Fine literature is nourishment for souls; they must draw provision from it to fill an emptiness that arises in their being. And to lighten the weight of this emptiness we find that all of us, whether we labor in the literary field or are kept from it by the cares of home life, take pleasure in returning from time to time to savor it; for it is our literature, and no one is to be blamed for finding pleasure in contemplating the literature of his nation, nor for taking from it food for a soul that yearns for something to fill a void within it — a void which, as the days pass, nothing will stop but breaths of that literature.
Our fine literature has many facets, all of them attractive, all delightful, all restful to the soul. But there is one facet, somewhat forgotten, upon which I stumbled in the course of my searching, and in it I found a pleasure without equal. I do not doubt that you will share this pleasure of mine as I set before you samples of what I have managed to come upon; these samples are but miniature pictures of an art among the arts of poetry in which the poets and poetesses of the Arabs stand alone above all others: the art of the ijaza in poetry.
The ijaza in poetry is one of the loveliest arts of the science of rhetorical embellishment, and it was most widespread at a time when princes and poets prized its practice and counted it a means of whetting wits and displaying talents. A poet would recite half a line of verse and ask another poet to complete that line on the spot; or, likewise, a poet would recite a line and ask another to complete it with lines suited to it in sense and in structure. In this kind of poetic exchange appear the poet's power and genius, his alertness and quickness of wit in composition, and his gathering of many meanings into few words. Here are no year-long odes, which the poet composes and spends a whole year polishing, pruning away whatever mars their beauty of feeble diction and jarring rhyme; no ivory towers into which the poets retreat, fleeing their ordinary world to be alone there and give themselves over to composing... No — no year-long odes here, and no ivory towers; the whole matter is a kindled mind and a ready wit, fed by soundness of taste and a fertile poetic gift.
Al-Mu'tamid ibn Abbad sat one day in a certain place where he saw a pool whose water glided gently, raising little wrinkles on the water's surface. The sight stirred his genius and he said: "The wind has woven chain-mail upon the water..." Then he turned to his companion Ibn Ammar and said, "Complete it." His companion pondered long — which emboldened al-Mu'tamid's slave girl, known as al-Rumaykiyya, to complete it, saying: "What an impregnable coat of mail — if only it would freeze!" Al-Mu'tamid marveled at the excellence of what this girl had produced, and she rose very high in his eyes.
What happened to al-Rumaykiyya happened also to another slave girl named al-Abbadiyya, who was a woman of letters, witty, a writer and a poetess. Al-Mu'tamid saw her one day asleep and said:
She sleeps while he whom she has made lovesick lies wakeful; she can endure without him, and he cannot endure.
And she answered him, saying:
If this lasts, and this remains his lot, he will perish of longing before she is aware.
Thus in completing his verse she joined an intelligence and a readiness of wit without parallel.
These two examples make clear what I meant by the brief ijaza. But there is an ijaza more intricate than this: the completing of lines of verse with other lines. Among the charming things related of it is that Sayyid Abu al-Abbas al-Sharif accompanied the qadi Abu al-Barakat on one of his journeys in Andalusia. When they came to a village, weariness overtook them and the midday heat grew fierce; so they dismounted and ate of the early figs, and Abu al-Barakat stretched out beneath a tree, sheltering in its shade. Then he turned to Sayyid Abu al-Abbas and said:
What has the soul to say of my state? My life is spent in settling and in journeying.
And there he stuck fast; so he said to Abu al-Abbas, "Complete it, my man." And he said upon the instant:
Such are the souls that glory keeps company: they will not rest content with any station short of their hopes. Let it press on through wilderness and desert until it attains its desire — or death in its wandering. Death is lighter than life in an age that raises the base man high and pulls down the noble and exalted.
Whoever considers this poetic completion closely will see that Abu al-Barakat, in asking Abu al-Abbas to complete the line he had improvised, bound him with several bonds — among them the meter, the rhyme, and fitness to the occasion — and no one can master their conditions and keep to them in extempore verse except one on whom the Lord has bestowed quickness of wit and fineness of feeling.
Among the charming things told of such splendid completions is the following, related of the Imam and qadi Abu Bakr ibn al-Arabi, qadi of Seville, who said: A man of letters came in to me while before me was a fire overspread with ash. I said to him, "Say something on this," and he said:
The forelocks of the fire have whitened after their blackness, and it has veiled itself from us in a garment of ash.