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

This poses a problem for those who seek to contextualize Jahili poetry using independent socio-historical data. Of course one could argue that the received notion of maysir emerged from the same milieu that transmitted and read the poems. The true issue at hand would thus be the interaction between the texts and its eighth and ninth century readers. If one takes this stance, however, one should make no pretense of studying pre-Islamic poetry and society (as several notable scholars have done).

It may seem that our consensus on the place of maysir in Jahili society could easily be inferred from the poetry alone and that such sensible deductions require no outside information. Indeed even a cursory reading of the Mu c allaqat suggests that maysir served as a way of dividing up food. Yet here the distinction is blurred between what modern scholars might inter from explanatory material drawn from such quasi-literary sources as poetic exegesis (itself un-cited and probably extracted from contemporary scholarly discourse on the topic and lexicography) and that derived from Jahili poetry alone. What would the poetry have suggested to us if we had first read it in a contextual vacuum? Modern scholars have been very critical of both pre-Islamic poetry and the Islamic historical tradition. Expedience, however, often supercedes discipline when scholars collapse the distinction between text and context, deriving the latter from the former. It is difficult to resist this temptation of challenge scholarly consensus on issues such as maysir, but doing so would at least avoid inconsistency at a theoretical level.

VARIOUS APPROACHES TO STUDYING JAHILI ARAB SOCIETY

Modern Western and Arabic studies of pre-Islamic Arab society and its poetry fall into four methodological categories.

Source Approach

This approach entails an essentially uncritical view of Jahili poetry as a source for describing pro-Islamic society. A scholar can thus translate sentiments or ideas expressed in the poetry into social statements with a minimal interpretive risk. The widely-published Egyptian author Shawqi Dayf cites the following verses of the pre-Islamic poet Durayd b. al-Simma:

   Then we, no doubt, are meat for the sword, and, doubtless,
   sometimes we feed it meat.
   By a roe bent on vengeance we are attacked, our fall his
   cure; or we, vengeance bent, attack the foe.
   Thus have we divided time in two, between us and our foe, till
   not a day goes by that we're in one half [shatr] or the other. (9)

Dayf then concludes that "all the Arab tribes were like Durayd's, for they are food for the sword ... they are always either attacked out of vengeance or taking vengeance themselves, and their lives are divided along these lines and into these two halves. (10)" Although Dayf is a primarily a literary scholar, he nonetheless chooses to make such sweeping statements about the character of pre-Islamic Arab society without considering the vast differences between literary expression as a cultural product and the culture that produced it.