Journal of Arabic Literature 50 (2019) 211-250
brill.com/jal
Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī and Nahj al-balāghah: Rhetoric,
Dispossession, and the Lyric Sensibility
Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych
Georgetown University
stetkevy@gmail.com
Abstract
This study explores the relationship between the extraordinary poetic achievement
of Sharīf al-Raḍī (d. 406/1016) in his highly lyrical and influential Dīwān, on the one
hand, and the literary-religious accomplishment of his unrivalled compilation of the
sermons, epistles, and sayings of ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, Nahj al-balāghah, on the other. It examines the interplay among the contemporary Mutanabbī-dominated literary scene,
the Imāmī Shīʿite dominated Baghdādī politico-religious scene, and, in Islamic scholarship generally, the increasingly balāghah- (rhetoric)-focused theological discourse
on iʿjāz al-Qurʾān (the miraculous inimitability of the Qurʾān). Finally, the paper attempts to connect al-Raḍī’s sense of alienation and dispossession from his hereditary
right to rule—one that he has found so strikingly expressed in the sermons of his forefather ʿAlī—and the extraordinary lyrical-elegiac strain in his own poetry.
Keywords
rhetoric – lyrical poetry – description – sermon – Shīʿism – ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib – al-Sharīf
al-Raḍī – ʿAbbāsid poetry – Nahj al-balāghah – khuṭbah – qaṣīdah – Iʿjāz al-Qurʾān
Introduction
All too often, modern literary and religious scholarship have suffered
from the isolation of al-Sharīf al-Raḍī’s (359-406 AH/970-1016 ce) poetic
accomplishments—his highly influential Dīwān with its poignant lyricism,
not to mention his training of another master lyrical poet of his age, Mihyār
al-Daylamī (d. 428/1037)—and his unrivalled compilation of the sermons,
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epistles, and sayings of ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, Nahj al-balāghah.* This paper proposes to explore the connections between al-Raḍī’s contemporary poetic context,
still in the shadow of the immensely popular and rhetorically intimidating figure of Aḥmad Abū al-Ṭayyib al-Mutanabbī (d. 354/965), and the contemporary
political-religious scene, where in Baghdad the Imāmī Shīʿah were in the ascendant and in Islamic scholarship the theological discourse on iʿjāz al-Qurʾān
(the miraculous inimitability of the Qurʾān) focused increasingly on its incomparable rhetorical power and beauty (balāghah). It is in this age of the
extreme valorization of rhetoric—whether in poetic or religious contexts (and
the two are not entirely distinct)—that al-Raḍī compiled Nahj al-balāghah and
composed his own poetic Dīwān. The second element of this study is al-Raḍī’s
sense of dispossession or alienation from what he perceived as his hereditary
right to the rule of the Islamic Ummah, which he shared with, or more precisely, inherited from, his forebear, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet
Muḥammad, ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib (d. 40/660). Finally, the study will attempt to
make a connection between al-Raḍī’s sense of dispossession, one that he has
found so strikingly rhetorically expressed in the sermons of his forefather
ʿAlī, and the extraordinary lyric-elegiac strain in his own poetry, in which, I
argue, a poetics of loss has created some of the most powerfully lyrical poetry
of his age.
Al-Raḍī’s personal and political circumstances, which are intimately intertwined, are formative of his poetic, scholarly, and religious works. The Sharīf,
Abū al-Ḥasan Muḥammad ibn Abī Aḥmad al-Ḥusayn ibn Mūsā al-Mūsawī alʿAlawī, most commonly referred to by his Būyid-conferred honorific al-Raḍī,
was born in 359/970 in Baghdad, to a distinguished and influential ʿAlid family. His lineage on both sides traces back to ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, on his father’s
side to al-Ḥusayn, through the seventh Shīʿī Imām Mūsā al-Kāẓim, and on his
mother’s, Fāṭimah bint al-Ḥusayn, side, given variously as through al-Ḥasan
and al-Ḥusayn.1 His father (304-400/916- or 17-1009 or 10), who bore the Būyid
* An earlier version of this paper was presented under the title “Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī and Nahj
al-Balāghah: Rhetoric, Dispossession, and the Lyric Sensibility” at the Shiʿah Institute Annual
Symposium: Nahj al-Balāghah: The Word of ʿAlī. London, 14-15 Dec., 2017. I am grateful to the
organizers for giving me the opportunity to participate in that most engaging symposium
and drawing me back into the work of al-Sharīf al-Raḍī. All translation from the Arabic in this
study are mine.
