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INTRODUCTION

Belligerent, defiant, brutal, uncompromising, unsettling—the voice of ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād, legendary warrior and poet of clan ʿAbs, rings loud and clear today, some fifteen hundred years after he lived, loved, and fought.

ʿAntarah’s life and exploits are legendary. Many are the tales of his valor, of how he single-handedly held the line against marauders and saved the day. But in fact we know next to nothing about him, and what we do know seems at best amplified and larger than life, if not fantastical. As with Arthur of Camelot, we encounter ʿAntarah the legend, not ʿAntarah the man.

From the moment in the third/ninth century that ʿAntarah appears, charging full tilt against the record of history, he is cloaked in uncertainty, having already become the stuff of legend.¹ There are, however, points where all versions of the legend converge: that ʿAntarah was black and born a slave to a black mother, herself a slave; that he belonged to the tribe of ʿAbs; that he lived in the second half of the sixth century; that he was the most ferocious and accomplished warrior of his age; that he won his freedom in battle; and that he excelled as a poet.

ʿAntarah is an elemental force of nature. The name “ʿAntarah” (also “ʿAntar”) is variously explained.² One suggestion is that it is onomatopoeic and means “the blowfly, bluebottle” (Calliphora vomitoria) because the word replicates the sound the blowfly makes. Another that it means “valorous, valiant.” There is also a verbal form (ʿantara) that means to “thrust,” i.e., with a spear or a lance. The name “ʿAntarah” is thus polyvalent. It conveys an adeptness with the lance and valor in battle as well as skin color: the blowfly, with its loud buzz, red eyes, transparent wings, and black body, is often found around carrion and dead meat.

ʿAntarah was one of the three “Arab ravens” of the pre-Islamic era (a time known in Arabic as the Jāhiliyyah), that is, black poet-warriors born to black women. The mother of this raven (or was he a blowfly?) ʿAntarah was an Ethiopian woman called Zabībah, whose name means “black raisin.”³ According to one source, he was given the nickname “Cleftlip,” an epithet that denotes a deformity of the lip.⁴ And one version of the story of his death has him killed not by human hand, but by a rainstorm.⁵ After all, how could a human hand kill someone who identified so closely with death that he could claim, “Death I know—it looks like me, grim as battle”?⁶

Even ʿAntarah’s lineage, a topic of such importance to both pre-Islamic Arabs and the scholars who recorded and studied pre-Islamic lore, is enveloped in uncertainty. Was he ʿAntarah son of Shaddād, or son of ʿAmr son of Shaddād, or son of Muʿāwiyah son of Shaddād? If his father’s name was ʿAmr or Muʿāwiyah, why had this name been eclipsed in ʿAntarah’s lineage by that of Shaddād? And was Shaddād his grandfather or paternal uncle?⁷ Whatever solution they offer to this conundrum, the sources agree that Shaddād was a famous knight and that he was known as “the Rider of Jirwah.” In other words, Shaddād is a paragon of the northern Arab elite cavalryman. While we may not know for sure who ʿAntarah’s father was, all our sources agree that it was his father who gave ʿAntarah his freedom after ʿAntarah had distinguished himself in battle.

Some of ʿAntarah’s poems mention his love for a woman named ʿAblah.⁸ Legend has it that she was his cousin, and that he asked for her hand in marriage but was refused. As “ʿAntar and ʿAblah,” this story of unrequited and doomed love enchanted and captivated subsequent centuries and continues to weave its spell today.

ʿAntarah’s poetry breathes a spirit of indomitability, pride, and loyalty to kith and kin. It can seem inward-looking, solipsistic even, consumed by its own world and isolated from events beyond the pasture lands of ʿAbs, caught up in the hurly-burly of the squabbles, battles, and power politics of his clan. There are, however, indications that ʿAntarah and ʿAbs were not completely cut off from the wider world: he charges into battle with bamboo lances from India, wields curved Indian blades, brandishes broadswords from Yemen and sabers from Mashārif in Syria, shoots arrows as thin as strips of leather from Ḥimyar, and rides Mahrah camels from South Arabia.

ʿAntarah may have lived in an isolated region, the highlands of Arabia, but his poetry is the poetry of a society in turmoil. The myriad clan conflicts that his verses so fiercely evoke were not isolated phenomena, but were a part of wider unrest among the tribes of the peninsula. And the unrest among the tribes of Arabia was not isolated from the turbulence in the world that surrounded Arabia, as the superpowers of Rome and Iran continued to wage war on one another, and the kingdoms of Axum and Ḥimyar spiraled into decline.

THE ARABIAN PENINSULA

The Arabian peninsula (or Arabia) extends today from the deserts of modern Syria and Jordan in the north to Yemen in the south, from the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia in the west to the Gulf states and Oman in the east. It is the largest peninsula in the world, occupying a landmass about as big as the Indian subcontinent. Its terrain slopes from west to east, and is characterized by two great ergs, or sand-dune deserts: the Empty Quarter (al-Rubʿ al-Khālī) in the south, stretching from Yemen to the Gulf states, and the ʿĀlij (or al-Nafūd) in the north. These ergs are connected by a long strip of sand known as the Dahnāʾ (see Maps, pp. lxvii–lxviii). The heights of Yemen and Dhofar in Oman are blessed in summer with monsoon rains, but the rest of the peninsula receives little rain. Settlement patterns are therefore largely dictated by access to groundwater in the form of oases and wells, and by the need to travel to such sources of water or in search of areas of rainfall. In the pre-Islamic era, survival often depended on a group’s skill in gaining access to water.

Thus, the Arabian peninsula of the sixth century was geographically hemmed in, caught between the landmass of Iran to the east, Rome (Byzantium) to the northwest, and Africa to the west. It survived on the periphery of the two world superpowers of Late Antiquity: Sasanian Iran and Rome. And as a peninsula, an “almost-island,” it was both connected to and somewhat separated from this world on its three sides (by sea and desert). Culture and society were also peninsular, they mimicked geography—prior to the advent of Islam, Arabia both formed part of, and was independent of, the world of Late Antiquity, characterized by a curious combination of belonging to, and differing from, this world.

