A.Z. Foreman | "Lament for his People" by Abid b. Al-Abras read in Arabic and English @a.z.foreman74 | Uploaded 5 months ago | Updated 1 hour ago
In which I read yet another a Jāhilī poem in Arabic and then in English. This time it is a poem attributed to ʿAbīd b. al-Abraṣ.
Fortunately for the modern reader of Early Arabic (or, at least, fortunately for me) ʿAbīd's language is often as moving as it is difficult, the more so thanks to his most frequent subject: the disaster that befell his tribe, the Banū Asad. The nature of the disaster remains unspecified in the poems and therefore unknown to us, but judging by the evidence from the poems it would have involved some sort of attack by superior forces (presumably one of the sedentary Arab kingdoms) which left many of the Banū Asad dead, and forced most of the rest to flee much of their former territory.
The historical reality underlying the poetry is murky and probably will never be cleared up, barring an extraordinary fortuitous discovery by Arabian archaeologists. The information on ʿAbīd's life accompanying the poetry in Islamic literary compendia does not help much, as it has every sign of being based more on the poems than anything else, though it may contain some refraction of general truth about conflict with Kindite royalty.
Even admitting the qualifications which must attend any corpus which has gone through centuries of oral transmission, I see no substantive reason not to read the body of material attributed to ʿAbīd as (more or less) genuine pre-Islamic poetry. That does not definitively prove, of course, that all (or any) such early work attributed to ʿAbīd is necessarily by him. In pre-Islamic poetry, proving a positive is often much harder than proving a negative. It may well be that only a few poems are genuinely his, and that ʿAbīd as we know him is a half-archetypal figure around whose name various early poems of disparate authorship, containing a particular species of tribal lamentation, coagulated. If true, this would account for some the toponymic discrepancies that perplexed the commentators.
Erratum: the on-screen text has يحبون where I read يمشون. Didn't check to see that I had the correct MS variant when copypasted the text onto the screen.
In which I read yet another a Jāhilī poem in Arabic and then in English. This time it is a poem attributed to ʿAbīd b. al-Abraṣ.
Fortunately for the modern reader of Early Arabic (or, at least, fortunately for me) ʿAbīd's language is often as moving as it is difficult, the more so thanks to his most frequent subject: the disaster that befell his tribe, the Banū Asad. The nature of the disaster remains unspecified in the poems and therefore unknown to us, but judging by the evidence from the poems it would have involved some sort of attack by superior forces (presumably one of the sedentary Arab kingdoms) which left many of the Banū Asad dead, and forced most of the rest to flee much of their former territory.
The historical reality underlying the poetry is murky and probably will never be cleared up, barring an extraordinary fortuitous discovery by Arabian archaeologists. The information on ʿAbīd's life accompanying the poetry in Islamic literary compendia does not help much, as it has every sign of being based more on the poems than anything else, though it may contain some refraction of general truth about conflict with Kindite royalty.
Even admitting the qualifications which must attend any corpus which has gone through centuries of oral transmission, I see no substantive reason not to read the body of material attributed to ʿAbīd as (more or less) genuine pre-Islamic poetry. That does not definitively prove, of course, that all (or any) such early work attributed to ʿAbīd is necessarily by him. In pre-Islamic poetry, proving a positive is often much harder than proving a negative. It may well be that only a few poems are genuinely his, and that ʿAbīd as we know him is a half-archetypal figure around whose name various early poems of disparate authorship, containing a particular species of tribal lamentation, coagulated. If true, this would account for some the toponymic discrepancies that perplexed the commentators.
Erratum: the on-screen text has يحبون where I read يمشون. Didn't check to see that I had the correct MS variant when copypasted the text onto the screen.