1 For a concise summary of al-Sharīf al-Raḍī’s biography and works, plus bibl., in English,
see Moktar Djebli, “al-S̲h̲arīf al-Raḍī,” in: print: Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, eds.
P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W. P. Heinrichs (Leiden: E. J. Brill,
1960-2007); online: http://dx.doi.org.proxy.library.georgetown.edu/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_
COM_0046 First published online: 2012. Consulted 17 June, 2018 [Hereafter: EI2]. For a readable biography of him as a poet, see Iḥsān ʿAbbās, Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī (Bayrūt: Dār Ṣādir/Dār
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honorific al-Ṭāhir Dhū al-Manāqib (‘possessor of virtues’), was an accomplished
dignitary and diplomat who held, over his long lifetime, many prestigious
offices: amīr al-Ḥajj, naqīb al-ʿAlawiyyīn, and al-qāʾim ʿalā al-maẓālim (‘leader
of the Iraqi Ḥajj’, ‘marshal of the ʿAlids’, and ‘ombudsman’). Notable, too, particularly for its effect on al-Raḍī’s early poetic production, was al-Sharīf al-Ṭāhir’s
long imprisonment in Shīrāz (369-376/979 or 80-986) under the Būyid emir
ʿAḍud al-Dawlah, followed by his release and eventual reinstatement (380/990)
by the latter’s successor Sharaf al-Dawlah. His older brother is the renowned
poet, writer, and Imāmī scholar, al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā (355-436/967-1044).
In addition to boasting a distinguished ʿAlid pedigree on both sides, al-Raḍī
received a superb education from leading literary, linguistic, and religious
scholars of his time, one that included studying with both Sunnīs and Shīʿīs,
both non-Muʿtazilah of various stripes and Muʿtazilah. Of note here are, for
example, the grammarian Abū ʿAlī al-Fārisī (d. 377/987), the Muʿtazilī theologian al-Qāḍī ʿAbd al-Jabbār (d. 415/1025), and especially the philologist and
grammarian, Abū al-Fatḥ ʿUthmān Ibn Jinnī (d. 392/1002), an erstwhile friend
and commentarist on the dīwān of al-Mutanabbī.2
Like his father and brother, al-Raḍī had a distinguished political career, including taking over his father’s offices due to the latter’s ill health, in the year
397/1007. He made his way into the court of the caliph al-Ṭāʾiʿ (r. 363-381/974991) through his poetry as well and, although he failed to make headway with
the caliph al-Qādir (r. 381-422/991-1031), was greatly favored by the Būyid emir
Bahāʾ al-Dawlah (r. 379-403/989-1012). As early as his teens, he entertained high
political aspirations, including to the caliphate itself, encouraged not only
by his own ambition and sense of great destiny, but also by his older friend
and promoter, the renowned Sabean secretary and man of letters, Abū Isḥāq
Ibrāhīm al-Ṣābiʾ (d. 384/994). Al-Raḍī appointed a dāʿiyah (agent, propagandist), one Abū al-ʿAwwām, to promote his cause among the Arab Bedouin tribes
of Najd and southern Iraq. The death of his dāʿiyah at the hands of some of the
Banū Tamīm in 392/1002, effectively frustrated his caliphal hopes. Iḥsān ʿAbbās
provides an especially lively account of al-Raḍī’s period of caliphal aspirations
Bayrūt, 1959); detailed technical biographical, historical and bibliographical information can
be found in: ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ Muḥammad al-Ḥulw, Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī: ḥiyātuh wa-dirāsat shiʿrih,
2 vols. (al-Qāhirah: Hajr lil-Ṭibāʿah wa-al-Nashr, 1986); and Muḥammad Hādī al-Amīnī,
Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥusayn ibn Mūsā al-Mūsawī (Tehrān: Muʾassasah-i Nahj
al-Balāghah, 1366 sh/1408 ah/[1987 ce]). On his lineage, see al-Ḥulw, Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, 20
(paternal); 54-55 (maternal). Al-Ḥulw gives his maternal lineage to al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī; Djebli
to al-Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī, see Djebli, “al-S̲h̲arīf al-Raḍī.”