ROME AND IRAN

The Roman Empire and Sasanian Iran were not friends: at best their relations comprised an uneasy stasis characterized by mutual mistrust. Both shared a conception of universal empire and their sovereigns presumed a claim to universal authority, which was often expressed in the form of religion.

For the Romans, who had become Christian under the emperor Constantine (r. AD 305–37), this conception of empire was the universal establishment of Christian rule, including forced conversion and the eradication of paganism—in other words, the establishment of a God-guided kingdom. For the Zoroastrian Sasanians, universal authority was expressed through a social structure that amounted to a caste system of four social estates: priests (a class that included judges), landed gentry (the warrior class), cultivators, and artisans (a class that included merchants). As long as the four estates were kept discrete, the Sasanians did not ordinarily persecute members of other religious communities, because the communities of Jews, Buddhists, Manicheans, and Christians simply had no place in the stratified hierarchy. The Romans and Iranians, then, cherished two imperial visions that were never really going to get along with one another.

The roots of the animosity between Rome and Iran stretched back to Rome’s encounter with the Parthians (248 BC–AD 224), the predecessors of the Sasanians, as the Romans expanded into the eastern Mediterranean. The Sasanians (ca. AD 224–ca. AD 650), originally a landholder family from the highlands of southwest Iran, inherited this animosity and pursued it with zest. At their greatest extent, Sasanian rule extended from the Oxus River in the northeast to the Euphrates in the Fertile Crescent, giving them effective control of the silk trade with the Mediterranean.

The sixth century witnessed an increase in hostilities. In AD 531, Khusro I Anusheruwan (known as Kisrā Anushīrwān in Arabic sources) (r. AD 531–79) wrested control of Sasanian Iran from his father. Between AD 540 and 562, during the reign of Emperor Justinian (r. AD 527–65), Khusro’s Sasanians invaded Syria, formally a province of the Roman Empire. A peace treaty was negotiated in AD 562. In the last years of his rule, between AD 570 and 578, Khusro I conquered the kingdom of Ḥimyar in the Yemen and expelled its Axumite overlords. But by the end of the century, the Sasanian emperor Khusro II Aparviz (r. AD 591–628) had to depend upon troops provided by the Roman emperor Maurice in order to recapture his throne, yet when Maurice was assassinated in AD 602, Khusro II was quick to invade Roman Syria.

The Romans were not idle during the sixth century. Their involvement in Arabia was largely through the manipulation of proxies, including the Axumite kingdom, the Hujrids of Kindah, or the Jafnids of Syria. In part, this was a natural consequence of established Roman policy in the region implemented through the province of Roman Arabia, but it was more immediately a consequence of geography: the Syrian desert, devoid of food and water, was not the place for an army to cross, whether Roman or Sasanian. With the terrain so inimical to conventional warfare, both sides resorted to the cultivation of alliances and diplomacy.

The Romans and the Iranians developed links with two powerful Arabic-speaking clans at either end of the northernmost points of Arabia: the Jafnids of Ghassan in the west and the Nasrids of Lakhm in al-Ḥīrah near the Euphrates in the east. The Romans made the Jafnids into imperial foederati, confederates, bestowing a kingship upon them and recognizing them as phylarchs (tribal leaders). The Jafnids were charged with restraining the Arabic-speaking tribes and preventing them from interfering with trade routes and the collection of tax tribute. They supplied the Roman army with troops and waged war against the Nasrids of Lakhm, who acted on behalf of the Sasanians. Nasrid influence stretched along the eastern Arabian littoral and even into Oman. Their influence has been detected in Yathrib (the settlement that under Islam was to become Medina), to the extent that in the sixth century the Nasrids may have appointed a governor there. Roman and Iranian interest in the Arabian peninsula did not stop with the recruitment of elite warrior-rulers from the north to do their dirty work for them. Their activities extended as far as Yemen and Ethiopia, or the kingdoms of Ḥimyar and Axum.

AXUM AND ḤIMYAR

We do not know much about the kingdom of Axum.⁹ Its ruler was known as the negus and his territory included modern Eritrea and the northern part of Ethiopia. It may even have stretched farther west into Sudan. Christianity took hold in Axum in the fourth century. From the fourth to sixth centuries, Axum grew astonishingly rich in African products such as gold, ivory, rhinoceros horn, and tortoiseshell.

The fate of Axum is closely tied up with the history of South Arabia. In about 110 BC the South Arabian tribe of Ḥimyar formed itself into a kingdom and brought South Arabia under its control. By the third century AD, under the rule of Shammar Yuharʿish, Ḥimyar had conquered the southern Arabian region of Ḥaḍramawt and expelled the Axumites from the Yemeni coast. In the following centuries, the Ḥimyarites sought to extend their influence over the tribes of the interior, venturing deep into the Yamāmah and maybe even as far as Ḥajr (modern-day Riyadh) (see Maps). During the fourth century they converted to Judaism, and in the fifth century they exerted their dominion over Maʿadd, the main tribal confederation of the northern Arabs of Najd, by installing the Hujrids as their proxies under a chieftain of the powerful tribe of Kindah.

With Roman help, Kaleb Ella Asbeha, negus of Axum (r. ca. AD 520–40), invaded Ḥimyar, placing a Christian king on the throne. This led to a reprisal from the Jewish royal family, and the new Himyarite ruler, Yūsuf, slaughtered the Axumite garrison and in AD 523 executed several hundred Christians, who became known as the Martyrs of Najrān. This event led to an Axumite invasion in AD 525, the death of Yūsuf, the eventual replacement of the Himyarite kingdom with an Axumite protectorate, and enforced conversion to Christianity.

One of the Axumites who had remained in Ḥimyar after the return of the negus Kaleb to Ethiopia was a man named Abraha (in Arabic sources: Abraḥah), who assumed control of the protectorate. In AD 547, he received ambassadors from Rome, Iran, and Ethiopia, and from the Nasrids and Jafnids. In ca. AD 550, he constructed the Christian cathedral of Sanaa, and five years later mounted a major expedition into central Arabia, but that expedition resulted in his defeat and retreat.

