Loading summary
Transcript14 lines
- [00:02]
Host
Literature and history.com.
- [00:13]
Narrator
Hello and welcome to Literature and History Episode 113 Antara Ibn Shaddad in this program we will consider the writings of the pre Islamic Arabic poet Antara ibn Shaddad, who likely lived during the second half of the 500s. A warrior from Najd, or the central part of the Arabian Peninsula, Antara's works are a window into the tribal culture of Bedouin Arabia during late antiquity. Antara's poems are brutal and beautiful. Raised during a long conflict called the War of Dahis and Al Jabra, Antara came of age in the saddle, wielding spears and swords against the enemies of his tribes and their allies. His most famous poem, the Mu' Alaqa, or hanging poem of Antara Ibn Shaddad, is one of the great treasures of classical Arabic literature. But who exactly Antara was has been hard for posterity to determine with any certainty. Antara IBN Shaddad, like the other poets of pre Islamic antiquity from Arabia, is largely shrouded in mystery. He likely lived once again during the second half of the five hundreds ce, but he does not appear in literary or historical sources prior to the eight hundreds ce. To medieval Islamic scholars writing during the eight hundreds and afterward, Antara was larger than life, an Arab Odysseus or Cyrano wrapped in legend, a lover, a killer, an outcast, a wanderer, a bard, a half blooded upstart who made a name for himself via violence and verse. His corpus, or to use the Arabic term diwan of poetry, was probably edited and augmented in later centuries and ages after the real Antara lived. Sometime between 1000 and 1200, a popular Arabic epic about Antara was also produced, weaving 500 or so years of legends about the poet into a vast story which itself contained a great deal of poetry. The real Antara IBN Shaddad then, exists somewhere underneath centuries of later narratives, commentaries and forgeries alleged to have been written by him. While we won't sort out exactly who Antara really was in this podcast episode, we will take a long look at his poetic output with an emphasis on earlier recensions, to learn about why he he has been such a totemic figure in Arabic literary history. Let's begin by talking about what we know about Antara. There are many different stories about Antara, but they agree on several points. The first is that Antara was black, born a slave to a black mother who was also a slave. He announces in one of his poems, I'm the half blood Antara. Elsewhere he my mother descends from Ham, her brow dark as the Black Stone of the Kaaba. Antara's roots were with the Ubz tribe in the north central region of the peninsula. Though being a slave of African descent, Antara was not an equal with others in the tribe. Perhaps as a result of this discrepant treatment, Antara learned to fight at a young age and by adulthood he was such a fearsome warrior that he earned himself freedom through warfare. As he puts it in another poem, the noble line of my tribe accounts for some of what I am. My sword takes care of the rest. Antara's sword, however, wasn't his only weapon. His poetry also records self conscious confidence in his abilities as a writer, as when he warns an adversary like a volcano, I'll spew poems that long after my death will find and hold you up to shame. Beyond the central points that Antara was a half blooded scion of the Abs tribe, a juggernaut of a warrior and a brilliant poet, a constellation of other anecdotes about Antara were set down hundreds of years after his death, many of them as entertaining as they are likely fictitious. Antara's name may be an onomatopoetic translation of the sound of a blowfly, or it might mean valorous or valiant, or it might mean thrust, as in the thrust of a spear. There are also discrepant explanations regarding his parentage. Antara was one of three crows or ravens in Jahili Arabic literature, a title applied by later literary historians to describe the sons of black women and Arab men. The medieval Arabic Book of Songs, a massive work of literary history written in Baghdad during the 10th century, contains a number of stories about Antara. This famous anthology tells us that Antara was born with a cleft lip and that his mother's name was Zabiba. The Book of Songs also notes that Antara's mother had other sons who were slaves and not the children of Antara's father, and that it was customary for 6th century Arab men to only accept their children by slave women if those children distinguished themselves to some unusual degree. Even from what you've heard so far, the myths and scraps of autobiographical poetry surrounding Antara Ibn Shaddad's life paint a vivid picture of a young person disadvantaged from the beginning, someone too smart and scrappy to keep his head down, but too stigmatized by race and birth to be given equal treatment by his tribe. A young man held down always by his parentage. On the subject of that parentage, however, there is more confusion than clarity. His name has come down to us as Antara Ibn Shaddad. But the Shaddad in question, though he himself was a warrior of renown, may have been a grandfather or paternal uncle. And speaking of Antara's extended family, one of the most prominent stories about him has to do with a woman named Abla. Abla gets mentioned a number of times in Antara's corpus of poems as the object of the poet's love. However, who exactly Abla was remains uncertain. According to later traditions, Abla was Antara's cousin, and when he asked her to marry him, a father and an uncle prevented their union. Their refusal was not due to the blood relationship between the cousins but seemingly the circumstances of Antara's birth. Antara's own poetry never gives us a narrative history of the couple. In other words, Antara doesn't tell us how they met, how he courted her, how she turned him down, and that kind of thing. Instead, we learn about the poet's lover at several interviews, intense junctures of his poetry. In his most famous ode, Antara's beloved Abla leaves him, but her scent lingers in his memory. In another poem, when he is returned to the tribe after a long period of warfare, Abla disparages his appearance. He is grimy, thin and bedecked with rust, and, in her words, worthless. In another poem still, Antara writes that some of his greatest achievements were undertaken at Abla's behest, whoever exactly she was in later Arabic literary history, the fraught relationship between the couple took on a life of its own, inspiring works of literature, including the aforementioned epic. To be clear, though, Abla is an ambiguous figure in Antara's poems, an object of romantic desire but but otherwise unknowable from the earlier sources. I first encountered the poet antara in translator A.J. arbery's book The Seven Odes, published back in 1957. As we learned last time, pre Islamic Arabic literature, sometimes also called jahili, Arabic literature has at its core seven poems called the mu' al aqat. The the mu alakat, or hanging poems, are, according to tradition, so named because they were once hung in the Kaaba at Mecca, though today literary scholars think the name may have come simply from the fact that they hang suspended in your memory, or that they are precious enough to be held aloft like gemstones. The seven mu' alaka are qasidas, or Arabic odes following certain conventions. The poems, like other works of classical Arabic literature, do not have names, and sometimes later translators give them names so that Anglophone readers, unfamiliar with the poets themselves can better remember the contents of their works. In the case of the 1957 Arbery Anthology I mentioned a moment ago, Ansara Ibn Shaddad's most famous poem is translated as the Black Knight, and that's Knight with a K. This title at first seems like an anachronism. The armored cavalrymen who ruled medieval European battlefields up until the proliferation of the longbow, after all, were generally European Christian folks wearing heavy armor and galloping around grasslands and forests, not pagan Arabs riding camels as well as horses in the arid expanses of the Arabian peninsula. However, I think that the title Black Knight for Antara is still useful. He was indeed black, both in terms of his race and in terms of being a proverbial dark horse. Due to his race, he also lived in something like a feudal society in which tribal leaders, while they didn't live in castles, still controlled the resources of fiefdoms, quarreled with their powerful peers, and had alliances to nearby monarchs. Like the knights of chivalric romance, Antara fought, at least in part, to distinguish himself for the sake of his beloved, writing in one poem that she demands great things of me, and I don't disappoint. And finally, Antara was part of a distinct warrior class, one that had mounts, gear, and equipment of a certain standard ilk, a warrior class that was governed by a general ethical framework that mandated generosity and mercy in addition to martial skill, and that was governed by ties of fealty to regional leaders. In fact, before we get into Antara Ibn Shaddad's poetry, let's take a moment to learn a bit more about the world of this Arab black knight and what we know about the warrior culture of Arabia toward the end of the 500s. While Antara's love life and his upbringing will in all likelihood remain uncertain, modern historians do know a bit more about the warrior and raiding culture of late antique Arabia. And since Antara was ultimately most famous as a warrior poet, it's worth considering the military culture of the Central Peninsula around 550 CE. As we learned a couple of episodes ago, by the mid 6th century, central Arabia was at the axis of three himyar to the south in present day Yemen, the Byzantine Roman Empire to the northwest, and the Sassanian Persian Empire to the northeast. Closer to home, the Ghassanid client kingdom ruled out of what is today Syria, and the Lakhmid client kingdom ruled out of modern day Iraq. These were buffer states controlled by Arab kings who worked for the Byzantines and Sasanians, respectively. When we think of the central Arabian Peninsula, specifically what is called the Najd, or Central Peninsula, where a belt of sand called the Dahna connects the Empty Quarter or Al Rub al Khali to the south with the Nafu Desert to the southwest. We don't envision a bustling and crowded place, especially 1500 years ago. Late antique Arabia had urban centers and ports, but the territory of Antarazub's tribe was not exactly overrun with inhabitants. Still, what survives of his poetry suggests a region connected with all three states that hemmed in Arabia. Our poet for today describes fighting with swords from Syria, Yemen and India. Other references in his poetry to the southern peninsula indicate the poet's familiarity with this region, including south Arabian camels. We know from Byzantine sources that the primary auxiliary troops employed by the Ghassanid buffer state were cavalrymen. During the 500s, Arab warriors astride horses or more often camels, could patrol, protect and attack in order to defend Byzantine interests in what's today Syria, Jordan and Iraq. The 5th and 6th centuries then, saw war becoming an increasingly lucrative business in northern Arabia. By Antara's lifetime, several generations of Arabs had served imperial interests to the north, which led to military tactics and technologies infiltrating the central peninsula. On one hand, in the late 500s, the Bedouins of the central peninsula had in common shared culture, language and fluency with the