1 Beginnings
As a doctoral student in classical Arabic literature at the University of Texas at Austin, I made a decision that I did not realize at the time would still be affecting my research more than a decade later. That decision was to write my dissertation about two eighth-century Arab poets, Jarīr and al-Farazdaq, whose poetry forms the genesis for this book.
JarÄ«r and al-Farazdaq (both d. circa 728â¯CE)1 are among the best known of the Umayyad-era (661â750â¯CE) poets, and are in fact generally known by speakers of Arabic today. I found this out for myself near the beginning of my research, when I was living in Cairo on a fellowship from the Center for Arabic Study Abroad. At a party I attended for fellows from the center one evening, I struck up a conversation with an Egyptian about my research. As soon as I mentioned the names JarÄ«r and al-Farazdaq, he began quoting some of their most famous lines. Despite the apparent fame of this duoâleaving aside my anecdotal encounter, Egyptian school children are required to read works by the pair2âthe scholarship on them is far less copious than it is on their Abbasid-era (750â1258â¯CE) counterparts. Ali Hussein informs us that, âNo studies have been devoted to naqÄʾiḠpoetry in the Umayyad era in European languages, except for the entry by G.J.H. van Gelder in the Encyclopaedia of Islam as well as the brief, but profound, sub-chapter written by Salma Jayyusi on this issue.â3 Hussein made this point almost fifteen years ago, and since that time few new studies have appeared.4
The scholarship that does consider JarÄ«r and al-Farazdaqâs naqÄʾiḠpoetry often omits important artistic issues, focusing instead on more trivial and banal matters. Early Eurocentric Orientalist scholars often focused on the minutiae of Arabic poetry; in other words, they considered it hardly worth noting at all, at least in terms of its literary merits, thus sounding a would-be death knell to any scholar attempting to apply a philological hermeneutics, to study it as poetry qua poetry.5 Jaroslav Stetkevych, discussing the critical reception and study of Arabic poetry by these early Arabists says, âLater philologists [i.e., those after Wilhelm Ahlwardt, d. 1909] ⦠deny all Arabic poetry the quality of art.â6 He ends the paragraph with the following statement, which although made in 1980, sadly still holds enough truth to be salient today: âAs becomes embarrassingly apparent, no critical progress has been made in one century of literary Orientalism. Rather the reverse is true.â7
And so it was in a turn from banalism that I embarked on a dissertation that would eventually study the naqÄʾiḠpoetry of JarÄ«r and al-Farazdaq not only as poetry, but as a skillfully crafted performance for an audience. That spirit of investigating JarÄ«r and al-Farazdaqâs NaqÄʾiá¸8 as lyrical poetry, begun during my dissertation research, permeates the pages of this book.
2 Manuscripts
In the Asian and African Studies reading room of the British Library sits a manuscript that was produced nearly a millennium ago.9 It is just over eight inches long and approximately five and three-quarter inches wide, about the size of a novel. One glance reveals that it is not a new book, but the layman might be hard pressed to guess just how old it is. It most resembles a tattered notebook of sorts (in Arabic), with an embossed, red cover, perhaps of leather. This âmodernâ binding, which must by now be at least one hundred years old, has started to detach on one side, so that the red spine of the book flaps back and forth as you flip through it. The original folios have rough edges and occasional tears, several of which have been patched up with clear tape. These folios have been attached to backing paper to fill in any gaps and trimmed to a uniform size, then sewn together into a codex.10 The manuscript was in this state, apparently, at the time Anthony Bevan took possession of it, probably at the beginning of the 1890s.11 This nine-hundred-year-old manuscript has sat in this room at the British Library since it opened its new location at St. Pancras in 1997. Before that time it was located less than a mile away in the British Museum, where during the first decade of the twentieth century, Bevan sat poring over the beautifully hand-written script to produce his three-volume work, The NaḳÄʾiḠof JarÄ«r and al-Farazdaḳ.
Bevan was not the only scholar working on naqÄʾiḠpoetry at the turn of the last century. In 1922, Aná¹Å«n á¹¢ÄliḥÄnÄ« published an edition of the NaqÄʾiḠof JarÄ«r and al-Akhá¹al, incorrectly listing AbÅ« TammÄm as the compiler.12 In addition to this, Sezgin mentions a book of naqÄʾiḠbetween JarÄ«r and Ê¿Umar b. Lajaʾ.13 In 1998, KhalÄ«l Ê¿ImrÄn al-Manṣūr produced an edition of the NaqÄʾiḠof JarÄ«r and al-Farazdaq that is substantially the same as Bevanâs version.14 In choosing to focus on JarÄ«r and al-Farazdaq, I omit al-Akhá¹al, who is often considered the third member of the Umayyad âtriumvirateâ of poets. This is historically consistent with AbÅ« Ê¿Ubaydaâs (d. 823) compilation KitÄb al-NaqÄʾiá¸: naqÄʾiḠJarÄ«r wa-l-Farazdaq (âThe Book of Flytings: The Flytings of JarÄ«r and al-Farazdaqâ),15 which serves as the primary source of poems cited in this book. His collection focuses on the naqÄʾiḠpoems of JarÄ«r and al-Farazdaq, together with several other interlocutors, including al-Akhá¹al.