2 On the teachers, education and intellectual formation al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, see ʿAbbās, Al-Sharīf
al-Raḍī, 38-48; al-Ḥulw, Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, 1:268-93; al-Amīnī, Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, 57-76.
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(ca. 380-95/990-1005) and what he terms his ‘ʿuqdat al-imāmah’ or ‘Imamate
complex’ along the lines of the ‘ʿuqdat al-nubuwwah’ or ‘Prophethood complex’ of his celebrated predecessor and one of his chief poetic influences,
al-Mutanabbī.3 Although al-Raḍī remained somewhat embittered, the later
period of his life, particularly under the patronage of Bahāʾ al-Dawlah, was replete with political prestige and poetic, literary, and theological production.
In his later years, from 397/1007 on, he held the offices his father once held:
amīr al-Ḥajj, naqīb al-ʿAlawiyyīn, and al-qāʾim ʿalā al-maẓālim.4 Claude Cahen
writes, ‘In Baghdād, the brother s̲h̲arīfs al-Raḍī and al-Murtaḍā were, throughout the whole of the first quarter of the 11th century, the real masters of the
town, acting as intermediaries between the Buwayhids, the Caliphs and the
population, at the same time as Shīʿī scholars and traditionists.’5
Al-Raḍī’s poetic production extends from his tenth year until his death and
much of it is closely engaged with the political-religious status of himself, his
family, and his ʿAlid forebears, as he negotiates the complex terrain of Baghdad
with its ever-shifting imbalance of power between the ʿAbbāsid (Arab, Sunnī)
caliphs and the Būyid (Persian-Daylamī, Shīʿī) emirs. In his numerous poems
of madḥ (panegyric), tahniyah (congratulations) to the ʿAbbāsid caliphs, Būyid
emirs, viziers or other notables and literati, and members of his family and
ancestors, on such occasions as the Islamic ʿĪds or the Shīʿī ʿĀshūrāʾ, or the
Persian holidays of Būyid Baghdad (Nawrūz and Mahrajān), marthiyah (elegy),
and fakhr (boast, of himself or his family and forefathers),6 competition for
rank and status plays a definitive role.
Although most renowned for his poetic Dīwān and for his compilation of
the words of ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, Nahj al-balāghah, al-Raḍī’s extensive body of
scholarly works reveals the depth of his engagement in both fields. Of note
here are his works on majāz (metaphor, figurative language) in both the Qurʾān
(Ḥaqāʾiq al-ta‌ʾwīl fī mutashābih al-tanzīl, Talkhīṣ al-bayān fī majāzāt al-Qurʾān)
and the Ḥadīth (al-Majāzāt al-nabawiyyah), and his earlier incomplete project on the virtues of the twelve Shīʿī Imāms, Khaṣāʾiṣ al-a‌ʾimmah, of which he
completed only Khaṣāʾiṣ al-imām ʿAlī (383/994) and which serves as a precursor of Nahj al-balāghah (400/1010), as al-Raḍī notes in his introduction to that
3 See ʿAbbās, Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, 98-126, 148, 168.
4 The vagaries of al-Raḍī’s political, especially caliphal, aspirations and disappointments are
detailed with precision in al-Ḥulw, Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, 1:243-59.