topography and ecology of the region. On the other hand, tribal groups in ancient Arabia and confederations of tribal groups had always used raids to bolster their fortunes, sometimes out of greed and at other times out of desperation. With new military technologies trickling down from the imperial north, along with new rifts born from strife between Arab client kingdoms, the normative warfare between tribes on the peninsula had increasing accelerance. Over the course of the 500s. Two 40 year wars broke out on the Arabian peninsula during the 500s. The first, the Al Basus War, stretched from the 490s until the 530s. We discussed it a couple of episodes ago. The second, called the War of Dahis and Al Khabra, lasted from the 560s to the first decade of the 600s. This second conflict was one of the defining events in Antara's life, and it was named after a pair of horses. The origin of the War of Dahis and Al Habrah, related in a 9th century anthology called the Hamasa, is as follows. And this is one of the most famous sagas in pre Islamic Arabian history. By the way, one day in the 560s, the chief of the Abz tribe again, Antara's tribe decided that he'd place a bet with the chief of a rival tribe. The rival tribe in question was the Dubian tribe. The head of the Abs tribe bet the head of the Thubian tribe 100 camels that UBS could beat Dubyan in a horse race. The length of the race was 100 bowshots, perhaps a couple of miles or a few kilometers. When it began, the leader of the Dubyan tribe immediately took the lead. Soon, though, the head of the Abs tribe passed him, surging ahead. Although the chief of the Abs tribe maintained his lead, little did he know that the Dubyan tribe planned to cheat. An ambush of Dubyan warriors managed to lead the Abs leader off course, and so the Dubyan leader crossed the finish line first. However, the head of the Abs knew that he had been cheated and he claimed victory. When the Dubyan tribe refused to pay him the promised camels, the Abs chief murdered one of the Dubyan chief's brothers. In retaliation, the Dubyan leader killed one of the Abs leader's brothers. The war that resulted once again is said to have stretched for 40 years. The conflict is called the War of Dahis and Al Jabra because Dahis was the name of the horse of the Abs tribe and Al Khabra was that of the Dubian tribe's horse. Our main source text for the story of this war, as I mentioned, is a literary anthology known as the Hamasa, a text written 300 years after the War of Dahis and Al Khabra took place. Accordingly, we have little sense of whether four decades of bloodshed actually ensued over a horse race. Such an event, like so many other larger than life anecdotes about Jahili Bedouin culture that we find in later Islamic sources, might have been significantly exaggerated to paint the pagan past with a sensationalist lacquer and render pre Islamic tribespeople as romantic figures overly caught up in matters of honor and vengeance. Real Bedouin groups in the 6th century had plenty of reasons to feud with one another, from competing for scant natural resources to being caught up in the reverberations of northern proxy wars that did not involve squabbles over horse racing. In any case, though, the tribes of the central peninsula, like Antaras, living in a place unregulated by any central authority and inhabited an unstable world, a world made more tumultuous by a new cast of cavalrymen who identified more with one another than with any geographically anchored tribe. These soldiers of fortune, hardened by imperial proxy wars in the Byzantine Sassanian borderland, or having otherwise adopted armaments and tactics from the region, formed new confederations based on shared military experiences as much as kinship. Being a sort of northern coalition of what scholar Michael Zwetler calls the progressive northern Arabs, this warrior caste has often been imagined as analogous to European nights of the later medieval period. Hence Arbery's translation of the poet Antara's most famous ode as the Black Knight. So let's keep these so called nights of Arabia in our minds for just a moment longer. In the previous episode, we discussed some of the traditional scholarly questions about pre Islamic poetry in Arabic. The main question frequently posed is how much of the corpus of Jahili poetry that we now possess was actually written during the pre Islamic period. One of the main cases against its legitimacy is that what was compiled as Jahili poetry is largely composed in the Qurayshite Arabic dialect in which the Qur' an was written. This consistency is indeed exceedingly suspicious. The Arabian Peninsula is the size of Western Europe. Arabic was certainly, to our knowledge, the chief spoken language there during the 500s. But there were multiple dialects of Arabic, which makes the relative uniformity of pre Islamic poetry seem peculiar. We explored some solutions to this puzzle last time. One is that a lot of or all of Jahili poetry was rewritten or entirely forged by later poets during the 800s and afterward. But to make the case for the legitimacy of the oldest Arabic poetry, we can also imagine that a formal transpeninsular language of verse may have existed, the language of poetry competitions and other official occasions, used in particular by itinerant ambitious bards, a dialect itself not immune to evolution and permutation, but that nonetheless, by the second half of the five hundreds, had solidified into the one in which the Qur' an would be composed. One question we can ask is who might have been the engineers of this pan Arabic poetic dialect? Modern scholarship on late antique Arabia tends to understand the peninsula as a more settled society than earlier historians imagined. The qasidas or odes that we read last time frequently begin with the images of abandoned desert camps evoking a nomadic civilization in which tribes were moving around all the time. However, the majority of Arabia's population by the 500s lived in permanent settlements, and even Bedouins remained stationed in place for long stretches of the year. The question remains, then, how a poetic language might have emerged by 601, fairly consistent between poets like Tarava and Al Harith from the southeast, Labid and Al Hansa from Mecca, Khuthum and Al Nabiha from the Byzantine Sassanian borderland and others from the south peninsula. And one of the answers to this question takes us back to the so called knights of the 6th century, those armed and armored cavalrymen steeled in conflict from serving as mercenaries to the north, footloose and free to circulate among the more settled herders, foragers, merchants and landed noblemen. Perhaps this elite wandering group, as the 500 stretched into the 600s and Rome and Persia grew increasingly addicted to using Arab auxiliary groups, was the main engine of Jahili poetry, both as audiences and producers. The warrior patrician is the ultimate figure of pre Islamic Arabic literature, a person with all of humanity's capacity to love and fight, to survive and express for posterity, and to ruminate on a fatalistic universe. Prior to salvific religion, they were products of their parentage and tribal inheritance, bearing a neseb or genealogical name, as all late antique Arabs did. But warfare and the Byzantine Sasanian hot zone to the north gave them the opportunity to rise above the circumstances of their birth, and poetry offered them the capacity to set down their own legacy for posterity. And among the warrior poets of ancient Arabia, Antara IBN Shaddad stands nearly alone. Born a slave, it was against prejudices of race and caste that the poet rose to become a revered figure in Arabic literary history and culture. 1500 years of later literature concerned itself with him, including the aforementioned medieval epic, and over the past two centuries he has been the subject of a symphony, an opera, visual artwork, and dozens of films. Yet what is most extraordinary about Antara is his poetry. We have read thousands of pages of ancient poetry in this podcast. We have never read anything like Antara. His figurative imagination is restless and jagged, generating impenetrable images and metaphors. He depicts war and love with an intensity that is almost hallucinatory, calling to mind old Die Hards like Homer and Virgil, but also the conceits of the metaphysical English poets, the haunting strangeness of French symbolism, and the indelible clarity of modernist imagism. So let's take a long look at the work of Antara IBN Shaddad. Let me make a quick note on translations before we get started. Most pre Islamic Arabic poetry remains, to my knowledge, untranslated. Many of the translations that do exist are older ones. I haven't been able to find a translation of the Mu' al aqat or the 12 or 14 golden odes done in the past 50 years. However, the Library of Arabic Literature series done by New York University Press in collaboration with the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute, is hard at work getting strong scholarly translations out there to those of us who don't speak Arabic. One of these translations, published in 2018 is called War Songs, and it's a full anthology of Antara Ibn Shaddad's surviving poems, with the translations done by scholar James Montgomery, a prolific translator of medieval era Arabic literature whose work we'll see more of in future episodes. Most of the quotes from Antara's poetry will be taken from this recent translation Accepting Antara's Most Famous Poem so let's first look at the most famous poem of one of classical Arabic literature's most famous poets, The Mu' Al Aqa of Antara Ibn Shaddad. Translated by A.J. arbery in 1957 as the Black Knight. The Mu' Al Aka of Antara Ibn Shaddad has an extremely well known first line. We actually began the entire season of this podcast with this line. This first line in the Arbery translation is have the poets left a single spot for a patch to be sown? Alternatively, James Montgomery renders the line as did poetry die in its war with the poets? The meaning of the line is generally thought to be have poets left anything unwritten? It's quite a wonderful line to begin with. On one level, if you've ever tried to write something original, you too have probably contemplated the fact that writing is quite an old thing in which there is nothing new under the sun. On another level, the artistically weary sentiment with which Antara begins his poem again, have the poets left a single spot for a patch to be sown? This sentiment demonstrates that Arabic poetry by the late five hundreds was already such an established medium and the domain of so many different writers that it seemed as though everything to do had already been done. The speaker of Antara's most famous poem then begins by remarking that poetry is threadbare and exhausted. Then he looks around a deserted Bedouin camp. As you might remember from last time, this is a convention in the Arabic qasida or ode. These classical poems very often begin with a speaker arriving at a deserted place where he used to live and then reminiscing. Antara writes, quote, there at the camp I halted my she camel, huge bodied as a castle, that I might satisfy the hankering of a lingerer. All hail to you, ruins of a time long since gone by, empty and desolate. The abandoned camp, as with so many others in classical Arabic poetry, elicits memories of bygone days and Antara's lost love. The aforementioned abla, the Poem tells us that the poet Antara met Abla during a war. In this war Antara was fighting Abla's tribe. Though later literature