In his KitÄb al-NaqÄʾiá¸, AbÅ« Ê¿Ubayda arranged the poems into what scholars assume is roughly chronological order, due to a large number of interlinear notations concerning events the poems in question refer to, as well as a number of historical allusions in the poetry itself.16 Bevan compiled his edition of AbÅ« Ê¿Ubaydaâs work from three manuscripts dating from the twelfth, thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, and issued the work in three volumes between the years 1905 and 1912. The first two volumes consist of a printing of the poems in bold, numbered by line, with interlinear commentary (mostly from AbÅ« Ê¿Ubayda, but including later interlineations from various manuscripts) which consists of glosses (in Arabic) of rare and idiomatic usage in addition to historical notations that add context to the poems. The third volume comprises an index of poems arranged according to rhyme and meter, âparallel and illustrative passages from other works,â17 an excellent cross reference, an index of personal and tribal names, an index of place names, and a glossary of rare and idiomatic usage throughout the NaqÄʾiá¸. There is also an index of Persian words and phrases and a list of additions and corrections. Bevan provides no English translation, and the only translation I am aware of is a 1974 edition by Arthur Wormhoudt,18 which is riddled with inaccurate or non-idiomatic renderings.
I had spent the intervening years since the time I began working on my dissertation looking only at published editions of this work, and questions began to arise in my mind. I knew that published editions sometimes hid details that only physical manuscripts could reveal. Such details as page size and material, ink color, folded page corners, shifting styles of penmanship that might indicate multiple scribes, and other physical traces that can be found on manuscripts are not typically conveyed in printed editions.19 Even more critically, marginal notes that can reveal important clues about a manuscriptâs reception and history are sometimes left out, and other editorial decisions are made that affect the interpretation of the printed edition.
In July of 2014, I went to London with funding from George Washington University to see for myself the manuscript Bevan had looked at one hundred years earlier to compile his edition. As I sat in a carrel in the Asian and African Studies reading room at the British Library, one situated adjacent to the front desk where the librarian is able to keep an eye on patrons who have taken out an ancient manuscript, I was at last able to see and handle in person the document that had had such an effect on my academic studies for so many years.
The first thing that stuck out to me were the colors. The pages all seemed to be written in black ink. However, as I started flipping through the manuscript, I saw flashes of red, lines done in red ink that indicated the beginning of a new poem, and which usually said something like, âAnd then JarÄ«r answered â¦,â or, âAnd then al-Farazdaq said â¦,â and so forth, with the remaining lines of poetry returning to black ink once more.20 The pages did not look new, but some were in better condition than others. They were aged, gray more than tan, perhaps what one would expect from paper that is nearly one thousand years old. There were many instances of stains and ink blots as well as other deformities. Several pages had been ripped in two and either taped or glued back together at some point, and several small holes and even smaller pin holes appear at various places in the manuscript. There are also near the end of the document two non-ancient ârestorationsâ where it appears that part of a page went missing, and so a rectangular piece of paper, approximately one-fifth of the page in size, was attached, with the writing continued (in a later hand) so as to preserve the meaning of the text. I noticed at the top of each folio on the left-hand side penciled-in numbers, which I soon realized were folio numbers inserted by a previous scholar, likely to facilitate work on the manuscript. The more I looked, the more I was convinced that travelling over 3,500 miles to see this document had not been in vain.
âOriental 3758,â the shelfmark that identifies the manuscript, contains many marginal notes that were likely written some time after the manuscript itself, but probably not during the modern period, since the style is similar, though written in a different hand and usually in different ink to that of the main content of the manuscript. Some of these notes are included in Bevanâs print version, but others are left out, without any system that I could discern. Even more problematic, some of the passages from the manuscript seem to have been misinterpreted and printed incorrectly in the printed edition, leading not only to a misunderstanding of the meaning of the poem at hand, but also altering the poetic meter.21
My encounter with these manuscripts increased my enthusiasm for my research topic, but more important, made me realize the fragility of history. These manuscripts were preserved and passed down to future generations; others were not. Even still, sorting out variant readings, interpreting marginal notes, and creating a publishable version of the poems is only the first step. Once we know what the poets were saying, the challenge remains to interpret their larger meaning. In the case of the manuscript I went to London to study, I wanted to see if I could discover the impact these poems had at the time the poets performed them, during the first century after the Prophet Muhammadâs death.
According to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, JarÄ«r died in 110â¯AH (728/729â¯CE), âor a little later.â See A. Schaade and H. Gätje, âD̲j̲arÄ«r,â in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill),
As will be seen below, much of their poetry contains graphically explicit material which would be unsuitable for school children, who read severely expurgated editions of these poems.
