tabsir.net

Sir Flinders Petrie, Egyptologist

An Archic Sonnet

To know what man was, ere he wrote his name,
Inscribed the laws and precepts on the rock,
And sacrificed the best lamb of the flock,
We dig the mound, and wander o’er the plain.
To learn the mysteries of the past, we fain
Would search for hidden slabs, and keep in stock
The Relics we so love. Oh, to unlock
The door, and gain an entrance to the same! (more…)

 

[Webshaykh’s note: Dr. Saad Sowayan, as the post below will explain, has been collecting, analyzing and documenting the oral poetic traditions of the Arabian Peninsula, especially his native Saudi Arabia, since his graduate research. He has now completed two major works, available for reading on the internet, but still in search of an appropriate publisher. I invite readers to look over his impressive documentation and analysis and communicate with Dr. Sowayan any ideas that may help forward his project.]

by Dr. Saad Sowayan, King Saud University

After 10 years of continuous hard work, I managed to finish the two books, which, taking the size and importance of each, I consider to be my lifetime projects.
A) Legends & Oral Historical Narrative from Northern Arabia (1131 pages)
B) The Arabian Desert: Its Poetry & Culture Across the Ages: An Anthropological Approach (820 pages).

The first work, as its title says, is a collection of Bedouin narratives and poems relating to tribal genealogies, camel marks, tribal territories, water wells, sheikhs, warriors, tribal judges, tribal poets, personal histories, as well as narratives relating to raids and counter raids amongst tribes and other events. All of these are told by competent narrators & reciters in the various tribal dialects and all go back to pre and early 20th century. I have been engaged in taping this voluminous material during the span of the 4 years extending from 1982 up to 1985. Since 1995 I have been engaged in archiving, indexing, transcribing and editing this taped material which came to a total of several hundred hours of recorded interviews. Legends & Oral Historical Narratives from Northern Arabia (1131 pages) is the result of this effort very carefully transcribed and edited in Arabic script with full voweling tashkeel. The work comes with a very detailed table of contents and an introduction explaining the nature of the material along with some linguistic remarks and explanation of the transcription method I used. All in all, the work is a primary source on Arabian nomadic tribal culture, oral literature and vernacular language. This work constitutes a compliment to the works of P. Marcel Kurpershoek published in English by Brill in Leiden. (more…)

Arab poets extolled just about everything under the soon and in the moonlight. Even a loaf of bread could inspire passion. The following is a poem by Abu al-Mukhaffaf, an early 9th century Baghdadi poet. Here is the introduction (nasîb) in his ode:

Please, no abodes abandoned in the wastelands!
Spare me your lines about expensive wines;
No virgin girls with narrow waists and waistbands.
Describe a noble loaf: a sun that shines,
Or like the moon when it is full and round;
For only them my poetry is sound.

I’ve given up all contacts with attractive girls.
I’ve sobered up: no more consorting with all those
Who please the eye until you die from love. (more…)

 

Houris
by Rumi, translated by William C. Chittick

If anyone asks you about houris, show your face and say, “Like this.”

If anyone speaks to you about the moon, rise up beyond the roof and say, “Like this.”

When someone looks for a fairy princess, show your face to him.

When someone talks of musk, let loose your tresses and say, “Like this.”

If someone says to you, “How do clouds part from the moon?”

Undo your robe, button by button, and say, “Like this.”

If he asks you about the Messiah, “How could he bring the dead to life?”

Kiss my lips before him and say, “Like this.” (more…)

Illustration of his poem by Palmer Cox, 1882

The Sultan of the East
by Palmer Cox

There was a sultan of the East
Who used to ride a stubborn beast;
A marvel of the donkey-kind,
That much perplexed his owner’s mind.
By turns he moved a rod ahead.
Then backed a rod or so instead.
And thus the day would pass around,
The Sultan gaining little ground.
The servants on before would stray
And pitch their tents beside the way,
And pass the time as best they might
Until their master hove in sight. (more…)

Rizpah protecting the bodies of her sons, by George Becker, left; William Cullen Bryant, right

With Gaza ablaze, the political woes of contemporary Palestinians continue to echo past tragedies on the same blood-drenched ground. Consider the vengeance of the Gibeonites, both a purge and a scourge in the early days of Israel’s King David. Setting aside who is who for the moment, the biblical account recorded in the book of II Samuel describes a weak David with a struggling economy (called a famine in those days). The Gibeonites, who sought vengeance for their slaughter by the former King Saul, demanded seven of his sons, and David agreed. The princes were soon hanged in eye-for-an-eye justice. Yet the queen mother of two of the sons spent five months protecting the bodies from being devoured by beasts not shaped like humans. Her name was Rizpah and she can be seen as a maternal heroine or a distraught widow.