retrojected the story of a great romance between Antara and Abla, Antara's most famous poem is quite brief on the subject of their actual relationship. The poet Antara I fell in love with her as I slew her folk and she has occupied my heart. Make no doubt of it, I the place of one dearly beloved and highly honored. As much as these lines seem to suggest a star crossed romantic relationship, Antara immediately afterward writes that Abla's people now live elsewhere and that he will not get to see her anytime soon. What follows in the Mualaka Avantara is an incredibly dense sequence of lines and with similes nested within other similes. Abla, he reveals, has left she and her people having departed on an inky black night on a herd of camels, all black as the inner wing feathers of a sable raven. The recollection of Abla's departure leads the poet to into a reminiscence of Abla's smile and her scent. And then a cluster of similes begins. Abla's scent, the poet writes, is like the escaping fragrance of a merchant's bag of musk. Her scent is like the smell of strong wine aged in faraway foreign kingdoms. Abla's scent, he writes, is like an untrodden meadow of flowers that a good rain has guaranteed shall bear rich herbage visited by every virgin rain cloud bountiful in showers that have left every puddle gleaming like silver, deluging and decanting, so that at every eve the water is streaming over it in an unbroken flow. Close quote. On one hand, a poet comparing his beloved's scent to the smell of flowers doesn't exactly feel very original. On the other hand, though, if we continue reading this simile all the way to the end, we see the restlessness and strangeness of Antara's poetic imagination in full color. This is the 2018 Montgomery translation of the first big simile in Antara's most famous poem. Again, the beloved's scent compared to a field of flowers. And listen closely to the strange turn this simile takes. The poet remembers her scent wafting before her smile, sprung from a merchant's musk pouch or from a rain soaked field of flowers known to few beasts of the wild. Where showers have been kind and pools glint like silver coins, it downpours from the clouds evenings when water flows unchecked and the lone grasshopper look screeches its drunken song, scraping out a tune leg on leg, like a one armed man bent over a fire stick. Close quote. To be clear, then, the simile compares Abla's scent to that of a flowery meadow saturated with recent rain. And then continues, a flowery meadow saturated with recent rain, where a grasshopper scrapes out a madcap melody like a man with one arm rubbing sticks together to start a fire. The simile has within it an additional simile. We move from a fragrant, flowery, rain drenched meadow to a grasshopper within this meadow, to an amputee scratching a fire stick. It is a strange, haunting transition, a move from gorgeous natural plenty to a lunatic insect to an amputee hunkered over trying to stay warm. And by the end of the passage, we've left Abla behind. The extended simile may have had some specific analogical meaning in 6th century Arabia. Perhaps inebriated grasshoppers and one armed fire starters were parts of the metaphorical imagination of central Bedouin society. But perhaps not the comparison of a beloved's scent to a rain soaked field of flowers where a grasshopper screeches like a one armed man starting a fire. This is almost a stream of consciousness procession of images that goes from aromatic nature to shrill insects to a disabled, lonely person. It is a compressed burst of images, jagged and weird, that might show the workings of the poet's memory. Sweet nostalgia, mad addiction, and then fraught loneliness. If nothing else, this rich little passage in Antara's ode demonstrates that 6th century Arabic poetry had tremendous metaphorical sophistication, that comparing one's love to the scent of flowers was figuratively, at least, only the beginning. Moving on then, and zooming out. It is immediately clear in Antara's Mu alaka that the poet had complex and volatile feelings for Abla. And the next juncture of the poem is almost as cryptic as the one we just looked at together. We learned last time that the kasida or ode had various conventions. The poet stops at the abandoned desert camp. Then the poet recollects a lost love or a bygone period spent with a woman or women. Then the next thing happens. That next thing is very basically that the poet cheers himself up a bit. This cheering up often takes the form of the poet extolling the virtues of his horse or camel, or the poet extolling his own virtues in some way or another. Antara's Mu' Al AKA proceeds in just this way. In other words, we've heard the poet describe the abandoned camp and then his lost love. Now Antara is going to describe his camel, and a bit later, why he's not just some broken hearted wanderer, but indeed quite a formidable person. Let's start with the camel. Thinking of his lost love, Abla the poet, Antara asks again in the 1957 Arbery, could I indeed be brought to Abla's dwelling by my she camp? His camel, he emphasizes, is not a milk camel, but instead a feisty strong traveler, her tail still swishing back and forth even after a night of journeying, her feet as thunderous as hammers over the sandy trails. Beginning another simile, the poet writes that riding his camel is like being astride an ostrich, a male ostrich running to guard his eggs by night with a head like that of an earless slave, wrapped particolored firs. Another simile within a simile there, by the way, you don't see that very often in literature. To continue, Pontara's camel, after being compared to an ostrich, drinks deeply from an oasis. The camel, the poet writes, looks at the wells of another settlement with enmity, as if avoiding a cheetah or other big cat clawing and biting at her right flank. At her journey's end, Antara writes, his camel is still strong and imperious, sweat sliding down her neck like syrup or pitch from a boiler. Antara's panegyric to his camel concludes with an image of the animal kneeling to drink among some reeds, a groaning sound coming either from the crackling water plants or her great creaking legs. And he concludes that she is, quote, angry, spirited, proud, stepping the match of a well bitten stallion. Ansara's camel, then is many things in this famous poem. A castle, a fortress, an ostrich, an enigmatic creature, steady only in her orneriness and great stamina. When he finishes extolling her, Antara turns back to the the poem's other main female figure, his love, Abla. Abla, he writes, can spurn him, but she knows that he is not a man to be trifled with. Antara tells, praise me therefore, for the things you know of me, for I am easy to get on with, provided I am not wronged. But if I am wronged, then the wrong I do is harsh indeed. As if by way of prelude, Antares says he is not always a harbinger of war. It may be mentioned how often I have drunk good wine after the noon's sweltering calm, from a bright figured bowl in a glittering golden glass scored with Lines partnered to a lustrous filtered flask on its left. And whenever I have drunk recklessly, I squander my substance, while my honour is abounding, unimpaired. And whenever I have sobered up, I diminish not my bounty Sober. Antara writes, he consumes not wine but enemies. His spear splits the necks of husbands and good men such that they hiss blood like a harelip in war. Astride his horse he swims among troops, among spear thrusts and fusillades of bow shots, fighting with great fierceness, but not asking to share in any booty. Ansara writes that one cavalryman, heavily armored, faced off against him. Antara recollects killing this enemy warrior with a single spear thrust, a strike which tore a double sided wound into his foe. He describes the thud of the weapon weapon and the hiss of escaping blood, sounding like music to hyenas and wolves. Another formidable enemy was a champion and standard bearer, a man with ring mail, famous among his people, wealthy, mighty and privileged, known even for his generosity. This man too, Ontara writes, fell to him. His curved Indian sword split the man's expensive armor, and a spear thrust took the bannerman down for good. In the midst of these reminiscences of battle, Antara returns in his most famous poem to the subject of Abla. Abla, he writes, was not an enemy soldier, nor a hunted animal, but something unattainable. He sent a slave to investigate her whereabouts, and the slave confirmed that Abla was unguarded. The next lines of the poem are ambiguous. The poet writes, as Abla turned, her throat was like a young antelope's, the throat of a tender gazelle, fawn with spotted upper lip. This is a complex couplet. First, comparing female lovers to gazelles and their necks to the graceful necks of gazelles was commonplace in 6th century Arabic poetry. What we see here might be nothing more than a lover admiring his beloved's alluring looks, the contrast of a beautiful lover with the terror of war. But inset as this gazelle simile is in a bunch of stanzas about war and death and blood hissing from necks, the focus on Abila's throat could be read as forecasting her demise too. Moving on to the poem's final stanzas, Antara returns to the fray of combat. Heroes, he writes, make no complaint about physical agony other than a suppressed grunt. The poet remembers being used in the first ranks of battle and riding out ahead like a shield to soak up lance strikes, his black horse, bloodied from the blows, wearing sheets of its Own and enemy blood, like red robes and horses around, collapsing into the crumbling turf. If there is a climax to Antara's mu' alaka, it is perhaps at this juncture of intense combat as the poet and his horse, wounded, continue fighting. And he writes, oh, my soul was cured, and its faint sickness was healed by the horseman's cry, ha. Antara, on with you. Stricken by love sickness and uncertain of how to pursue the unattainable Abla, the poet hurls himself into warfare, and the esteem of other cavalrymen is enough in that moment at least to make him forget the pangs of heart sickness. The closing lines of Antara's hanging poem continue to pursue the subjects of war, death rather than love. Antara tells us that he has feared death only insofar as it might stop him from winning his war. He has killed the father of two powerful sons, sons who are pursuing him, as he well knows they are honor bound to do. In Antara's own words, his poem concludes with these I greatly feared that death might claim me before war's wheel should turn against the two sons who pursue me, and who blaspheme against my honour and I have not reviled them, who threaten to spill my blood only in my absence, and well they may, it being myself that left their father carrion for the wild beasts and all the great vultures. The the poem ends then, with the image of a warrior who self consciously has blood on his hands, but who at the same time is still trying to win a war. Antara, then, in his most famous poem, is not a morally spotless figure. No innocent Percival smiting various clear cut villains, nor guiltless champion of the good and just. Antara's speaker is, however, probably a more realistic portrait of a combat specialist than many other depictions of such figures in medieval literature. He is proud of his martial ability, being a bulwark out in front of other cavalrymen in the heat of combat he has seen and caused a lot of carnage. He is also loved and loved deeply. His memories of peacetime are full of longing and they are complicated. Antara