al-Sa'di — though others were smitten with them large.

The figure: it should be slender and lithe in its upper half, and big and plump in its lower half. Omar describes her, saying:

(She is evenly poised: half of her is the bough of a ben-tree,
and half a sand-dune matted by drenching rains)

The slenderness shows also in the front, while the plumpness shows behind: (slender as she comes toward you, ample-hipped as she turns away...). They described the woman's lithe figure in many ways, likening it to the bough, to sprays of the ben-tree, and to the brown lance (Antara's imagination being ever warlike); and for her figure they likened the woman to a gazelle, swaying with grace.

The belly belongs to the slender part of the woman: it is white and soft, lean, not slack.

The waist too belongs to that same part: it is slim, smooth, and fine, likened to the she-camel's nose-rein... (and rings might be worn on such waists)!

The Arab woman made her waist a boast to glory in, as Omar tells us — and he is widely experienced in such matters. Al-A'sha relates that when she walked, her waist all but snapped and doubled over, and that her garments hung loose about it however much they were taken in, so that she had to stuff the empty space — whereby al-Ra'i fancies her with child!

Plumpness: upon the slimness follows a plumpness that was dear to the ancient Arabs. They admired the plump woman generally, and praised the beauty of the fleshy one — the large-limbed, the massive, the heavy-hipped, the ponderous — who moves like a dune of sand and looks like a thick papyrus-stalk; she mounts the camel-litter and it proves too small for her bulk, as Bishr ibn Abi Khazim says; she puts on her gown and at once it grows tight on her, so she wears wide garments. For her fleshiness and her abundance of fat and flesh she was pictured as though she were without bones.

The haunches: the Arabs insisted greatly that the absolute beauty of the haunch

lies in its massiveness; the more massive it grows, the more beautiful. The critic al-Amidi says: (It is the custom of the Arabs hardly ever to mention slenderness, the folded flank, and the fineness of the waist, unless they also mention those members in which fullness, ripeness, and thickness are prized.) So they described the woman as harkula — huge of haunch — and likened the haunch to a full dune of sand, heavy to the point that the woman's body tires under it, according to Amr ibn Kulthum, so that she nearly falls; nay, the carrying of it may throw her down. Imru' al-Qays chose to add something new to the descriptions of the haunch: not content to liken it to the sand-dune, he added that it is so vast and broad that (two young lads upon it...)!

As for the thighs, to be perfect in beauty they must be white, and soft as castor-stalks, and thick to the point that the one knocks against the other.

The Arab poets did not insist on the beauty of the legs, since to feel their beauty would have required a shortening of the long garment the woman wore. They assumed in them whiteness and straightness, like the papyrus-stalk; that they be rounded and plump; and that they be full and massive — khadallaj, that is, fat — to the point that seventy mithqals might go into her anklet, and if it were forced on by hammering it would break, from the bigness and fullness of the legs.

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... We may end here this part of the survey of the body and the description of its beauty as the old poetry expressed it. I find it fitting to touch on a few further points connected with woman's beauty:

The gait: the fair one's walk was described as short-stepped, owing to her plumpness; as though she trod on thorns, so heavy was walking upon her and so narrow her steps; she walks slowly, like one enfeebled, with a lumbering gait like the gait of cattle; she is out of breath before she reaches her goal; whenever she rises she needs something to lean upon; and were it not that she braces herself when she stands up for her neighbors, she would drop, felled by indolence. She sways in her gait and undulates, quivers and struts, and every portion of her legs and thighs moves each on its own.

Speech: strange it is that the Arab poets described the woman, when she talks, as speaking in a whisper! More than that, they portrayed her as sparing of words — as if they never truly knew her, or had never heard Ovid's symbolic tale of the woman whose tongue was cut out: they came back to it hours later and found it still quivering and moving, for never in its life had it known a moment's stillness!.. And they described her talk as honey, for its sweetness.