Perhaps the most notable construction project undertaken by the kingdom of Ḥimyar was the Maʾrib Dam, which was 650 meters wide and 15 meters high. Maʾrib (presumably the church and not the dam) was where, in AD 552, Abraha chose to receive the delegations of ambassadors, but sometime between AD 575 and 580, during the childhood of Prophet Muḥammad, the dam is reported to have burst and not been repaired. The collapse of the dam signaled the end of the kingdom of Ḥimyar and may have led to a massive influx of mercenaries and professional soldiery maintained by the kingdom into central and northern Arabia.¹⁰

During the second half of the sixth century, the frontiers between Rome and Iran were destabilized, and the interior of Arabia was thrown into turmoil. On the eve of the advent of Islam—and toward the end of ʿAntarah’s life—the Jafnids were overthrown by Rome in AD 573, and the Nasrids by the Sasanians in AD 602. Ḥimyar had been unable to repair the dam that it so crucially depended on. And in AD 604, the Sasanian army was defeated by an army of Arabian tribesmen at the Battle of Dhū Qār.

ARABS IN ARABIA

The term “Arab” is apparently an old one. Its earliest appearance is thought to occur in Assyrian texts from the seventh century BC, though this has been disputed. But there is no indication in this or any of its subsequent occurrences that it is an ethnonym, i.e., the name of an ethnic group. In fact, it is likely that for many centuries inhabitants of Arabia were not widely or even automatically known as Arabs. Other names, such as the Greek names homēritai (i.e., Ḥimyarites) and sarakēnoi (Saracens), predominate—presumably they are designations of specific groups of inhabitants of regions of Arabia.

Two basic solutions to the identity of the Arabs has been proposed, one maximalist, the other minimalist. The maximalist solution is to take “Arab” as an atemporal designation of transhumant tribespeople, that is, nomadic pastoralists who herded camels, or other domestic animals such as goats and sheep, in designated winter and summer camping grounds. Yet the probable percentage of the population of the Arabian peninsula that may at any one time have been nomadic was small, even allowing for returns to nomadism after a period of sedentarization. As Donner notes, “Most Arabians … are, and have been, settled people.”¹¹ If the “Arabs” were transhumant tribespeople, they would not have been particularly numerous. And if the “Arabs” were nomads, we should not presume that they would necessarily be Bedouins, i.e., people of the desert. Bedouins could, counterintuitively, be settled for much of the year, and could also share some of the features of the nomad’s lifestyle, such as camel pastoralism.¹²

The word “Bedouin” represents the hinge point at which the maximalist solution becomes minimalist: its historical frame of reference is specifically the fifth and sixth centuries AD; its geographical frame is North Arabia (specifically Najd), the highlands of modern Saudi Arabia, and the imperial satellites of the Jafnids in the west and the Nasrids of al-Ḥīrah.¹³ Thus, Macdonald argues (in the context of North Arabia) for greater discrimination in the use of the label “Bedouin,”¹⁴ and Zwettler would establish “its most restrictive” designation as “the camel-raising and -riding Arab nomads of the late antique Near East.”¹⁵ Whittow has advocated replacing the term “Arab” with the term “Bedu,” in accordance with contemporary anthropological and ethnographic practice.¹⁶ Dostal, arguing for an Iranian (Parthian) influence for the saddlebow and its associated weaponry and cultural complexes (including tent types, customs, and clothing), distinguishes between nomads, “half-bedouins (breeders of small-cattle),” and “full bedouins (camel-breeders).”¹⁷ Retsö, in a bold argument that has not won many supporters, argues that the Arabs were a “razzia-loving warrior caste” and imagines them forming:

a socio-religious association of warriors, subject to a divinity or ruler as his slaves … separate from ordinary settled farmers and city-dwellers, living in their own lots often outside the border between the desert and the sown.¹⁸

The notion of a “socio-religious association of warriors” (one that celebrates the desert wastes, wherever their residence may be) is appealing. The lifestyle would have been typified by unsettledness, by the rapid shifts from sedentary to nomad and back again.¹⁹

Whether or not we accept Retsö’s suggestion of a “socio-religious association of warriors,” during these centuries the northern Arabian peninsula witnessed the emergence of aristocratic “rider-warriors” (the term is Walter Dostal’s), adept at warfare with both horse and camel, implicated, to varying extents, in the Roman and Iranian imperial reliance (in North and Central Arabia) of confederations of rider-warriors as mercenaries or proxies, and characterized by developed military technology such as body armor and the lance.²⁰ We can perhaps go further and identify these “rider-warriors” as the elites of Maʿadd. In the three centuries before Islam, Maʿadd were:

predominantly camel-herding … bedouins and bedouin tribal groups—irrespective of lineage or place of origin—who ranged, encamped and resided throughout most of the central and northern peninsula … and who had come to adopt the shadād-saddle and … by the third century, to utilize it so effectively as a means of developing and exploiting within a desert environment the superior military advantages offered by horses and horse cavalry.²¹

These elites were organized in their various kin groups, and Zwettler notes that their principles of organization were not exclusively based on blood relationship or kinship; rather, they operated as

colleagues, associates or cohorts in an amorphous, far-ranging, almost idealized aggregation of like-minded compeers and communities who shared many of the same social, cultural and ecological experiences, aspirations, opinions, and values.

According to Zwettler, this is how, by the middle or the end of the seventh century, “Maʿadd entered the genealogical realm, where it became an eponym for the ‘progressive’ Northern Arabs.”²² As part of this process, tribalism and genealogy emerged as central defining features of the descendants of Maʿadd. It is, then, the inability of the imperial powers of Rome and Iran to control their buffer zones through the Jafnids and Nasrids, and the various mercenaries they relied on, that created in the second half of the sixth century the state of instability and turmoil that characterized northern Arabia.²³

The elites of Maʿadd shared another important feature: language. The language of these groups was the ʿarabiyyah, the Arabic we encounter today in the poetry of pre-Islamic Arabia. We should not overstate the evidence, but we should bear in mind the observation that the predominance of this ʿarabiyyah is an accurate, if not fully representative, account of the linguistic situation during the centuries under discussion. Jenssen reminds us that “very little … can be known about Arabic before the dawn of Islam.” He notes that of all the varieties of Arabic similar to the Arabic of pre-Islamic poetry, it was only this latter variety that was in fact preserved “in the form of a corpus of text and a systematic description.”²⁴ The survival of the ʿarabiyyah, preserved in a specific corpus of poetry, the qasida poem, suggests that at some stage this “classical” Arabic emerged as a dominant form of expression of a dominant group. The users of this ʿarabiyyah were the masters of qasida poetry: they controlled both language and society, as renowned warriors and chieftains or as figures closely connected to these chieftains.