deeply reveres Abla, but within this reverence there is a maelstrom of bitterness, bitterness that comes across in the poem's metaphorical complexity, in which a rain damp field of flowers is torn by the shriek of a besotted bug, in which a gazelle necked beloved appears in a sequence about warmongering and sliced throats. But just as there is ugliness in the poem's beauty, there is also beauty in its ugliness his camel is an almost unearthly thing, giant and finicky, steady and irascible, invincible and odd. War in the poem is gruesome and gorgeous, an arena in which language can wrap itself around new extremes of human experience and stanzas can change subject with the rapidity of sun glinting on spear points. Antara's mu' alaka opens by asking whether poetry has died in its war with the poets, whether there is a tear in the fabric of metaphor and figurative language where an aspiring poet might put something original. Antara's answer seems to be the that poetry can tear just as much as it can patch, that a vigorous poet can bruise and disintegrate, outworn metaphors to suit his own experience, and that poetry itself was a war all along. So that takes us through Antara IBN Shaddad's most famous poem, his mu alaqa, or hanging poem. It is first of all a nice reminder of the basic form of the qasida, or Arabic ode. It begins with musings at an abandoned camp, moves on to amatory reminiscences, and celebrates the poet's mighty steed as the cocida so often does, and then it moves on to acclaim the poet's own martial abilities. Not all qasidas do the latter some conclude with more abstract contemplations or panegyrics to patrons or all manner of things. But knowing that Antara IBN Shaddad is one of the most legendary warriors of ancient Arabian history, we should not be surprised that his most famous poem engages extensively with the theme of war. It's time for us to go deeper, though. We have about 40 other poems from Antara that are generally understood to be about as genuine as most Jahili poetry is. As we learned last time, the oral poetry of 6th century pagan Arabia was generally not written down and compiled until the 8th century and after, by which time those doing the anthologizing were Muslim scholars working in towns and cities. Thus some tampering has likely gone on with this poetry, and it may not reflect the exact lines that Antara composed during the late 500s. There is, however, plenty of linguistic and tonal consistency to Antara's oebre, and it's not unreasonable to assume that a substantial amount of the poetry that we're about to go through originated as the oral compositions of one person. It would be impossible for us to go through 40 poems in the remainder of this program. So I'll do what I've done before with authors like Catullus and Horace over the next hour or so, we'll consider the main recurring contents of Antara's poetry. While Antara's poems cover a breadth of subjects, perhaps the most common of them is war and combat. So let's begin by putting all 40 or so of Antara's surviving poems on our desk. About 120 pages of pages dense Arabic poetry, if that helps you picture it. Let's look at all of these poems at once and see what ancient Arabia's most famous war poet has to say about war itself. One of the main traditions of pre Islamic Arabic poetry is the fakhr or boast poem. The fakhr poems can emphasize different virtues depending on their authors and and thus a fakhr or boast poem might boast of the poet's tribe, or his sex appeal, or his capacities as a writer. In the case of the warrior poet Antara Ibn Shaddad, the vaunting in his boast poems is most often about his capacities as a fighter on the battlefield. Let's look at a few representative examples from the Montgomery translation. This translation again was published by NYU in 2018 in a book called War Songs. There's a link to it in the episode notes of this podcast and I highly recommend that book. The majority of Antara's poems feature references to combat, and our poet for today was clearly quite confident about his abilities as a fighter. He writes in one of his poems, My sword cuts deep with a sure sinewed hand. My sparkling bride is a weapon never dented or dull. My spear shaft straight and true, Its head burns bright in the night. Elsewhere, Antara tells us, with the sun at its hottest pitch, I fell upon an enemy knight and hacked him down at the head of his column, then locked horns with their cheek and slashed my way into their midst as the black horses ran red with wounds, wading through a swamp of blood. Many of the poet's battle boasts are on behalf of himself and his fellow fighters together rather than himself alone, he writes. I've floored many a warrior. Posh lumps of flesh in the saddle, sprawled in dirt, we mounted or dismounted, fought on to the kill, our spears bloodied black to the haft, our swords reaping skulls like gourds. Elsewhere, the poet remembers, we harried their fate and fearless, raced our mounts through rock strewn wastes, charging deep in their midst and spearing them hard, sometimes sounding like the Iliad and sometimes like Beowulf. Due to translator James Montgomery's alliterations, Antara Ibn Shaddad's battle narratives capture the ferocity and violence of mounted combat in Bedouin Arabia. Similes frequently intensify Antara's combat narratives, as when he writes, my cavalry crushed the enemy arms a glitter hearts high as sudden to strike as dry wood bursting into flame. To some extent, these terse narratives we've just heard about the poet's battle prowess are boasts brief tales about how he and his cavalry bested their foes. Elsewhere, though, Antara's poems capture out outright vaunts, insults such as we might hear warriors exchange on the battlefield of any epic poem. In one stanza, Antara taunts an adversary who has attempted to kill him and failed, growling, quote, man up, Hussein, you'll never rise to the task. Your spear missed my eye, leaving just a scratch on my face. Pathetic, Antara warns another Amr IBN Aswad, you foul breathed clan of shabby old camels. Your last gasp is near. Similarly to a different enemy, Antara thunders, has your sorry ass come to kill me, Umara? I'm right here. Shall we have a go at it, you and I? Or will you run, butt shaking with fear? While sometimes Antara's combat vaunts are voiced to specific enemies, at other junctures they are to collective groups of foes, as when he warns, opposing our spears are hard iron to make you whine like dogs at the sight of vipers you bolted, rumps in the air like old camels sniffing a corpse. Another simile caps off another combat boast when Antara I slew your chief and sent you scurrying like rabbits into your holes. These are ferocious lines of poetry, capturing the awful intensity of combat with arrows and bladed weapons and at the same time, a literary culture that valued tales of combat prowess. The speaker of these war poems is a seasoned veteran, undaunted by frontline warfare and almost incredulous at those who try to best him. As fiery as Antara's war poetry is, however, a lot of it sounds like things we've heard before. War bursting out like fire, blood turning a battlefield into a morass, heroes taunting one another prior to combat. These were old poetic traditions by the late 500s, and they likely arose independently in many places and times. Where Antara's war poetry is the most memorable and distinct is in the intermittent strangeness of its figurative language. The metaphor rich battle descriptions that Antara left behind depict war as having a terrible hallucinatory beauty, a thing that stretches human perception to its very edges. Some of Antara's similes are marvelous but fairly conventional, as when he the iron weight warriors fought to the death in chainmail, flowing like sheets of raging flames, floodwater. Some of Antara's battle similes are marvelous to Anglophone readers like us in that they use the ecology and topography of the Arabian Peninsula, as when the poet describes his his mane as if from a palm stripped trunk he snorts from nostrils deep and round as a hyena's den. Others, though, are eerie in their sheer inventiveness. In one battle narrative, the poet we drive our horses hard, their manes matted like the heads of women who have lost their lice combs. It is a turbulent simile in which infesting insects swarm in uncombed hair, women misplace their daily accoutrements, and warriors gallop into battle. In another strange war simile, the poet I planted my cold arrow in Juraya, forcing his men to swarm around him like worshippers rushing round an idol. The comparison here is rich and complex. A man torn through with an arrow becomes an idol of worship, doomed and exalted by death, a ritualistic object of pity and reverence. Elsewhere, the way that Antara writes about battlefield deaths is similarly sacral, as when he writes that he left my challenger dead, his hair a bloody red bud, the vultures praying over him, dancing their bridal dance. A slain foe in these lines becomes a flower and an object of reverence, hovered over by carrion birds, who in an internal simile are themselves akin to dancing brides. In a different poem, Antara writes that a man, quote, died on the field of battle, grasping at spears like a slave girl gathering wood for a fire. Homeric similes just like these compressed descriptions in Antara's poetry, they compact images of peace together with images of war. Drifting dust from war horse hooves is likened to wind, winnowed chaff in the Iliad, and the fires of a war camp are akin to bright stars watched by a shepherd, also in the Iliad. But Antara's similes are more abrupt and jarring. As much as Homeric similes can seem new to us when we first encounter them in ancient Greek poetry, they quickly become familiar, set pieces of a sort in a bardic performance. Antara's figurative language, though, is less self conscious, bursting up in the space of a single line as when he the battle of Aurayir was a healing nourished by grim battle swords. That's it. The metaphor is otherwise undeveloped. Hand to hand combat heals, and the poet moves onto the next line. In a line unrelated to combat, Antara I shed my tears, silver balls or flowers, pearls that scatter when string knots unravel. Here again we have an extremely compressed image. Tears are silver balls, or are they pearls? Or are they baubles on corded jewelry, faded to fall all over the place when the jewelry loosens, just as untying our own knots can make us cry. In another battle narrative, the poet writes, quote, the sleek mares swarm like locusts, sweat flecked saddles ridden by hawks. Homer might compare a warrior to a hawk or a lion, but the intense, saw toothed concision of Antara's description here creates an image we might see in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Hawks riding locusts on sweat splattered saddles, A war in which humanity itself is gone. Antara, at several junctures, reveals how much the experience of war has changed his perception, how peacetime life has become as incomprehensible to him as he has to it. And in a final marvelous and strange metaphor, the poet records his impressions of his beloved Ablaz Khem after being out on a campaign for a long time. Writing Abla's camp traced like tattoos on a bride's wrists, engraved now like Persian mumbled at Khosrow's court. The Sasanian emperor Khosrow, by the way, ruled from 531 to 579 CE, and so his name would have been been familiar to the Arab world. To repeat, though, the lines quote, abla's camp traced like tattoos on a bride's wrists, engraved now like