5 Cahen, “Buwayhids or Būyids,” EI2.
6 See Djebli, “al-S̲h̲arīf al-Raḍī”; the poems in these genres (aghrāḍ), together with the addressees, dates, and circumstances, are set out in detail in: al-Ḥulw, Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, 2:43-136.
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work.7 Moktar Djebli, in a remark quite pertinent to the argument at hand,
states: ‘As a talented writer and admirer of literature, [al-Raḍī] wanted to seek
out eloquence, rhetoric and metaphor in the three principal sources of the
Arabic language, these being the Ḳurʾān, the Ḥadīth and the sayings of ʿAlī.’8
Part I: Rhetoric
I will begin by examining the element of balāghah for two reasons: first, it
features in the title of the compilation, Nahj al-balāghah, and second, in the
broader cultural context, we are centrally in what I have termed elsewhere
‘the age of rhetoric’—that period of Arab-Islamic culture in which balāghah
(rhetoric, eloquence) was so valorized that in both literary and theological
circles the miraculousness of the Qurʾān, that is, the proof of Muḥammad’s
Prophethood and the divine origin of the sacred text, was established and witnessed through the Qurʾān’s incomparable rhetoric and eloquence.
The formulation of the doctrine of iʿjāz al-Qurʾān (the miraculous inimitability of the Qurʾān) took place only between the 2nd and 4th Islamic centuries
(750-1000 CE) and particularly in the 4th/10th century the concept of al-iʿjāz
al-balāghī (rhetorical inimitability) took hold to the extent that treatises on
the subject deal largely with rhetorical devices (al-maḥāsin al-balāghiyyah or
al-badīʿiyyah) as the major feature. The proposition arrived at by the scholars of
iʿjāz al-Qurʾān, such as ʿAlī ibn ʿĪsā al-Rummānī (d. 384/994) and ʿAbd al-Qāhir
al-Jurjānī (d. 470/1078), was that true faith can be achieved only through the
thorough study of rhetoric: that is, that the truth of Muḥammad’s prophecy
is the divine origin of the Qurʾān, which resides in its unmatchable rhetorical
beauty. Al-Rummānī lists seven aspects of iʿjāz: 1) the failure of anyone else to
imitate or match it (tark al-muʿāraḍah), despite numerous motives and pressing need; 2) the [Qurʾānic] challenge (al-taḥaddī) to all to try to do so; 3) turning away (al-ṣarfah), that is, Allāh’s turning away anyone who would take up
the challenge; 4) rhetoric/eloquence (al-balāghah); 5) true information about
future events; 6) breach of convention (naqḍ al-ʿādah), that is, the Qurʾān’s
unique literary form, not following the conventions of Arabic poetry or prose;
and 7) the Qurʾān’s analogousness (al-qiyās) to every other miracle (e.g., Moses’
7 Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī Abū al-Ḥasan Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan [sic] al-Mūsawī, Nahj al-balāghah,
cmt. Muḥammad ʿAbduh, ed. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Sayyid al-Ahl (Bayrūt: Dār al-Andalus, 1404/1984),
17-8.