ʿABS OF GHAṬAFĀN

The inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula were caught up in this turbulence that engulfed the world on their borders during the sixth century. Often they were the agents of turmoil. ʿAntarah belonged to a kin group known as ʿAbs, transhumant pastoralists who lived in Najd and belonged to the larger kin group of Ghaṭafān, itself claiming descent from the super-lineage group Qays ʿAylān. Ghaṭafān contained other conglomerated kin groups, including Sulaym and Dhubyān (see Map 1), and Dhubyān in turn comprised three distinct kin groups: Fazārah, Murrah, and Thaʿlabah.

By the middle of the sixth century, Ghaṭafān was a conglomeration in a state of upheaval. ʿAbs, under the leadership of Zuhayr ibn Jadhīmah, had gained hegemony of Ghaṭafān and over the Hawāzin (see Map 1), who also claimed descent from Qays ʿAylān. Ghaṭafān had to contend with some powerful neighbors, chief among whom was ʿĀmir ibn Ṣaʿṣaʿah. The killing of Zuhayr, chieftain of ʿAbs, by a member of ʿĀmir signaled the decline in ʿAbs’s hegemony. Before long, as a result of a power struggle between ʿAbs and Fazārah of Dhubyān, hostilities broke out and quickly escalated into the forty-year War of Dāḥis and al-Ghabrāʾ. This power struggle is expressed in the sources as a quarrel between two chieftain protagonists: Qays ibn Zuhayr (of ʿAbs) and Ḥudhayfah ibn Badr (of Fazārah). A pretext for conflict was afforded by a horse race between the protagonists. Each chief agreed to race two horses, a stallion and a mare. Qays chose to run Dāḥis and his mare al-Ghabrāʾ, but Ḥudhayfah’s men cheated and slowed Qays’s racehorses down, so Qays lost the wager.

In the war that ensued, ʿAbs initially enjoyed notable successes, but eventually the combined forces of Dhubyān proved too strong and ʿAbs were expelled from their ancestral pasturelands. It was in this crucible of exile and wandering that ʿAntarah’s warrior spirit was tested and found true. We encounter him participating in the battles of ʿUrāʿir and al-Farūq, and repeatedly saving his people from calamity. ʿAbs and Dhubyān were eventually reconciled by the end of the sixth century. In the siege of Medina known as the War of the Trench (5/627), Ghaṭafān, under the leadership of ʿUyaynah ibn Ḥisn of Fazārah, fought on the side of the Meccans against the Muslims.²⁵

Whatever the historicity of the narrative of the War of Dāḥis and al-Ghabrāʾ, the turbulent relationship between kin groups within the same lineage group over a prolonged period is typical of the kind of turmoil that dominated much of Arabia during the sixth century.

THE POETS AND THEIR COSMOS

The elite warriors of sixth-century Maʿadd chose to express their views of the world, their war culture, and their ethos in qasida poetry, which is poetry composed in a prestige language (classical Arabic) in works of varying length and complexity, from simple poems to complex odes.

Like the society the warrior-poets lived in, qasida poetry was in a state of turmoil. This oral poetry emerged abruptly in the second half of the sixth century, was subject to an astonishing variety of experimentations, manipulations, conceptualizations, and imaginings in the seven or eight decades before the advent of Islam, and continued to thrive well into the Umayyad era (41–132/661–750).

The poetry of ʿAntarah is one of the many examples of the emergence in the course of the sixth century of the warrior-poet as spokesperson of a war culture, a complex of ideals celebrated in qasida poetry. These ideals were informed by a universal vision of manly virtue (muruwwah),²⁶ at the very heart of which lay a passionate and uncompromising adherence to honor (ʿirḍ), set within “a universal perspective where the paradigm for how one must live and die is founded on the principle of chance.”²⁷

These warriors were united, yet kept distinct by their scrupulous adherence to an ever-changing and flexible social dynamic of alliance and protection, as well as by their expression of ties, kinship, and loyalties through genealogy, both acquired (ḥasab) and inherited (nasab).²⁸ They cherished their vehicles of war, the she-camel and the horse, as well as their weaponry and armaments, and perfected the raid and the hunt. War was often retributive, driven by the need for vengeance, although it was also hazarded to win spoils: women, camels, livestock, and slaves. War was how a man preserved, acquired, and displayed honor and glory. It was the ultimate realization of risk and chance. For these warriors, war was effectively a religion.²⁹

The cosmos of the pre-Islamic qasida poets is stark. Everything is governed by Time (or Fate) and its avatar, Death. At the heart of the cosmos stands man, either alone, or with his family and/or his kin group. The cosmos was unpredictable: a man knew that it could and would inevitably infect him, his honor, and his society with a most terrifying disease: disunity and disintegration. What he did not know was when this would happen. The events of this cosmos play out in the desert, the landscape where a man on camelback pits himself against Time and risks his all, in a series of actions whose outcomes are determined solely by chance.

The poet-warriors were unanimous in their celebration of and devotion to the majesty of the qasida and the ʿarabiyyah. Poetry as memorialization offered man a victory over Time: if his feats were immortalized in verse, and his descendants and kin group perpetuated his memory, man would thus vanquish Time. Therefore, memory and kin group solidarity were central to the perpetuation of an individual’s glory, an all too fragile and ephemeral possession unless reinforced by constant and repeated efforts to acquire more glory.

