The social context of pre-Islamic poetry: poetic imagery and social reality in the Mu c allaqat

Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ), Summer, 2003 by Jonathan A.C. Brown

While family bonds generally remain intact despite severe shortages, food sharing with relatives and friends decreases significantly. "Individuals drop friends and extended kin from food-sharing networks," states Robert Dirks, "restricting generalized reciprocity to close relatives." Despite their predictability, annual food shortages can also lead to a "sociology of hording" in which food stores are hidden or denied to all but the closest kin. This even occurs in societies that pride themselves on generosity. (46) When deprivation exceeds the expected perennial difficulties and the community enters into an unusually harsh famine, food-sharing can dwindle even further. M. J. Murray notes that among the famine-stricken Ogaden nomads in Somalia:

   family groups ... tended to shun all others ... The effects of
   these attitudes were striking, the worst being the complete
   disregard for the health and welfare of immediate neighbors
   who did not happen to be members of the family. (47)"

The case of Somali nomads housed in famine shelters is certainly extreme, but it illustrates the harshest end of the famine spectrum.

Generosity and hospitality have always featured prominently in Arab nomadic values, constituting an important aspect of muru'a (manliness) and c ird (honor. (48) Labid b. Rabi c a extols his generosity, proclaiming:

   And how many a chilly morning in which the reins of the cold
   had fallen into the hands of the frigid North Wind, have I
   [eased the people's suffering] with food.

Speaking of his munificence when distributing food by maysir, he adds:

   I tell the [maysir players] to slaughter a she-camel, barren or
   pregnant, her meat given to all our neighbors.

Finally Labid honors his tribe as a whole:

   They are Spring to those around them and the client-farmers
   when their year grows long (i.e. when their food stores
   dwindle). (49)

To Labid this generosity is crucial for asserting both his own greatness and that of his tribe. Much like the role that reanimating an ancient feud allowed Shammar poets to underscore their honor, so does such proverbial generosity exist in the liminal area between real actions and rhetoric. Labid gives food both on a daily basis and in times of need. Moreover, his tribe is a refuge for the cultivators whose harvests have proven feeble.

One of the salient features of pre-Islamic poetry, however, is its penchant for hyperbole. c Antara's descriptions of battles and c Amr b. Kulthum's tribe strapping pack-loads of skulls to their camels (50) clearly belong to realm of literary devices and not accurate descriptions of reality. Given the tendency of human societies to limit food-sharing during perennial shortages, Labid's boasting should be interpreted as the hyperbolic expression of an ideal and not necessarily as common practice. The same approach applies when c Amr b. Kulthum avers:

   (104.) [And all the tribes of Ma c add know] that we are those
   who protect [the hungry] in every year of famine (51), and that
   we are givers to those who ask gifts of us. (52)