8 Djebli, “al-S̲h̲arīf al-Raḍī.”
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rod turning into a serpent; his parting the sea).9 However, after listing these,
he devotes almost his entire treatise to rhetoric, with a brief paragraph on the
other aspects at the conclusion. Al-Jurjānī goes further and, prior to delving
into his nuanced rhetorical analyses of poetry and the Qurʾān and his formulation of naẓm (verbal construction), introduces his celebrated treatise Dalāʾil
al-iʿjāz (‘Signs of Iʿjāz’) with the claim that he who does not know Arabic poetry
cannot know ‘Allāh’s proof’ (ḥujjat Allāh), that is, the miracle of the Quʾrān.10
The scholarly consensus on this matter is cogently expressed some centuries
later, by the 8th/14th century poet and scholar, Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī (d. 749 or
750/1348 or 1349):
The science most deserving of precedence and most worthy of being
learned and taught, after the knowledge of God Almighty, is the knowledge of the verities of His Noble Speech [the Qurʾān] and the understanding of what He sent down in the Wise Remembrance [the Qurʾān],
so that they might be safeguarded from the calamity of doubt and delusion […]. And there is no way to [acquire this knowledge] except through
the knowledge of the science of rhetoric, including the figures of badīʿ,
through which the meaning of the inimitability of the Qurʾān and the
veracity of the prophethood of Muḥammad (peace and blessings of God
upon him) is known by evidence and proof.11
I would like to propose that this development is no historical accident, but
rather, it occurred only after the ʿAbbāsid Muḥdathūn (Modernist) masterpoets of the late 2nd/8th through 3rd/9th century, such as Abū Nuwās, Muslim
Ibn al-Walīd, and above all Abū Tammām and al-Buḥturī, had created the
‘new’, ‘innovative’ badīʿ style of poetry.12 In it they achieved astounding heights
of rhetorical innovation and intensity, especially as they competed in court
panegyric to create a verbal correlative of caliphal might and dominion. In
9 Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn ʿĪsā al-Rummānī, Al-Nukat fī iʿjāz al-Qurʾān in Muḥammad Khalaf
Allāh and Muḥammad Zaghlūl Salām, eds., Thalāth rasāʾil fī iʿjāz al-Qurʾān lil-Rummānī
wa al-Khaṭṭābī wa-ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, 4th prt. (al-Qāhirah: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1991), 75113, at 75, 111.
10 Abū Bakr ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, Kitāb dalāʾil al-iʿjāz, ed. Maḥmūd Muḥammad Shākir
(al-Qāhirah: Maktabat al-Khānjī, 1404/1984), 8-9.
11 Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī, Sharḥ al-Kāfiyah al-Badīʿiyyah fī ʿulūm al-balāghah wa-maḥāsin
al‑badīʿ, ed. Nasīb Nashāwī (Dimashq: Maṭbūʿāt Majmaʿ al-Lughah al-ʿArabiyyah biDimashq, 1982), 51-2.
12 On this process see Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, Abū Tammām and the Poetics of the
ʿAbbāsid Age (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991), 5-37 and Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, “Toward a
Redefinition of ‘badīʿ ’ Poetry,” Journal of Arabic Literature 12 (1981): 3-29.
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the course of these poetic endeavors, they related rhetorical power to divine
power to both formulate and propagate an ideology of a divinely appointed or
sanctioned caliph and Arab-Islamic imperium; that is, they expressly joined
the notions of rhetorical beauty and Islamic might. Only then was the concept
ratcheted up to the divine level: if rhetorical beauty (eloquence) equals power,
then absolute rhetorical beauty equals absolute power.13
We must keep in mind that in terms of etymology, the word balāghah, derives from the root b-l-gh, whose meaning centers on achieving or reaching
one’s goal or purpose to the fullest degree.14 Thus, the definition of balāghah
begins first with ‘effective communication’. Above all, the ability of the speaker
or writer, through the effective use of language, to make his message penetrate
the hearts and minds of his audience. For the Qurʾān, this message is the promise of salvation through submission to God. ʿIlm al-balāghah (the science of
rhetoric), which became nearly identical with the study of iʿjāz al-Qurʾān, was
the study of the verbal means through which this was accomplished—what
we would call rhetorical devices (al-maḥāsin al-balāghiyyah wa al-badīʿiyyah).