Persian mumbled at Khosrow's court, these lines show that Antara no longer finds his beloved's home an intelligible place. Once as clear and familiar as a bride's tattoos, Abla's camp has become as unfamiliar as a mumbled foreign language changed forever by a world in which horses become locusts and men hawks or dying idols. And war is therapeutic. The poet Antara finds his former realm of peacetime, together with its outworn language, muted and inarticulate. So that should give you a good general sense of Antara Ibn Shaddad's war poetry, how it sometimes sounds like epic war poetry from the ancient Mediterranean basin, but also how sometimes it doesn't. Antara wrote about more than combat, however. While he frequently depicts himself as a powerhouse on the battlefield, at other times he paints himself as a reluctant combatant, as when he tells an addressee quote, I didn't start this war that engulfs you. For generations, others fanned its flames. In fact, a lot of the poetry that Antara left behind on subjects other than warfare has an overall atmosphere of gentleness and melancholy fatalism. His poetry emphasizes that he never tried to seduce women beyond what was proper, though he had entranced attractive girls that he was charitable and gave much during drought years that he ruled over his desires and was judicious in dividing up booty, and that he and his men were quick to ride out to help those in need. Ansara emphasizes especially that he gave his horse plenty of milk, unlike certain family members who let their mounts grow lean so that they could enjoy milk. And occasionally, Antara writes, as we heard earlier, about a woman named Abla. Posterity proved extraordinarily interested in Antara's relationship with Abla, whoever in the world she actually was. We'll talk about the Antara and Abla tradition a little later in this program, but to take a lot of the fun out of that, I can tell you that in the earlier ascensions of Antara Ibn Shaddad's actual poetry, she's not really a major presence. Not like Lesbia in Catullus or Cynthia in Propertius, anyway. Let me quote what I think is definitely the most substantial and revealing verses about their relationship for you. This is again the Montgomery translation. Writing in the third person in a passage that describes how the poet came home from being deployed for an entire year, Antara recollects the following about blade thin war spent, he shocked Abla with sinewy hands and matted hair in a year's grime and coat of mail, its battered irons so long worn, he had turned to rust and looked a wreck. You're worthless, abla said, shocking me by the laugh she got from gathered friends as she cast a scant glance at this glorious warrior, this brave lion famed for largesse. These are heartbreaking lines of poetry. A speaker has been away at war. He has distinguished himself there both through fighting and through generosity. But when he arrives at home, he is seen as gaunt, dirty, and meritless. In the same poem, Antara tells all your henna and your makeup. Who cares if I'm thin? I've been hard at it, dodging spears. This reprimand, however, seems to go unheeded now. Later, literary History embroidered all sorts of stories around these lines of poetry. Antara, during and after the Caliphates, became a half caste suitor, devastated first that his race made him ineligible in the eyes of his beloved, and then later that his formidable reputation on the battlefield did not make him similarly esteemed by the patricians of upper Bedouin society elsewhere. Antara, if you ask Abla about me, she'll say, I want her and her alone. She demands great things of me and I don't disappoint. And again, these seem to be lines that support that later story, the tale of a warrior who fought for love and of a mistress who spurned him at first but was slowly won over by his amorous consistency and his irrepressible strength and fortitude. However, and a big however. The lines that I just read you, together with the lines we already heard that survive in his Mu' al AKA are the full extent of our primary sources on Antara and Abla. They certainly invite us to imagine what happened, and reading an underdog courtship story into them isn't too far fetched. But Abla, for all we know from the primary sources, could have also been merely one of the poet's lovers. One of Ansara's other poems, after all, mentions his wife, another poem mentions two other lovers by name, and a third poem mentions another lover by name. Later and considerably embellished narratives about Antara might have shown him as a lovelorn warrior poet forever hung up on winning the heart of one woman. His actual poems, however, suggest a person who, while he had unreciprocated feelings for someone, moved on, had other relationships, and was eventually married to someone else. To put it very simply, Antara Ibn Shaddad was not a love poet in as much as later narratives about a black knight with a chip on his shoulder courting an aloof mistress, proved captivating to medieval Arabic readers. His words are almost always on the contrary, about war, war and its capacities to transform the individual. If there is a recurrent preoccupation other than war in Antara's poetry, it is not love but instead time and death. On one hand, we would expect a belligerent war poet to speak often of death with a certain degree of plucky indifference. Some of Antara's poems do just this. He writes, death is a cup we all must drink of death I know it looks like me, grim as battle, with no qualm or care, I embrace the terrors of war. The poet often identifies with death, writing in one poem, I smile commanding death, gripping the reins in hands that killed. But while there are junctures of Antara's work that boast doughty indifference toward death, more often elsewhere he regards it with considerably more ambivalence. Antara also writes, the crow beak like a pair of shears croaked, I won't be able to outrun fate when she comes. Cowards run. I stand my ground as the years went by, and the war of Dahis and Al Khabra spilled into a new generation. Antara must have known his epoch was passing, as when he time, not war, has made me weak. Time appears again in another, perhaps later, poem when Antara reflects the years passed and the east wind blew, even the ruins fell into ruin, tired playthings of time and the thunder and rain. And finally, in lines that can be read as equally tragic and serene, Antara wishes rarely come true. Death always finds a way. When Antara isn't writing rousing verses about war, then his verses are often fatalistic, like the ones we just heard. While in Antara's imagination a general determinism grinds all of us toward inevitable closure, he also believes that there is room, though it requires severe effort and considerable risk, to assert ourselves and in doing so change not only our own lives but also the lives of others, to assert ourselves in love or war or, most of all, language. Everything we know about Antara, after all, is rooted in the poems attributed to him, which may indeed record the supernal combat abilities of a Jahili Arab warrior, but may also be a layer cake of various later Arabic poets riffing verses on what they imagined it might have been like to be a Jahili Arab warrior. The act of leaving poetry behind for posterity is in itself an act of violent defiance and an attempt to spit in the face of time and death, inasmuch as it is also a process of craftsmanship for a refined audience. Although we have little of it from Antara, satire was a major part of pre Islamic Arabic poetry, and verse competitions between poets were major public entertainments in the educated circles of global modernity, undisguised self aggrandizement is most often regarded as as boorish. If I walked into a room yammering about the number of books I had read, I would naturally come across as an idiot. However, if you have ever attended a slam poetry contest or a real rap battle and watched participants compete, and in doing so actually demonstrating their verbal dexterity in the act of bragging about it, then you know that boasting can actually be quite a high art. Antara writes to an adversary like a volcano. I'll spew poems that long after my death will find and hold you up to shame. These lines communicate a daring, swaggering notion, the notion that a few of us do manage to dodge the ruination of time, to put the ephemera of our lives into meter and rhyme. Though Antara Ibn Shaddad is hardly a household name to Modern Anglophone audiences. The figure of the warrior poet, brazen with the sword as well as the pen, is one of the central icons in modern music in many languages. To quote American rapper Nas in one of the most famous rap songs and my favorite rap album in history, quote I'm like Scarface sniffin cocaine holdin an M16 see with the pen I'm extreme now Bullet holes left in my peepholes I'm suited up in street clothes Hand me a nine and I'll defeat foes it's only right that I was born to use mikes and the stuff that I write is even tougher than dykes I'm taking rappers to a new plateau through raps slow My rhyming is a vitamin held without a capsule the explosion of muscular double rhymes and half rhymes here demonstrates the poet's ability just as he describes it. Just as in the poetry of Antara Ibn Shaddad, in rapper Nas's 1994 song New York State of Mind, a speaker attests to his own martial and poetic abilities, the virtuoso capacities of the latter seeming to corroborate a similar prowess in the former. Same stuff, different continent and century to return to Antara and change subjects slightly, I wanted to note that it's important for us to remember that not all Jahili Arabic poetry sounds like Antara IBN Shaddad. He just happens to be the only one who as of the time of recording this, has had his works made available in a long scholarly English translation. Translation Other pre Islamic Arabic poets were associated with the luxuries of court life or satire or eulogy, or panegyric or incidental poems recording this or that scuffle between tribes or client kings or diplomatic ventures between such individuals. If all we read of Greco Roman theater was Seneca tragedy, we would walk away from ancient Mediterranean drama gawking at its seeming preoccupation with vengeance and bloodthirsty cruelty. And in just the same way, focusing just on Antara in this episode may give the inaccurate impression that all pre Islamic Arabic poetry is bloody and martial and fatalistic. On the contrary, Jahili Arabic poetry beyond just that of Antara is quite a big body of work and it covers many subjects. Now this could be a good stopping point for today. We've learned a bit about the pre Islamic Arabian warrior culture of Antara's world. We've learned about the tantalizing possibility that a trans peninsular class of poets might have existed by the year 600. Poets who as two 40 year tribal wars destabilized life in Arabia, and Byzantine and Sasanian conflicts in the north, destabilized it further, roamed the peninsula as military and literary mercenaries, carving reputations with swords, words, or both. And we've looked at a lot of Antara's poetry, a body of work that, even in translation, gives us a sense of the generic metaphorical and figurative sophistication of Arabic poetry before the dawn of Islam. However, even though we haven't covered the Prophet Muhammad and the Quran just yet, I actually want to jump forward and talk a bit about why and how Antara's poetry, and later the legend of Antara himself, was so popular in later Islamic history. I have already emphasized that