Poetry existed to celebrate the winners in the deadly game of war or to commemorate the valiant losers who died on the battlefield. In their commemoration of glorious ancestors, the masters of qasida poetry sought, through the perpetuation of genealogy and the memorization of poetry, to preserve this glory against the depredations of Time.³⁰ They did not do this through, say, a cult of heroes, but by positioning the last living member of a line of glorious ancestors as the guarantor of the perpetuation of glory. It was this elite warrior’s heroic duty to embody and consolidate former glory, but also to build upon it and surpass the deeds of his forbears.³¹

THE QASIDA

Pre-Islamic qasida poetry is a public art form and is in a profound way theatrical: it cannot function without an audience. In its orality, it is addressed to, and entirely dependent upon, a group of listeners; it appeals to others and voices challenges to them; it cries defiance against Time; it trumpets the triumph of man; it memorializes his afterlife. It is the poetry of performance, and its soundscapes are performed on the stage of the cosmos.³²

Out of this simple set of elements (Time, man, and the sweltering heat of the desert), a profound and imaginative poetic tradition was fashioned. Its themes were as simple as its elements: ruins and abandoned encampments, lost loves, arduous desert crossings, honor and glory, battles and raids.

Thus, many qasidas explore variations on the following narrative pattern: while on a desert journey, a poet comes across some ruins. His discovery forces him to stop and determine whether this is the site where he once enjoyed happiness with a woman who was subsequently either lost or denied to him. He explores his memories of their time together, but then resumes his journey on camelback, possibly comparing his camel to some other animal of the desert, such as an oryx, a wild ass, or an ostrich. His journey brings him to a destination: this destination can be physical, such as a patron or chieftain, or metaphysical, such as a celebration of honor, nobility, and glory, perhaps through acts of communal generosity by feeding the needy in times of famine and drought, perhaps through the provision of wine for others, perhaps through military exploits in the battlefield, or through the righting of a wrong.

Not all qasida poems fit this simplistic and generalized characterization: there are many variations on the pattern, across time, region, lineage, and kin group. But what is typical of all of this poetry is its economy—it fashions complex and profound works of art out of a simple set of components.

ʿANTARAH’S “GOLDEN ODE” AND THE UNDOING OF THE QASIDA

The poems ascribed to ʿAntarah belong to a number of distinct genres: there are personal and tribal vaunts, war chants, full-blown qasidas, threats, and vituperation. His fame and reputation as a poet, however, are entirely dependent upon his most important composition, known both as his Muʿallaqah, “Suspended Ode,” and as his “Golden Ode” (Poem 1). This is a difficult poem, one dominated by grotesquery, where meaning and established order are in flux. It is a poem that pushes the qasida as art form to the very edge of signification and derives its meaning from the obliteration of existence in death.

The occasion of its composition is roughly the last decade of the sixth century, a time before the first truce in the War of Dāḥis and al-Ghabrāʾ. The concluding verses refer to both sons of Ḍamḍam as alive: Harim ibn Ḍamḍam died after the first truce of the war, at the hands of Ward ibn Ḥābis, a kinsman of ʿAntarah. The poem begins with a desolation so extreme that it defies recognition. The poet is on a journey, on camelback. He comes across an area that he thinks was once inhabited by ʿAblah, the woman he loves. But so much time has passed, so much has happened to the poet, that he cannot at first be sure. The despair and sadness that overcome him, and his inability to move on, gradually convince him that this is in fact the place. He pleads with the ruins, trying to conjure up the time when they were full of life, in an attempt to revivify not only the ruins but poetry itself, slaughtered by earlier poets and left unburied on the battlefield.

The poet’s identification of the desolate site brings home to him the emptiness of the present: ʿAblah is beyond the poet’s reach, physically (i.e., geographically) and temporally (because the past is irrecoverable). It awakens memories of the epiphany of the beloved on the night of the departure of her tribe, memories that now engulf the poem, in a comparison between the strong perfumed scent that accompanies the vision of the beloved and a musk pouch, a heady wine, and flowers growing in a lush meadow, a remote and sacred enclosure rarely visited even by the animals of the desert. But in this terrestrial paradise, beauty is sullied—the screeching insect is intoxicated and out of control, its actions like a one-armed amputee trying to light a fire with two fire sticks. Under the surface of this apparent plenty, then, lurk pain and grotesquery. Such memories accentuate the desolation of the poem's opening and intensify the poet’s sense of his loss, for he is denied the luxuries his beloved enjoys: she sleeps in comfort, while he, true to his bellicosity, passes the night on his horse, poised to launch a dawn raid, which as poet he will soon turn to.

In a good number of pre-Islamic odes, the poet effects a transition (known in Arabic criticism as takhalluṣ, literally “setting oneself free” or “being rid of”) from the first movements of the ode (frequently referred to in Arabic poetic criticism as dhikr al-aṭlāl, evocation of ruins, and nasīb, the amatory episode) to the desert adventure (raḥīl) and description of the camel (waṣf al-nāqah). Most odes conclude their desert adventures and descriptive scenes with an incantation of the exploits of poet or tribe (mufākharah). In some odes, such as the Muʿallaqah of Zuhayr, the destination of the desert adventure is a warlord or a regent (this is typical of panegyric poems, known as madīḥ), and the poem’s conclusion marks a return to civilization from the desolation of the ruins and the desert.

In ʿAntarah’s poem, the destination is ʿAblah, the beloved, and not a patron. The shape of the qasida is thus temporarily destabilized, because the transition does not mark a progression but rather signals a return to the beginning, to the nasīb. This destabilization is conveyed syntactically through the fact that the question posed with the phrase “Can I reach her” concludes with the final verse of the movement (with the phrase “big as a bite-scarred stud”).

Shape-shifting dominates the description: the camel resembles an ostrich that in turns resembles a funeral bier, an incomprehensible foreigner, and a slave wearing a fur cloak; the ostrich’s flock resembles Yemeni camels; when the poet’s camel runs she seems to be attacked by a cat tied to her side; the journey converts her into a brick fortress, supported on tentpoles. Her legs are like fifes, and she sweats tar. After her metamorphosis from ostrich to human-made structure, her final act of shape-shifting is the abandonment of her gender altogether as she becomes a stallion, the consummation of the denial to allow her to produce milk at the onset of the passage. Once more, pain and grotesquery abound: the camel is physically maimed (her teats are snipped); the slave has had his ears docked; the foreign camel herder is incomprehensible; the cat is ferocious in its attacks on the poet’s she-camel.