The title Nahj al-balāghah thus means ‘The Way of Eloquence’ or ‘Rhetoric’—
but, as opposed to what other way? and the way to what? My proposition is
that al-Raḍī intended by this title and this collection to establish the veracity of ʿAlid claims to Islamic leadership, not through practical and worldly
military-political success—that is, the usually claim that the victor is ipso facto
God’s elect—but rather through establishing the moral leadership of the ʿAlids
through demonstrating ʿAlī’s unrivalled eloquence in persuading the Islamic
Ummah to follow the Islamic path to salvation. In light of the contemporary
ideas of iʿjāz al-Qurʾān and valorization of rhetoric, this argument could stand
simply on al-Raḍī’s ʿAlid nasab and thorough Arab-Islamic literary-religious education. However, we can also adduce textual evidence from Nahj al-balāghah
itself, where in his introduction, after describing ʿAlī’s eloquent and effective
speech (balāghah, faṣāḥah),15 al-Raḍī states:
13 On this development, see Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, “From Jāhiliyyah to Badīʿiyyah:
Orality, Literacy, and the Transformations of Rhetoric in Arabic Poetry,” Oral Tradition 25.1
(2010): 211-30. http://journal.oraltradition.org/issues/25i/stetkevych.
And Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, “Rhetoric, Hybridity and Performance in Medieval
Arabic-Islamic Devotional Poetry: Al-Kāfiyah Badīʿiyyah of Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī,” in Sabine
Dorpmüller, Jan Scholz, Max Stille, Ines Weinrich, eds., Religion and Aesthetic Experience:
Drama—Sermons—Literature, Heidelberg Studies on Transculturality (Heidelberg:
Heidelberg University Publishing, 2018), 207-31.
14 Edward William Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon, 8 vols. (New York: Fredrick Unger, 1958
[London, 1863]), b-l-gh.
15 Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Nahj al-balāghah, 18-19. For the text and commentary, I have relied on
al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Nahj al-balāghah, cmt. Muḥammad ʿAbduh. On issues of the attribution,
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I intended [in this compilation] to elucidate the great rank of the
Commander of the Faithful [ʿAlī], peace upon him, in this virtue [eloquence], in addition to his many good qualities and merits, and that he,
peace upon him, was unique among our earliest ancestors, from whom he
took very little and only rarely, in achieving its goals [bulūgh ghayātihā].
As for his speech, it is an unmatchable brimming tide and a swollen sea
no other can surpass. And I wanted to be able to boast about him, peace
upon him, the way al-Farazdaq [boasted of his forefathers and taunted
his rival, Jarīr]:
Those are my fathers, so bring me ones like them,
[If you can,] O Jarīr, when we meet.16
It is worth noting that for al-Raḍī, too, the matter of ʿAlī’s balāghah is expressed
in competitive form: that he among the ‘first forefathers’ (al-salaf al-awwalīn)
is uniquely (infarada ʿan) eloquent; that, twice using the passive form III verb,
the brimming sea of his eloquence is ‘incontestable’ (lā yusājalu) and its abundant waters are, like the milk of an overflowing camel-udder, ‘unsurpassable’
(lā yuḥāfalu). This competition extends to al-Raḍī’s own times, for, he hopes
that, as ʿAlī’s descendant, he can boast among his contemporaries of the unequalled rank, status, and virtue to which he is heir. This point is made by citing
the two renowned poetic rivals of the Umayyad period, Jarīr and al-Farazdaq,
famed for their naqāʾiḍ (poetic duels of boast and invective): the former had a
humble, base ancestry while the latter could boast a noble lineage.17
It is especially noteworthy that ʿAlī’s unique eloquence is expressed precisely in the sense that is understood in the studies of iʿjāz al-Qurʾān: ‘to achieve
the goals’ (of eloquence); and, further, that the terms used for virtues and eloquent speech are synonyms or homonyms: al-maḥāsin (good qualities, beautiful expressions) and al-faḍāʾil (virtues, exquisite [expressions]).