later Islamic scholars undertook the general project of resuscitating Jahili poetry for the sake of celebrating the grandeur of a bygone culture. The hardy Bedouins of the Arabian Peninsula and their poetry, or in some cases their alleged poetry, were resplendent to later literary scholars, just as Japanese culture perennially reveres samurai, Denmark, Vikings, America, cowboys, Ukraine, Cossacks, and on and on, regardless of the historicity involved in such idolization. But there was a bit more to the resurgence of Antara Ibn Shaddad in Arabic literary history than generally romanticizing the past. Now, this will get just a bit complicated. For a moment, it's hard for me to offer a detailed reception history of Antara during the Middle Ages when we haven't even looked at the Quran yet, let alone the Caliphates. Nonetheless, let's go over a couple of final reasons why Antara's poetry became especially interesting to the Muslim world during and after the 800s. To repeat the obvious a final time, all Jahili poetry to some extent symbolized the glorious, simple past of Islam's Arabian heartland. I'm sure you've got that by now. Cultural conservatives. Like ancient Romans idolizing the stout farmer soldiers of the Old Republic, cultural conservatives always like stories about simpler, hardier times before people became pansies. And the caliphates had plenty of conservatives who liked imagining Jahili poets as rugged dudes bench pressing their camels. There are two other reasons, however, why Antara himself became especially popular during and after the 800s. The first is very easy to explain. Devout Muslim philologists or language scholars were interested in Jahili poetry for linguistic reasons. Due to its relative brevity and its beauty, the Quran may very well contain the most heavily trafficked lines of verse in all human history. For later scholars and interpreters of the Quran, any morsel of poetry from the pre Islamic world, including Antara's verses, was to be treasured for its nearness to the Prophet Muhammad world. By studying the Arabic poetry of the 500s, the theologians of the medieval period could get a clearer sense of what poetry had sounded like around the time of Muhammad's revelations. A chance verb, noun or conjunction might provide the key to unlocking a cryptic Quranic verse or challenging an accepted interpretation. And thus, for reasons of faith as well as personal ambition, the devout linguists of the caliphates had multiple reasons to be interested in the pagan poetry of the pre Islamic period. And with this philological research, in reading Jahili poetry and comparing its nuts and bolts to what they saw in the Quran, the scholars of the 700s and 800s and afterward were already undertaking the same sort of comparative linguistic analysis that various humanities departments still do today. In addition to their general interest in pre Islamic Arabia as a time of simple and hearty virtue and a time that had given rise to the Quranic revelations, later Muslim scholars were also interested in the period for the sake of its martial history. The tribes of the Arabian peninsula before Muhammad brought so many of them together. Each had their own legends, their own heroes, and their own sources of pride. The Rashidun and Umayyad caliphates, which persisted from 632 to 750, were a time of new relative unity for Arabs. But underlying this unity was quite literally tribalism, a series of stubborn genealogical and political fissures that had roots in pre Islamic Arabia and did not suddenly vanish. Following the theological unification that Islam brought during the early caliphates, a record of Jahili warfare came together, called the Ayam al Arab, literally Days of the Arabs, though we might translate it as Battle Lore of the Arabs. This was not a modern narrative history of battles between Arab clans prior to Islam, but instead an evolving bundle of prose mixed with poetry, in which the prose gums together. The bits of poetry in the Ayam al Arab prose passages first introduce the circumstances of each battle. We learn the topography of a dispute and the tribal and genealogical identities of the disputants. Then, often, as Arab warriors of different tribes square off, they issue poetic taunts and they grandstand in front of one another, just like Homeric heroes. Subsequently, often other poems, frequently excerpts, are quoted about the actual battle, excerpts that are framed with prose that explain them. The ayam ul Arab, or again, Battle Lore of the Arabs, were pseudo historical hybrid documents in which poetry itself seemed to be assumed to carry weight due to the very nature of its existence. This guy and this guy met in a gulch and they had a dispute over a freshwater spring. And look at their surviving remarks to one another. See, they're quoted in full accurate sounding Arabic verse, so this must all be true. And also, look, some other poet left behind two dozen verses about their subsequent sword fight, so they really must have met and dueled in that gulch. The Ayam al Arab to those of us new to ancient Arabic literary history is a fascinating body of work to consider. Everyone who studies literature can understand readily enough that literature began as oral poetry recited by bards in Arabic literary history. Rawis poetry full of mnemonic features like regular meter, rhymes, epithets and other tools that helped performers remember long works. Everyone who studies literature can also understand that later on, literature existed as ink on pages. What about the in between period, though? What if there wasn't some magical generational moment when all the oral poetry was set down and abracadabra turned into written poetry? What if it took a long time? The ayam ul Arab, those mixed blocks of prose and poetry, show us how this transition took place early in Arabic literary history, how compilers took bricks of pre existing centuries old verse, sometimes from other texts and sometimes from living bards, and situated these bricks in a mortar, explanatory prose. By the year 784, a collection of poetry and battle narratives had come together. That's commonly called Al Mufal Dali' at, named after the literary scholar Mufadhal Al Zhabi, who lived in Kufa in present day Iraq. Al Mufal Dariat, one of the most important anthologies of Arabic literature, was a product of its times, and it followed previous examples by situating centuries old Arabic poetry within narratives and also adding interpretive commentary to that poetry. If you opened Al Mufal Vali' at, for instance, to an entry on Antara Ibn Shaddad, you would find each poem prefaced by a paragraph or so on. When, where and why the poet wrote each poem, and unfamiliar place names or archaic diction would be accompanied by helpful notes. The historical accuracy of the accompanying material is unknown, and we can assume that it involves some guesswork. The poems themselves, as we learned in the previous episode, may not have been perfectly preserved records of Jahili verse, and indeed in some cases may have been forgeries. But in spite of the factual shakiness of Arabic literature's first anthologies, they were long serious scholarly efforts to capture Arabic poetry as the Umayyad Caliphate gave way to the Abbasid Caliphate. Arabic literature's early anthologies, in their structure and contents, were also influential. The Battle narratives of the 700s and 800s gave way to anthologies in which editors preserved and commented on the work of earlier editors. And poets became increasingly storied figures, known for their poetry but also the prose anecdotes that had evolved about them over the years. Our primary sources on Antara Ibn Shaddad today are documents from the 1000s CE set down all the way over on the Iberian Peninsula. When we look at them, we see a poet mediated by 500 years of evolving legends and literary scholarship. Let's take a moment to read Antara in the way that he would have been encountered during the Middle Ages. This will be an introduction to one of Antara's poems from the literary scholar Al ba tal Yusi, done sometime in the late 1000s. Here it is. Antara addressed the following poem to Aumara IBN Ziyad, who was known as the munificent Aumara, envied Antara and would tell his people that they mentioned his name too often. God, if I confront Antara face to face, Aumara said, I'd show you that he's no more than a slave for all his generosity and his propensity to give everything away. Aumara was a man of great wealth, and he owned many camels, whereas Antara could barely hold on to a camel, for he always gave them away among his brothers. Antara learned of what Aomara had been saying about him, so he composed the following poem, and again that's from an introductory preface to one of Antara's poems in an anthology from the late 1000s. The verses that follow in the medieval anthology are Taunts. Ansara asks Aomara if the latter really wants to fight him, or whether Umara is going to run away in fear. Antara praises the glint of his own sword, the straightness of his spear shaft, the sharpness of his arrowheads. And the poem concludes with the exceedingly Homeric warning that I lead the charge of mounted lions who snap the necks of their prey. During the Middle Ages, then, Islamic readers of Jahili Arabic poetry did not encounter Antara Ibn Shaddad's poems. Blank pages the poems were embedded within contextual narratives. They might tell you a story like the one above prior to a poem, or they might tell you that Antara had had his heart broken in just such a fashion before he voiced a subsequent lament about his beloved Abla, or that he was wandering in just this stretch of the wilderness when he wrote some subsequent lines about the mercilessness of faith. The effect is a fascinating one. Literature in a Word is yoked to history, or at least an attempt at history. Authorial intention is made. Unambiguous. Poetry is glued to specific situational points of origin, such that medieval Arabic literary scholars encountered verse as an unfolding component of history itself. From the perspective of those of us who are interested only in factual accuracy, the prosometric or prose and verse compilations of scholars like Al Ba Tal Yousse are in all likelihood wildly inaccurate. Arabic poetic anthologies covering the jahili period by 1000 CE were products of the telephone game of history, even though each generation that participated may have earnestly sought sound scholarship. And while medieval Arabic anthologists sought at least some fidelity to the original poetry of Antara and his contemporaries in Arabic popular culture, bards still continued to sing and audiences still sought folkloric sagas about ancient heroes. And so stories about Al Jahiliya continued to unspool century after century. One of the most famous of these was Sirat Antara, a medieval epic of monumental proportions that had been completed by about 1200. Medieval Islamic societies, as we've learned, romanticized the Bedouin world of the 500 CE as a place of solitary poets and windblown expanses of hardy virtues and close knit clans of violence, ardor, loss and resolution, creating what scholar Peter Cole calls a time which is always past, yet somehow now. Many pre modern Arabic epics have survived epics rooted in real historical events. Some of them are about Achaemenid, Persian and Greek antiquity. Some tell of the early years of the caliphates and the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties. The Antara epic, focusing on pre Islamic Arabian history, is perhaps the most widely known of all