With the camel now transmogrified almost beyond recognition, the poet addresses ʿAblah, his destination. It is as yet unclear whether ʿAntarah has reached her—he entertains the possibility that she may refuse to lower her veil before him. The words he addresses to her epitomize the pre-Islamic warrior ethos: the fulfillment of the warrior’s identity through excess, whether as implacable vengeance or unbounded generosity. And the poet’s demand that ʿAblah recognize his merits with praise reminds us that this ethos is ineffectual and empty without its celebration in verse. The force of this apostrophe and its significance for the shape of the qasida should not be underestimated. It means that, somewhat uncommonly in the pre-Islamic poetic corpus, the boasting intoned in the remainder of the ode (i.e., the mufākharah) is addressed directly to the poet’s beloved, and not to his tribe or opponents. So, once again, the shape of the qasida is destabilized and the shape-shifting of the desert adventure continues, in metaphor and simile: the harm the poet inflicts on his enemies is a snarling lion (bāsil, in Arabic, here rendered as “savage in wrath”); in the mouth of his enemies his actions taste as bitter as colocynth (“desert gourd”).

Now it becomes clear that the dawn raid, alluded to earlier, is about to begin. The raid is launched: three champions are felled in rapid succession. The sequence is structured as a priamel,³³ with the most significant kill coming last—at the end of the ode. Again, grotesquery abounds: the severed jugular of the first victim hisses like breath whistling through a harelip; the poet feeds savage hyenas and other predators with butchered flesh, the thud of his spear sounding a clarion call that dinner is ready; spilled blood (as red as resin) and rotting flesh (dark as indigo) frame the three vivid close-ups that zoom in on the killing and pulsate with battle lust, as the poet delights in slaughtering his highborn opponents.

ʿAblah, the poet’s target, is now easy prey: she is an exposed and vulnerable gazelle that beckons and invites him to pounce. But do these verses depict the aftermath of the raid or are they a memory of the time when the poet and his beloved were together? Why is the poet accompanied by a slave girl on the raid? The scene is perhaps more appropriate for the period when ʿAntarah pursued ʿAblah before her tribe struck camp. Once again, meaning is destabilized and uncertainty flits over the chronography, shape, and direction of the poem.

With the poet’s prey apparently captured, the poem launches into an exultant boast (mufākharah), as the poet reiterates his exploits on the battlefield. In a panoramic battle description, ʿAntarah holds the line and leads his tribe to victory in a hard-won contest—the combatants lose the power of language; the poet’s horse almost acquires it. The only words to be heard are the chants, “ʿAntar!” and, “Ho ʿAntar, Onward!” which frame the poet’s charge into the fray and his rout of the enemy.

Many pre-Islamic qasidas end on this note of unbridled exultation, but not so this Golden Ode, for the poet addresses a further bout of self-justification to ʿAblah. The extent of the poem’s instability becomes clear, for ʿAntarah has not yet been able to reach her, seize his prize, and fulfill his desire—ʿAblah remains unattainable, physically and figuratively beyond his reach. The poet is now at war with both kinfolk and foe: the clan that bars his way to ʿAblah traces its descent from Baghīḍ, an ancestor of both the ʿAbs, the poet’s own tribe, and the Dhubyān, its inveterate opponents in the War of Dāḥis and al-Ghabrāʾ. The poet launches into the final (and in a sense the only real) expression of self-glorification (mufākharah) in the qasida as he challenges his opponents to combat.

The poem concludes with a disturbing, intensified image of the desolation it began with: a corpse left unburied on the field of battle, carrion for hyenas and vultures. In this way, we are led by this shimmering mirage of a qasida to ponder the one true reality. It is the conclusion the ode has been straining to reach: Death, the obliteration of existence, is the only true reality; it is the real subject of the ode.

THE ABBASID DISCOVERY OF ʿANTARAH

The story of the discovery of ʿAntarah is the story of the recovery of the Jāhiliyyah in the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries, when this body of oral verse came to be salvaged, recorded, and studied by Abbasid language experts, scholars, enthusiasts, and intellectuals. Ibn Qutaybah (d. 276/889), one of the architects of high Arabic culture, and part of the second wave of scholars who devoted their lives and energies to this corpus of poetry and the Qurʾan, summed up pre-Islamic poetry thus:

Poetry is the source of the Arabs’ learning, the basis of their wisdom, the archive of their history, the repository of their battle lore. It is the wall built to protect the memory of their glories, the moat that safeguards their laurels. It is the truthful witness on the day of crisis, the irrefutable proof in disputes. He who has no decisive proof to support his claims of nobility, or his claims about his ancestors’ glory and praiseworthy deeds, will find that his efforts are in vain, even if his glorious deeds are famous. Their memory will be effaced over time even if they are momentous. But he who has his merits committed to rhyming verse and bound in meter, and gives them renown through a choice verse, a memorable maxim, or a subtle notion, will immortalize them for all time. He will secure them against disavowal, and protect them from the plots of enemies. He will repel the jealous eye. Even if his glories are modest, they will forever be evident for all to see and recollect.³⁴

By the middle of the third/ninth century, discussion of pre-Islamic hero warriors had become so widespread that al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/868–69), theologian, author, and prominent intellectual, could write in a discussion of lexicography:

There are warrior-knights who, with their steeds, attain the pinnacle of fame and yet still fail to enjoy the same reputation as those who are much less deserving. Consider how our uneducated colleagues think that Ibn al-Qirriyyah is a more famous orator than Saḥbān Wāʾil, and that ʿUbayd ibn al-Ḥurr is a greater paragon of knighthood than Zuhayr ibn Dhuʾayb. The same is true of their treatment of ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād and ʿUtaybah ibn al-Ḥārith ibn Shihāb, and they love to quote ʿAmr ibn Maʿdī Karib but have never even heard of Bisṭām ibn Qays.³⁵