Adornment: the fair one was described as doing nothing and undertaking no work save in times of distress; hence the gravity of circumstances could be gauged by the amount of work the women were doing. She sleeps from nightfall and remains in her slumber till mid-morning, and hates to be waked though you offer her all you may, as in the well-known story of Aisha bint Talha. This excess of ease leads to the plumpness which the ancients took as the emblem of her beauty. Her indolence may come of her wealth and luxury. She stains her fingertips, as we have seen; she perfumes herself till the scent of ambergris and musk breaks from her and sweet odors are wafted from her — Omar finds his way to Nu'm's house by her fragrance, congratulates her people on her delicious scent, and takes her, as she passes, for a seller of perfumes. She is a garden full of cloves; there is nothing in her body but the fragrance of musk — were that fragrance wrung from her sleeves, she herself would well-nigh be wrung out with it. The woman wore ornaments in abundance, placing them on her ear, her neck, her wrist, and her leg. She was fastidious in her dress, changed her gowns often, and wore silk. In early Islam the woman took to wearing the sheer Alexandrian shifts and the safflower-dyed Quhi robes that all but revealed her body, uncovering more of her than they covered — which moved Mu'adh ibn Jabal to say: (You have been tried with the temptation of adversity, and I fear for you the temptation of prosperity — that is, the women, when they deck themselves with gold and wear the fine linen of Syria and the striped stuff of Yemen.) And when Aisha bint Talha was reproached for going unveiled and displaying herself, she said: (God, blessed and exalted, has stamped me with the stamp of beauty, and I wished that people should see it and know His grace toward them; never would I veil it!)

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... And someone may ask: whom, then, would you nominate as the model of ancient Arab beauty? I stand perplexed, searching for a counterpart to Aphrodite and Helen among the Greeks, Cleopatra and Nefertiti among the Egyptians, Semiramis among the Babylonians, and the Shulamite among the Hebrews. The truth is that the old poets left us not so much real names as portraits of real persons, whom in most cases they painted with the selfsame portraits. It is difficult, then, to name a name; yet we may venture a suggestion. If we recall that Omar ibn Abi Rabi'a was the lover of lovers and possessed a refined taste in beauty (notwithstanding that he did not disdain to drink from any spring, and notwithstanding his praise of certain plain women — so that his lady-friends took him to task for it and asked how they could hold their heads high after his praise of Ramla, for instance); and if we recall that his first beloved was al-Thurayya, whose beauty Omar praised at length, of whom one critic of her age said that she was more marvelous than Omar had described, and another that she was the very pattern of beauty and perfection — then we may propose her among the beauties of the Arab women. Likewise, if we recall that Aisha bint Talha was his second beloved, that many of the great men of the people, and the connoisseurs of beauty among them, aspired to her love, and that she saw no blemish in herself so much as that anyone should charge her with one — we may propose her too among the beauties of the Arab women. We have, alas, no particular description of the two beyond the general descriptions lavished on all the fair ones, and beyond these two accounts —

so let us judge by them how great was the beauty of the two women, and let us see whether we would count al-Thurayya and Aisha goddesses of beauty had they lived today. As for al-Thurayya, the chief mark of her beauty, according to the author of the 'Aghani,' was this: (A jar of water would be poured over al-Thurayya as she stood, and not a drop of it would touch the outer side of her thighs — from the greatness of her hindquarters!) ... As for Aisha, the author of the 'Murdifat' describes her thus: (Aisha wished to rise; two women took her by the hands, and she leaned upon the two women, and she had scarcely got to her feet when her hips gave way beneath her. One of the two women said: How you do weary us! And she was long of body and abundant of flesh) ... And I believe that by way of these descriptions we can compare our present taste and the old Arab taste in the beauty of woman!

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And finally — what woman did the Arab poets love? Did they love woman the tender mother? Did they love woman the artless daughter? Or did they love woman the playful beloved?.. And if it was this last they loved, did they love her as inspiration, as the summons of art and of elevation — did they love her as a Beatrice creating a Dante, a Lesbia creating a Catullus, a Laura creating a Petrarch; or did they love her as a passing amusement? It is our good fortune that among our poets were the likes of Majnun Layla and his worthy fellows — even if his existence be legendary; but legend, in art, is truer than history... Did they care for her for a night's sake, or care for her for what that night would inspire in them, bearing them up on the wing of the ether, higher and higher, to paradises of perfumes and enchantments and birdsong, to airs of legend and of dreams — the blue dreams which I hope may be granted you this evening and on the evenings to come.