In Nahj al-balāghah itself, ʿAlī declares: ‘We [Ahl al-Bayt] are the princes of
speech (innā la-ʾumarāʾu al-kalāmi).18 In another khuṭbah, he claims for Ahl
al-Bayt the exclusive authority and right to rule the Ummah, or even exclusive path to Islamic salvation—depending on how the reader interprets the
figurative ‘treasure-house’ and its ‘doors’: ‘We [Ahl al-Bayt] are the innermost
I am in accord with the conclusion that al-Sharīf al-Raḍī is indeed the compiler, as set
out in Moktar Djebli, “Nahd̲ j ̲ al-Balāg̲ h̲a.” Please note that for the purposes of the present
study I have limited my consideration to the khuṭab of Nahj al-balāghah, to the exclusion
of the rasāʾil and ḥikam.
16 Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Nahj al-balāghah, 19.
17 On Jarīr’s base lineage, see intro. to Nuʿmān Muḥammad Amīn Ṭāhā, ed., Dīwān Jarīr
bi-sharḥ Muḥammad ibn Ḥabīb, 3rd prt., 2 vols. (al-Qāhirah: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1986) 1:11.
18 Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Nahj al-balāghah, 434.
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garment [closest to the Prophet], the companions, the treasure-house and
the [its] doors; and houses must not be entered except through their doors;
whoever enters by any other means is called a thief’. And further, from the
same khuṭbah: ‘The noble [verses] of the Qurʾān are about them [Ahl al-Bayt]
and they are the treasures of the All-Merciful. When they speak, they speak the
truth; when they are silent, none [dare] speak before them’.19 What is essential
here is to keep in mind that when the text refers to Ahl al-Bayt, this refers to
the compiler al-Raḍī, as well as ʿAlī, and confers the same authority upon him.
It is this authority that renders the convention of isnād (authenticating chain
of transmission) unnecessary or redundant and explains why al-Raḍī has dispensed with it in Nahj al-balāghah.
In other words, Nahj al-balāghah rejects the conventional worldly proof of
political-military dominion as the sign of God’s favor and the path to salvation.
It offers instead a different path to salvation, through following the moral (and
political) prescriptions and admonitions of the sermons, epistles, and sayings
in its text. As its title indicates, it aims to convey this message through its rhetorical force—its ability, through the power of eloquence, to compel men’s
hearts and minds to accept this path to salvation. In so doing, it follows the
path of eloquence formulated in the doctrine of iʿjāz al-Qurʾān, as elegantly
summed up by Abū Sulaymān al-Khaṭṭābī (d. 388/998):
So understand and know now that the Qurʾān was a miracle only because
it brought the most eloquent expressions in the best composition containing the truest meanings: of the oneness of God Almighty, of His being
free from [human attributes] in His descriptions; the call to obedience to
Him; clarifying the proper manner of worship; of what is permitted and
forbidden, allowed and prohibited; of admonition and rectification; of
enjoining what is right and forbidding what is wrong; and of guiding toward virtuous morals and rebuking bad morals; [while] putting all of this
in the most appropriate order and in such a way that the mind cannot
picture a more fitting [form of expression]; and setting down information
from centuries past and God’s exemplary punishments that were visited
upon the disobedient and rebellious among them; and predicting future
events in the ages to come; combining both the proof and what is proven,
the sign and what is signified, so that [the Qurʾān] may best confirm the
necessity of what it calls [mankind] to and best communicate the obligation to observe what it commands and forbids.20
19 Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Nahj al-balāghah, 270.
20 Abū Sulaymān Ḥamad ibn Muḥammad al-Khaṭṭābī, Bayān iʿjāz al-Qurʾān in Khalaf Allāh
and Salām, Thalāth rasāʾil fī iʿjāz al-Qurʾān, pp. 19-72, at 27-8.
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In other words, as I take it, the title Nahj al-balāghah means ‘showing the
way to salvation by means of eloquence’ and its intent is to establish the words
of ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib as the proof of the precedence of ʿAlī and Ahl al-Bayt on the
basis of the rhetorical force of its moral message rather than military-political
might.