Al-Jāḥiẓ is annoyed that a lack of specialized knowledge means that for many of his contemporaries ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād is a warrior of greater renown than ʿUtaybah ibn al-Ḥārith, the chieftain of the Tamīm kin group.³⁶

The genesis of the legend of ʿAntarah and the story of the collection of his poetry are accordingly unclear, but the cultural currents that led to it being written down gather around a series of narratives known as “The Battle Lore of the Arabs” (Ayyām al-ʿArab), i.e., the stories of the wars, conflicts, and skirmishes that were fought by the North Arabian tribes a century or so before the advent of Islam. Any form of fighting, from the slinging of stones to full-scale military engagement, qualified as worthy of record and justified the label of “battle day.”³⁷

A typical battle narrative is told in an unadorned prose style and is usually identified by the name of the place where the incident occurred. Accuracy of geographic and genealogical detail is paramount, with scant regard paid to chronological accuracy. The main protagonists, the tribal context, and the bone of contention that led to the dispute are introduced, and then the narrative is typically focused on the actions of individuals, as a composite picture of the events of the battle is drawn. Sometimes tribal champions exchange poetic taunts before engaging in combat. Often dialogues proliferate. The narrative culminates in a rehearsal of the poetry, usually boasts and vaunts, composed to celebrate the victory or commemorate the memory of the glorious dead. Poems relating to the event are quoted, often as fragments. Poetry is central. It corroborates and ensures the veracity of the narrative, while the narrative contextualizes, justifies, and explains the poetry. In this way, the powerful and enduring concept that poetry is “the (historical and genealogical) register of the Arabs” (al-shiʿr dīwān al-ʿarab) took root and became widespread.

These tales of tribal conflict began life as the collective memory of an oral society; as one of the means whereby, unsystematically but consistently, the pre-Islamic kin groups of North Arabia communicated and imagined their visions of themselves, and commemorated their histories. Under the rule of the Umayyad dynasty that followed the first half century of early Islam, tribal allegiance dominated political conflict:

The reevaluation and transformation of tribalism fostered the interest in preserving tribal lore as an object of tribal pride and as argumentative basis in the ongoing struggles for political power.³⁸

Thus, battle lore emerged as tribal apologetics, a contested and disputed lore of immense political clout and relevance.

As the Abbasid dynasty (132–656/750–1258) set up court in Baghdad, and elite society began to be shaped by new social, cultural, and political structures, genealogy and tribal battle narratives gradually lost much of the political immediacy they had enjoyed during the Umayyad era (41–132/661–750), when tribes in Syria and Arabia jockeyed for preeminence and politics were largely expressed through tribal loyalties. This was when genealogy and battle narratives emerged as subjects to be studied and codified.

By the end of the second/eighth century, a large-scale, major collection of poetry with a commentary incorporating battle narratives was composed in the garrison town of Kufa by al-Mufaḍḍal al-Ḍabbī (d. 90/784). In this monumental collection, known as al-Mufaḍḍaliyyāt, the battle narratives are used as context for and commentary on the poems. Al-Mufaḍḍal’s approach to narrative as context for and commentary on poetry set the standard to be followed in subsequent centuries. Thus, when we encounter ʿAntarah’s poetry in the two collections of the fifth/eleventh century, it is presented predominantly in this form, with narrative as preface to the poem, and the poem with commentary interspersed after every two, sometimes three, verses.

Genealogy and battle narratives were of central concern for two antiquarian enthusiasts and expert philologists: Abū ʿUbaydah Maʿmar ibn al-Muthannā of Basra (ca. 210/825) and Hishām ibn al-Kalbī of Kufa (d. 204/819 or 206/821). Ibn al-Kalbī was the undisputed master of Arabian genealogy: his masterpiece was known as The Roll Call of Genealogy (Jamharat al-nasab).³⁹ He also composed a work on the battle days of the Arabs that has not survived. The two key works on battle days composed by Abū ʿUbaydah have also been lost. The shorter of Abū ʿUbaydah’s two monographs is thought to have covered either 75 or 150 battle days, whereas his major work, Deaths of the Knights (Maqātil al-fursān), is thought to have contained narratives of either 1,200 or 1,600 battle days. Abū ʿUbaydah also composed a monumental collection of poetry, The Flytings of Jarīr and al-Farazdaq (Naqāʾiḍ Jarīr wa-l-Farazdaq), a series of high-profile public slanging matches expressed in poetry by two major Umayyad poets. In this work, Abū ʿUbaydah’s expertise on pre-Islamic battle days is evident: it is our primary source for the War of Dāḥis and al-Ghabrāʾ waged between the ʿAbs and Fazārah.⁴⁰ The principles of organization of Abū ʿUbaydah’s battle-lore books is not known, but evidently he created a corpus of battle lore that became canonical.

The works of Abū ʿUbaydah and Ibn al-Kalbī were informed by, and helped shape, a wider intellectual, cultural, and religious process that developed over the course of the third/ninth century. In their quest for a pure, original Arabic to set the pristine (divine) Arabic of the Qurʾan against, the philologists of third/ninth century Iraq sought to imagine a correspondingly pure, original Arabia inhabited by noble warrior nomads. It is hard to think of a figure that could have met their requirements more completely than ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād, legendary warrior, chivalrous Arab, tragic lover, and composer of one of the poetic masterpieces of the Jāhiliyyah, “the Suspended Odes” (al-Muʿallaqāt).⁴¹ Yet we know almost nothing of how ʿAntarah’s poetry and its associated battle lore was collected. Glimpses of this process of discovery are afforded by four types of textual evidence:

1. The comments of al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/858–59), and the entries on ʿAntarah provided by Ibn Qutaybah (d. 276/889) and Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī (d. 356/967).