of these epics. Compiled sometime between 1000 and 1200 CE, it is a monolith of world literature, although to be clear, it is a work of fiction about a guy whose legend grew and evolved for five centuries due to poems which might or might not have been particularly original in the first place. Sirat Antara, or the Biography of Antara, or the Path of Antara, is a formidable brick of text. Scholar Peter Heath describes the story as stretching to precisely 5,607 pages in a 1961 Arabic edition. And even the summary that he includes of the book in an appendix to a scholarly monograph is 63 pages in length. A few seasons from now, I would like to offer episodes on this epic as well as other medieval era Arabic epics. For now, let me give you a very quick summary of the Sirat Antara as Antara remains a cultural monolith in much of The Arabic speaking world. The Sirat Antara, in its opening passage, offers its protagonist an extremely important place in Islamic history. The text tells us that during the Jahiliyya, the Arabs were conceited, thick headed. And in order to take the Arabs down a notch before Muhammad arrived, God sent Antara. Once the Arabs were clobbered in battle by a half African slave, God reasoned they'd be softened up a bit and be ready for Muhammad's revelations. It's a great opening and backstory, and the epic only gets better from there. The Sirat Antara opens near the beginning of the Torah's creation story with Noah's descendant Nimrod eventually perishing due to hubris against God. After which Abraham and his slave Hagar have a boy named Ishmael. Ishmael, who grew up around the famous Zamzam well in what is today Mecca, eventually saw his father Abraham build the Kaaba nearby. Ishmael or Ismail, the patriarch of many Arabs in Islamic history, had many sons. And after a stretch of begats, we learn of how Antara IBN Shaddad came to be. The long and short of it is that a raider named Shaddad captured a black slave named Zabiyya together with her baby sons and he raped her, resulting in the birth of Antara from the beginning. In this later medieval epic, Antara is a bruiser working as a shepherd who kills predators that assail his flock with his bare hands. Antara feuded with and killed another slave, the slave of a local prince, making himself a powerful enemy. But Antara also made a friend, specifically this same local prince's brother. With powerful enemies and powerful friends Then, and already becoming enmeshed in intra tribal politics, Antara also fell in love. Love for his cousin Abla inspired the young man to begin writing poetry, an occupation which brought him both fame and trouble in later parts of the epic. And speaking of trouble, both Antara's biological father and Antara's paternal uncle, the father of Abla, were disgusted that the young half breed was writing love poetry to Abla, whom they considered far too good for the lowborn Antara. Antara's uncle and father planned to kill him. They reconsidered when they saw Antara kill a lion with his bare hands. Being a juggernaut in battle soon became useful to Antara in other ways. The young man made new friends when he saved some women from marauding raiders and even endeared the affection of a local king. But the king's favor was counterbalanced by the enmity of the king's son who tried to have Antara killed and failed. Young Antara, in between strangling lions and fending off various assassins, managed to find out who his father was. Antara IBN Shaddad confronted his father, Shaddad, who refused to acknowledge the brawny youngster. And so off Antara went, leaving the UBS tribe and wandering into the desert, where he fell in with a party of marauders, beginning his youthful adventures in earnest. And that summary, by the way, takes us through book 2 of 58 books of the Sirat Antara Antara is a magnetic presence in the rest of the epic that ensues. He is a hero with a chip on his shoulder, fluent in poetry and murder, with an enduring and tragic soft spot for his cousin Abla, and born into a tumultuous world full of violent and entrenched factions, an Othello with his own epic rather than just a play. He ends up in Persia, Constantinople, Damascus, Andalusia and Rome. He faces off against a powerful clan leader first. Then he takes a central role in the famous war of Dahis and Al Habra between two major Arabian tribes and up and over these intrapeninsular conflicts, the Lakhmid and Ghassanid kings pull puppet strings from present day Iraq and Syria, and behind these client kings are the power of the Persian Shah and the Byzantine emperor. And in the background, too, is the more nebulous rivalry between the northern Arabian tribes, who declare themselves the descendants of Adnan, and the southern Arabian tribes who trace their lineage to Khataan, Adnan and Khatan being legendary Islamic patriarchs, both descended from Abraham. The Antara epic, though fiction and littered with anachronisms, is also soaked through with real Jahili history, most notably these onion layers of factional strife that characterized real Bedouin life during the 5000 CE. There are silly elements of the Sirat Antara, a total of 11 different lion fighting scenes formulaic enough to be weirdly fascinating, although Sirat Antara isn't nearly as full of devils and sorcery as other medieval Arabic epics. As a whole, though, the Sirat Antara remains one of the masterworks of Arabic epic literature. And as I said on down the road, we'll take a longer look at the epic. Being no strangers to epics ourselves at this point in our podcast, the Antara Epic, in addition to having the narrative elements you just heard, also contains poetry, poetry ostensibly done by Antara himself, and often poems modeled on the verses we've already read together in this program. Let's Take a look at some of the poetry from the Antara epic for a moment, because I think that in doing so we can learn a handy lesson about Arabic and Islamic literary history before we even get to Islam itself. We learned in this, in the previous episode that part of the qasida or Arabic ode is the Nasib or erotic recollection. Five or six hundred years after Antara Ibn Shaddad lived, when later poets were writing what we might call fan fiction about him, these poets wrote verses in which Antara recollected his beloved Abla. Here are some erotic verses from the Antara epic in which later poets imagined Antara remembering his lover, the hero Antara in the medieval epic. How good life was, How I played with that coy gazelle, that sweet voiced dark eyed flirt so serene. Eyebrows are like pen strokes, teeth like daisies in a row Shapely, full, leggy, silky, delicate waist, smooth skin a tender rose hid by the curtain of a night Whose stars glittered against the dark like quicksilver in a bottle I played with her till daybreak, clasped tenderly in braceleted arms. That was the Montgomery translation and to repeat, that was a poem from the Antara epic, written sometime between 1000 and 1200 and definitely not the work of a Jahili poet. Nonetheless, the poem certainly sounds like the other work of Antara. A lonely poet looks back into the past, remembering a love that's come and gone. He recalls her voice, her eyes, her teeth, her body. And the complex similes in the poetry. Eyebrows like pen strokes and stars like quicksilver in a bottle seem to admit that the poet's very memories of his beloved are artistic constructions mediated by the distortive power of his imagination. The later epic poets who wrote these lines knew Antara's small corpus of love poetry well. They also knew his war poetry. Let's take a quick look at another example from the Antara epic. This is an inset poem in which Antara voices his indifference to life on earth. Without Abla, Antara says in the epic, men find glory in chains, Women in strings of pearls I get get drunk on the murky binge of battle, not strong wine. Fate, don't go easy on me what I seek lies close at hand. Without Abla my comfort is death, death Abla is near. Weep if you have any tears and mourn me more than jealous fate does let them kill me My deeds will live. And these lines, like the previous ones, sound like verses Antara would have written. A warrior poet who has lost his love expresses indifference to life and at the same time vows that he'll continue to live on, known by posterity for his deeds in war, if and when he perishes on the battlefield. These could have been the words of Achilles upon the death of Patroclus. And that really takes us to the point that I wanted to make. 500 years after the real Antara ibn Shaddad lived, the epic. Poets who told tall tales about his deeds and imagined new poems for him lived in a different world. Antara, a denizen of the Arabian peninsula in the 500s, was a pig and a fatalist of the old Greek epic Stamp, a figure who fought and lived and loved with indifference to heaven or hell or any all governing deity. The writers who told and embellished his story centuries later obviously revered him. They deftly set him in the context of Islamic history at the epic's outset. And later, they made a Antara do some precociously Muslim things. And after Antara's death in the epic, Antara's brother joins Muhammad's new religion. But the authors of the Sirat Antara did not make the story's hero into a pious Muslim, somehow honoring the five pillars of Islam before the religion ever came to be. Antara's splendor, like that of the old Jahili period more generally, lay partly in its difference from the securer centuries of the caliphates. In Antara, the poets of the 1000s and 1100s in the Abbasid Caliphate saw an ancient mirror. He was a person who, like they themselves, revered Arabic poetry, but unlike them, lived in a lawless protean period before the revelation of Muhammad. Antara's splendor to Islamic posterity lay partly in the fact that he was not a Muslim. Half a millennium after Antara lived, he was a legend from a lost time and the emblem of a world that was ruthless and beautiful and that crackled with ancient magic, a world that had engendered the Quran itself. The professional bards who sang Antara's epic saga to gatherings before and after the five daily prayers were voiced all over the Islamic world. These bards knew that Arabic was older than Islam and that the ubiquitous Qurayshite verses revealed to Muhammad, though divinely inspired, had also not been the beginning of all history. So we have just explored with reasonable depth for a podcast episode how Antara Ibn Shaddad's poetry and the legend of the poet himself traveled down through the centuries. The tail end of this show has been fairly dense, so let's back up and review what we've learned. We learned that jahili poetry to later readers and scholars had numerous attractions. First, it invited its audience to remember the early days of the Arabs, when luxuries were scarce, folks were tough, and times were simpler. Second, Jahili poetry offered later Muslim scholars a wealth of primary materials to research Arabic literature and language from the period of the Prophet Muhammad. Third, jahili poems were puzzle pieces of the complex relationships between Arabia's tribes during antiquity, pieces that later writers and statesmen could use to stage proxy feuds against one another in the early days of the caliphates, when tribal fissures could still very keenly be felt. And finally, jahili poetry was eventually transmogrified under the pens of anthologists into an accepted canon of standard works and accompanying legends. The latter process took a long time. By the year 1200, around the time the Sirat Antara was completed, it