Ali Ahmad Hussein, âThe Formative Age of naqÄʾiḠPoetry: AbÅ« Ê¿Ubaydaâs NaqÄʾiḠJarÄ«r wa-âl-Farazdaq,â Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 34 (2008): 499.
Ali Ahmad Hussein wrote a follow-up article three years later: âThe Rise and Decline of naqÄʾiḠPoetry,â Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 38 (2011). In addition to this, Geert Jan van Gelder has dealt with JarÄ«r and al-Farazdaq in his excellent book chapter, âSexual Violence in Verse: The Case of JiÊ¿thin, al-Farazdaqâs Sister,â in Violence in Islamic Thought: From the QurʾÄn to the Mongols, ed. Robert Gleave and István T. Kristó-Nagy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015); and Raymond Farrin has also written about the issue in Abundance from the Desert: Classical Arabic Poetry (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011). Most recently, Mohammed Bakhouch has published a monograph, La rivalité dâhonneur ou la fabrique de lâaltérité: Les joutes satiriques entre ǦarÄ«r et al-Aḫá¹al (Aix-en-Provence: Presses universitaires de Provence, 2018), which deals with the NaqÄʾiá¸. This book, however, focuses not on JarÄ«r and al-Farazdaq, but on JarÄ«r and al-Akhá¹al (d. 710), who together with the former two, âis considered one of the three most illustrious political poets of the Umayyad period.â See Tilman Seidensticker, âal-Akhá¹al,â in Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, ed. Kate Fleet et al. (Leiden: Brill),
âRecent study on the qaṣīda can be said to respond to the triple accusation of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry by early orientalists: they perceived it to be molecular in structure, stereotyped in its imagery, and lacking introspection and individual emotion.â Beatrice Gruendler, Medieval Arabic Praise Poetry: Ibn al-RÅ«mÄ« and the Patronâs Redemption (London: Routledge, 2010), 14.
Jaroslav Stetkevych, âArabic Poetry and Assorted Poetics,â in Islamic Studies: A Tradition and Its Problems, ed. Malcolm Kerr (Malibu: Undena Publications, 1980), 115.
Stetkevych, âArabic Poetry,â 115.
Throughout this monograph I distinguish between the term naqÄʾiḠwith a lower-case n and NaqÄʾiá¸, upper case. The former refers to any poem or set of poems in this poetic genre, while the latter means specifically the NaqÄʾiḠof JarÄ«r and al-Farazdaq.
âAccording to Rieu, this MS is probably of the 12th century of the Christian era.â Anthony Ashley Bevan, ed., The NaḳÄʾiḠof JarÄ«r and al-Farazdaḳ, 3 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1905â1912), 1:xii.
I assume that the original manuscript leaves were glued to newer paper at some point in time, although the bond between manuscript leaf and paper is so seamless that it is difficult to tell exactly how they were attached.
Bevan says, âSome time after his [i.e., Professor William Wrightâs, who had worked on the manuscript previous to Bevan] death, which took place in 1889, these copies were entrusted to me.â Bevan, The NaḳÄʾiá¸, 1:v.
See Aná¹Å«n á¹¢ÄliḥÄnÄ«, NaqÄʾiḠJarÄ«r wa-l-Akhá¹al (Beirut: DÄr al-Kutub al-Ê¿Ilmiyya, 1922).
Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des Arabischen Schrifttums, vol. 2, Poesie bis ca. 430â¯H. (Leiden: Brill, 1975), 364â365.
Al-Manṣūrâs edition, however, lacks the volume of indices and appendices that Bevan includes. See KhalÄ«l Ê¿ImrÄn al-Manṣūr, ed. KitÄb al-NaqÄʾiá¸: naqÄʾiḠJarÄ«r wa-l-Farazdaq, 2 vols. (Beirut: DÄr al-Kutub al-Ê¿Ilmiyya, 1998).
This corpus consists of over one hundred poems, mostly naqÄʾiḠbetween JarÄ«r and al-Farazdaq.
See Bevan, The NaḳÄʾiá¸, 1:xviâxix.
Bevan, The NaḳÄʾiá¸, 3:viii.
Jarīr and al-Farazdaq, The Naqaith of Jarīr and al Farazdaq, Translated from the Text of Anthony Ashley Bevan, trans. Arthur Wormhoudt (Oskaloosa, IA: William Penn College, 1974).
Samer Ali discusses this problem: âAs a physical artifact, each manuscript provides clues that often tell a story, and I have endeavored to foreground those stories by gauging the ways the book has been bound, supplemented, and rebound, interpreting marginal notes, noting shifts in script style or ink color, and observing the many strategies that manuscript owners employed to personalize and customize tradition.â Samer M. Ali, Arabic Literary Salons in the Islamic Middle Ages: Poetry, Public Performance, and the Presentation of the Past (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 8.
There is one instance of a straight line of red ink that looks like it is crossing out half a line of poetry. It may not have been intentional, but may instead be a simple scribal error or something of the like.
For an example of this, see Chapter 3, footnote 39.