2. The redactions and commentaries of the poetry of six pre-Islamic poets by two scholars from al-Andalus: Abū l-Ḥajjāj Yūsuf ibn Sulayman the Grammarian, known as al-Aʿlam al-Shantamarī (the man from Faro with the harelip) (d. 476/1083); and Abū Bakr ʿĀṣim ibn Ayyūb al-Baṭalyawsī (d. 494/1101), from Badajoz. Both philologists include ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād as one of the six pre-Islamic poets. Al-Shantamarī’s redaction includes twenty-seven poems, and he notes that the philologist al-Aṣmaʿī (d. 213/828 or 216/831), whom he identifies as the ultimate source for his own redaction, accepted without question the attribution of twenty-three of these.⁴² The redaction of al-Baṭalyawsī includes thirteen more poems than those commented upon by al-Shantamarī, i.e., forty poems in total. Al-Baṭalyawsī does not indicate the provenance of his collection, though he provides more variant readings in his commentary than does al-Shantamarī, and Abū ʿUbaydah looms largest among those scholars whose variant readings al-Baṭalyawsī does quote. Both scholars include, as prefaces to the poems and commentary, a number of poetry narratives (akhbār al-shiʿr) that seem to be descendants or retellings of apposite narratives from the battle-lore tradition.

3. The anthology of Abū Ghālib ibn Maymūn (d. 597/1201), The Ultimate Arab Poetry Collection (Muntahā l-ṭalab min ashʿār al-ʿArab), compiled in ten parts between 588/1192 and 589/1193. Ibn Maymūn offers versions of five poems by ʿAntarah, including the “Suspended Ode” (Muʿallaqah). One of these five poems (Poem 28) is only attested in The Epic of ʿAntar, and another (Poem 29) is a considerably enlarged version of a poem that we encounter in the other collections (i.e., Poem 5).⁴³

4. The origins of The Epic of ʿAntar date from the fifth/eleventh and sixth/twelfth centuries. The two extant traditions of the Epic (Cairene and Levantine) contain a great deal of poetry. The Levantine tradition contains a version of Poem 28 in the current volume, one of the five poems by ʿAntarah included by Ibn Maymūn for inclusion in his anthology, thereby attesting to the emergence and development of the ʿAntar legend in the fifth/eleventh century.

Of by far the greatest relevance for the story of the discovery of ʿAntarah in the third/ninth century are text groups one and two, and I will confine my discussion to them. It is hard to know what to make of the passage from al-Jāḥiẓ, for his interest is not in ʿAntarah as such, but rather in the shortcomings of the assessments of those who prefer ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād over ʿUtaybah ibn al-Ḥārith ibn Shihāb. It would be foolhardy to extrapolate from this passage more than a passing indication that by the middle of the third/ninth century interest was being taken in the deeds of ʿAntarah, an inference that is corroborated by the entry on the poet included a decade or so later by Ibn Qutaybah in his Book of Poetry and Poets (Kitāb al-Shiʿr wa-l-shuʿarāʾ). That entry comes in two sections: biography and appreciation. The second section (Appendix §§1.8–13) concerns ʿAntarah’s originality (§§1.8–10) and provides several examples of some choice verses, one example of a verse in which ʿAntarah is criticized for going too far (§1.12), and one citation of some verses in which he boasts of his blackness (§1.13). The first section (§§1.1–7) initially discusses the uncertainty hovering over ʿAntarah’s lineage and proceeds to structure its points according to ʿAntarah’s life, from birth to death: his manumission and recognition by his father, his mother and color, his involvement in the War of Dāḥis and al-Ghabrāʾ, his emergence as a major poet with his “Golden Ode,” and his death.

In §1.2 Ibn Qutaybah quotes a sample of the verses of Poem 43 in the present volume that ʿAntarah declaims as he charges into battle on the day he wins his freedom. This quotation by Ibn Qutaybah is significant because these verses are not included in al-Shantamarī’s redaction of (al-Sijistānī’s? version of) al-Aṣmaʿī’s recension, though they are included as the final poem in al-Baṭalyawsī’s recension. This meager piece of evidence is an indication that al-Baṭalyawsī’s recension of poems not included in al-Aṣmaʿī’s redaction may in fact include materials that predate Ibn Qutaybah. Noteworthy are similarities between comments in Ibn Qutaybah and remarks provided by al-Shantamarī and al-Baṭalyawsī, suggesting that these poetry narratives may in fact be quoted from material that also predates Ibn Qutaybah.⁴⁴ We may even be tempted to discern in Ibn Qutaybah’s entry a core of the ʿAntar legend in the stress placed on slavery and birth, and in the story of ʿAntarah’s solitary death, when his elemental life force is reclaimed by nature.

The entry on ʿAntarah in al-Iṣbahānī’s Great Book of Songs (Kitāb al-Aghānī al-kabīr) (Appendix 2), a sweeping panorama of Arabic court culture, musical history, and poetic creativity across the ages, may be longer and somewhat more involved than that of Ibn Qutaybah, but it shares the same basic structure, with the addition of recapitulations and alternative versions of key incidents, as well as notes on musical performances of ʿAntarah’s verses and sections explaining difficult, obsolete, and obscure vocabulary. Interestingly, al-Iṣbahānī’s version of the seduction of ʿAntarah by his father’s wife, so reminiscent of Zulaykhah’s attempted seduction of Joseph in the Qurʾan (Q 12 (Yūsuf)), is quoted by al-Baṭalyawsī.⁴⁵

More significant, however, is a narrative given by both al-Iṣbahānī and al-Baṭalyawsī: the incident in which ʿAntarah’s valor incurs the animosity of Qays ibn Zuhayr.⁴⁶ Al-Iṣbahānī’s source is Abū ʿAmr al-Shaybānī; al-Baṭalyawsī’s is Ibn al-Sikkīt, from whom he also derives the obscure tale of ʿAntarah’s brothers and their colt, which according to al-Iṣbahānī originates with both Ibn al-Aʿrābī and Abū ʿUbaydah (via al-Sukkarī and Ibn Ḥabīb).⁴⁷ The tale of ʿAntarah’s death is also shared by both sources.⁴⁸ Al-Baṭalyawsī gets his version from the Egyptian grammarian Ibn al-Naḥḥās (d. 338/950), al-Iṣbahānī his version from Abū ʿUbaydah and Ibn al-Kalbī.⁴⁹ This brief comparison suggests that al-Baṭalyawsī may have had access to sources that included a range of material possibly originating from the first century of the discovery of ʿAntarah.