Like so many of these seemingly sacred stories, almost any moral can be teased out of the narrative. Should the lesson be “Do not make deals with the enemy, even when you are weak”? I can see both supporters of Hamas and Israeli hardliners applauding the message. Or might it be possible to read the story in a more sane hindsight as a referendum on the futility of vengeance? Were the matter simply an eye for an eye, it could theoretically stop after the first act of vengeance, but this region has seen an infinity of eye-gouging that no blessed peacemakers have yet been able to stop. My own preference is for Rizpah fighting off the vultures of violence, less an act of protecting only one’s own than defiance of the perpetual killing that makes martyrdom a virtue on both sides.

Once again, I prefer to tune out the talking heads and let a poet of the past speak: (more…)

This is my first attempt to translate Indonesian poetry. I was so taken with it, that I just had to try. I met the author, the headmaster of an Islamic boarding school in his home. He had recently read his poem at a public forum and read it again for me. I asked him (and would have have begged him if necessary) for permission to translate and post the poem. When Westerners look for strong statements against terrorism, maybe we should turn to poetry.

Allahu Akbar (Almighty God)
By Abah Faqih Muntaha,
Headmaster, Pesantren Al-Asy’ariyyah, Wonosobo, Central Java, Indonesia
Translated by Ronald Lukens-Bull, Ph.D.

Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.
It should be that when we hear those words, say those words
Our heart quivers and we feel very small
We should feel insignificant and afraid to sin
With Your greatness, God
We should not feel arrogant,
Or look for unlimited strength.
They should not cause fear because of violence,
Sadism, cruelty, and even hatred.

Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.
It should spread rejuvenation, tranquility, and obedience to God.
It should not create the impression that Islam is a religion of terrorists,
Roughnecks, sadists, trouble-makers, fear mongers,
And even murderers.

With the Word of God, who is great
Allahu Akbar with all His Power
Makes evil men good,
Refined, and humble.

With Allahu Akbar, people should become wise
To create a better future,
a future that is patriotic, religious, and civilized.

But we should not just think in terms of one year, 2 years, or ten years.
But in terms of the Eternal.

Al-Jazeera, August 9, 2008
Mahmoud Darwish, the renowned Palestinian poet, has died after open heart surgery at the Memorial Hermann medical centre in Texas.

Ann Brimberry, Memorial Hermann’s spokeswoman, confirmed to Al Jazeera that Darwish died at 1.35pm (1835GMT).

Siham Daoud, a fellow poet and friend of Darwish, 67, had asked not to be resuscitated if the surgery did not succeed.

She said Darwish departed for the US ten days ago for the surgery, and he had undergone two operations for heart problems before Saturday’s surgery.

Best known for his work describing the Palestinian struggle for independence, the experience of exile and factional infighting, Darwish was a vocal critic of Israeli policy and the occupation of Palestinian lands. (more…)

[The following is Najwa Adra’s review of two books by anthropologist Steven C. Caton, who conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Yemen in 1979-1981. It was first published in Yemen Update, #48 (2006):46-50.]

“Peaks of Yemen I Summon”: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe, by Steven C. Caton
Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990
ISBN # 0-520-06766-5
351 pp., illus., maps, hardcover

Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation, by Steven C. Caton
New York, Hill and Wang, 2005
ISBN-13: 978-0-8090
341 pp., maps, no illus., hardcover (also available in paper)

Reviewed by Najwa Adra

“Peaks of Yemen I Summon”: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe and Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation, published 15 years apart, should be read as two complementary parts of a whole. They document Steven Caton’s field research on tribal poetry in Khawlan at-Tiyal in 1979-81. Together, these books are important contributions to theory in anthropology, the ethnography of Yemen, and perhaps literary theory and political science as well. The first book is a technical discussion of tribal poetry as cultural practice; the second is a personal, reflexive description of the author’s experiences in the field. It provides rich contextual data that shed light on, and help support, the author’s argument in the first book. (more…)

Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak is a short but provocative book of poems from several of the detainees held at Guantánamo Bay. Much has been written about the legal issues and violations of human rights, but here we can hear the silenced voices of those dehumanized in detention without access to justice. Here is one of the poems:

Death Poem
by Jumah Al Dossari

Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.

Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience.
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.

And let them bear the guilty burden, before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden, before their children and before history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul.
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the “protectors of peace.”

Jumah al Dossari, a thirty-three-year-old Bahraini national, is the father of a young daughter. He has been held at Guantánamo Bay for more than five years. In addition to being detained without charge or trial, Dossari has been subjected to a range of physical and psychological abuses, some of which are detailed in Inside the Wire, an account of the Guantánamo prison by former military intelligence soldier Erik Saar. He has been held in solitary confinement since the end of 2003 and, according to the U.S. military, has tried to kill himself twelve times while in the prison. On one occasion, he was found by his lawyer, hanging by his neck nd bleeding from a gash to his arm.