was so commonplace to write colorful myths and legends about bygone heroes that the historicity of epic as a genre was probably of little interest to anyone. Greek writers had written a romantic epic about Alexander the Great centuries after his death, and before this, Christian writers wrote apocryphal Acts books about the Apostles, and and before this, Plutarch wrote short fiction about Rome's historical heavyweights. And in all cases, it was expected that writers would invent speeches, fill in gaps, and make stuff up in order to tell a good story. Antara IBN Shaddad, like warmongering Alexander, like the innocent apostle John, like valorous Scipio Africanus, is a magnetic figure. And it's no wonder that various narrative orbitals have gathered around him and been compacted together into the figure that we now have today. But as fantastic as some of the legends about Antara surely are, and as spurious as some of Antara's poetry today surely is, he still serves as an excellent introduction to the earliest Arabic literature. This literature, as we've learned in this in the previous program, is always mediated by the first few centuries of Islam scholarship, scholarship that had various tribal, theological, intellectual, and artistic agendas that we explored in this program. It is still, however, a rich and diverse body of work. We've learned about the Qasida, or od, the most quintessential form of classical Arabic poetry, and the subcomponents that it typically has. We've learned about the salik, or vagabond poem, and read some of Antara's, and we've learned about the fakhr, or boast poem and seen examples of those from Antara as well. While we didn't take a long look at the madi or panegyric, nor the hija or satire. We've learned that these were poetic forms that also predated Muhammad. And while you may walk away from these introductory episodes on early Islamic history forgetting a lot of these details, I want you to remember something very simple as we move forward. By 570, the year often given for the Prophet Muhammad's birth, there was already a massive amount of Arabic poetry out there, poetry that reflected the size, diversity and complexity of Arabia itself. A century later, Arabic poetry was already being compiled from professional bards into loose groupings of poems and explanatory material. A century later still, in the late 1700s, the first mature anthologies of Arabic poetry were underway. And soon thereafter, Arabic literary scholarship was flourishing. Everywhere there were people who spoke Arabic and liked to read, and that by the 800s, was a lot of places. So the biggest takeaway from these opening programs on early Islamic history is again a simple one. That a variety of Arabic poetry predated Muhammad and that it, of course, kept being produced during and after Muhammad, and that Arabs have always taken enormous pride in its quality and its vintage. 100 episodes ago, we began our history of the Tanakh, or Old Testament, with an overview of how the Bronze Age collapse had affected the Levant and the ancient Near East. It was important to me, in an episode titled Canaan, to emphasize that Judaism was the product of a cultural crossroads, that it arose from a seedbed of other religious ideologies that were collectively trending toward monotheism. Over these past three programs on early Islamic history, I hope I've been able to do something similar with Islam. Far from being an isolated place generating endogenous ideologies, Muhammad's Mecca was a commercial linchpin between Europe, Africa and Asia. Historian Tamim Ansari coined the term Middle World as an alternative to Middle East. As for much of recorded history, the Arabian Peninsula and its neighboring regions have indeed been at the geographical center of much of the human population. Born and raised then in what we can better call the Middle World, and exposed to various sects of Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Arabian polytheism, and a whole lot of tremendous Arabic poetry. Muhammad, like Manny and Jesus before him, lived in a place and time conducive to well informed prophetic revelations. Muhammad's story and the Quran, which we'll learn about over the next bundle of episodes, are central to the history of the Middle World. The Prophet's biography is a cherished story for about 2 billion of us today its hero, perhaps a bit like Antara Ibn Shaddad, being a person of middling birth, whose fortitude and intelligence, whose percipience and tenacity are the stuff of legend. Muhammad was a prophet, certainly, but he was also an orphan, then a common worker, talented with camels, then a businessman, an arbitrator and a husband, a reluctant visionary terrified that his revelations were madness, and then gradually a religious leader, an adjudicator, a general, a sage and a legend. Within his biography is the tale of an orphaned child, an up by the bootstraps narrative, an unlikely but moving romance, the saga of a seer who doubts his own visions, a David and Goliath narrative of a tiny band who grows to stand against a powerful commercial and military oligarchy, and eventually the beginning of a movement that completely changed history. The early history of Islam as we come to the actual story of Muhammad and the Quran, is like the history of Christianity's inception and Judaism's beginning, an intimidating subject, sacred to billions and of great importance to all of us. The story of Islam's prophet is long and historiographically complex. However, coming to the year of Muhammad's birth in about 570. As we are in the wake of hundreds of hours of episodes on the ancient history that led up to 570, we do have some advantages. Islam, as the Quran emphasizes again and again, is a part of the prophetic tradition of Judaism and Christianity, a prophetic tradition with which we are familiar at this point. Islam was born at a period when the Byzantine and Sasanian empires had exhausted one another, and we have traced the course of Mediterranean and Persian empires and their cultural history since the 5002 BCE. Islam was born at a moment when Europe and North Africa had transitioned into a decentralized patchwork of evolving kingdoms. Franks, Visigoths, Lombards, Byzantine Exarchates, Papal States and others. And during our long season on late antiquity, we learned about how and why this happened. Thus, while I can't offer you the prestige and polyglot expertise of a trained Islamic studies scholar, I think that the journey we've taken so far, including the first three programs of this season, will be excellent preparation for learning about Muhammad and the Qur' An. So in the Next program, episode 114, the Life of Muhammad, part one, we'll learn about Muhammad's biography up until a little after his first revelation, focusing on the years between 570 and 610. Muhammad's story is the saga of one of the most influential people who ever lived. But it's also the tale of a generation. Over the next three programs, we'll not only meet Muhammad, but also his younger cousin Ali, and the future caliphs Abu Bakr, Omar and Uthman. We'll learn about the fishers in the Meccan Qurays tribe that were later central not only to Islamic but also to world history. And we'll explore the roots of how a small population of merchants and tradesmen from Western Arabia created the largest empire the world had yet known in a little less than a century. And stay on a minute here if you could. I have a pretty big announcement. First of all, of course there's a quiz available on this episode in the Notes or Details section of your podcast playing app, and there's some bonus content available for you Patreon supporters. The announcement, though, is My co host, My Chocolate Lab Parker died recently. I know. I just talked about him a few episodes ago. He was 14, a ripe old age for his breed, and it was time. Ever since I started this podcast, he's been here. Literally here in this room while I talk into the mic. He was a big guy, 85 pounds, but he was also gentle and quiet. Often he'd get up and do something in the middle of a take and I wouldn't even have to redo or edit it because he made such little noise. He was, I can say without reservations, my best friend and my family as much as any human. Even in his senior years, I was taking him for long, long walks every day, and the day before he died, he still took a stiff legged old man walk down to the river to go swimming. That's about as good as it gets. Anyway, the announcement is that I wrote him a song. It's called Parker's Song. Parker was his name. They named him that at the animal shelter where I adopted him in 2011, and so we kept it. I spent a lot of time on this tune and I guess I hope it shows. I'll play it for you in a moment, but let me say that I also made a video of this same song that I also spent a lot of time on. A video that's mostly Parker himself, filmed in probably a hundred different locations over the years, running, playing, swimming, goofing, and just being his lovable self. I released that video on YouTube today and there's a link to it in your podcast app and across my social media accounts as well. He was a beautiful dog with really expressive, intelligent eyes and a brown coat that glowed ochre and bronze in certain kinds of light. So listen to Parker's song if you're in the middle of something. But if you're not, or if you have time later, I hope you'll watch the video version. It would mean a lot to me if you could see him doing his thing and being himself. So everybody, here's the audio version of Parker's song. And next time we'll hear the important and really pretty touching and human story of the Prophet Muhammad's early years.
- [118:36]
Host
We both knew the song a dozen years or so and then so long. But I gave you my all and you gave me your all. When you were old in time when you were young and slow strong that talk long ago when men were wise and the days were pure grass up to the skies But I don't trust the sages. There were never golden ages except for the one in your eyes. Run dear Bora.
- [119:28]
Narrator
You were made out.
- [119:30]
Host
Of hope and so splash life and glow. You're the closest thing to heaven that I know. Da da da Chant a long time ago in coming years. Love the far away, overlook the near. But you loved what was close. Yeah the ground beneath your nose. Cause everything you wanted was right here. A lot of things I never got to do. Work day's been many victories been a few. But I got a love at least every day it just increased. Cuz boy I got to know you. Run dear boy, run. You were made out of hope and song. Splash, laugh and glow. You're the closest thing to heaven that I know. You were made out of hope and so splash life and glow.
- [121:16]
Narrator
You're the closest thing to heaven that I know.
- [121:30]
Host
Miles are miles with paws in our.
- [121:32]
Narrator
Shoes we ran.
- [121:37]
Host
Blue skies and gray skies. Wet fur and wind and suntans. Hikes high and bike rides and late days and car trips. Panting and birthdays and sweet dreams and.
- [121:50]
Narrator
Cool dips my friend.
- [121:54]
Host
Oh my boy. Drinking the river and watching the sunset. Taking a break and then pats in the forest. Walking in winter, in summertime daybreak. Dashing and smiling and scratching your back. When I see stars I see sparkles in water.
- [122:16]
Narrator
You made.
- [122:19]
Host
You were everything and equal all things except for afraid. Dear one, how you love the rain. Dear one, how you loved. Dear one, how you loved. Dear one, how you love the world.
- [123:38]
Narrator
Sa.