The present argument is essentially that al-Sharīf al-Rāḍī has aimed to select from the known or accepted sermons, epistles, and sayings of ʿAlī those
that he finds—in his own time and place and to his own contemporary
audience—the most rhetorically compelling. Just as the formulation of iʿjāz
al-Qurʾān established the Qurʾān’s unmatchable rhetorical power and beauty as evidentiary proof of its veracity (i.e., divine origin) and of the Prophet
Muḥammad’s divine mission, it is the rhetorical power and beauty (which are
the same thing) of Nahj al-balāghah that ultimately confer authenticity and
establish the veracity of the ʿAlid claim to Islamic moral and/or political legitimacy and dominion. In my estimation then, the primary basis for selection
was not modern notions of ‘authenticity’, that is the ‘historicity’ of the texts
included, but rather how powerfully they convey the message of ʿAlid moral
(Islamic) authority: that the true path to salvation, as with the Qurʾān, lies in
attending to the commandments and admonitions that these texts convey.
That is, the authenticating principle is not textual-historical, but rather performative, and lies within the words of the texts themselves: do they compel the
belief, adherence, obedience of the reader/audience?21 A corollary of the performative argument derived from the religious tenet of iʿjāz al-Qurʾān, as formulated by al-Rummānī, al-Khaṭṭābī, al-Jurjāni, and others, is that no effective
distinction can be made between the rhetorical-literary and moral-religious
aspects of Nahj al-balāghah.
21 I consider Nahj al-balāghah to be a compilation selected from what were believed at the
time of its compilation, around 400/1010, to be the words of ʿAlī. In my view, this is what
constitutes ‘authenticity’ in a living oral-literary tradition. This ‘authenticity’ is distinct
from the issue of the precise ‘historicity’ of the materials included, which, although of
great literary, historical, and—for some—religious importance, is not the subject of
the present study. To me, some of the sermons in Nahj al-balāghah clearly exhibit the
features of oral literature, whereas others exhibit stylistic and rhetorical features associated with the Abbasid period (badīʿ, etc.). On these historical stylistic developments, see
S. Stetkevych, “From Jāhiliyyah to Badīʿiyyah.” For more extensive study and bibl. on the
sermons of ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib and the Islamic sermon more broadly (both covering issues
of transmission and authenticity), see, respectively, Tahera Qutbuddin, “The Sermons of
ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib: At the Confluence of the Core Islamic Teachings of the Qurʾān and
the Oral, Nature-Based Cultural Ethos of Seventh Century Arabia,” Anuario de Estudios
Medievales 42/1 (2012): 201-28; and Tahera Qutbuddin, Arabic Oration: Art and Function,
Handbook of Oriental Studies series vol. 131 (Leiden/Boston: E. J. Brill, 2019).
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While keeping in mind that the religious and scholarly authority of the
compiler played an essential role in both the selection process and the work’s
reception, it is above all al-Raḍī’s exquisite rhetorical judgment or taste—
refined through his extensive linguistic and literary studies, as well as his own
poetic and scholarly production—that is the authenticating principle of Nahj
al-balāghah. My argument in the present study is that al-Raḍī selected from
the established and accepted corpus of the words of ʿAlī a body of materials
that would establish the rhetorical—and hence moral—preeminence of ʿAlī
and thereby promote a message of ʿAlid legitimacy in the (moral) leadership of
the Islamic Ummah.
A further corollary to the influence of 4th/10th century formulations of iʿjāz
al-Qurʾān concerns those khuṭbahs in Nahj al-balāghah that proffer predictions
of events to come, which, of course, have in due time come to pass. Ironically,
while some modern scholars consider this evidence that they cannot be the
actual words of ʿAlī, but rather retrospective compositions intended to vindicate Shīʿī history and belief, for Muslims espousing the classical tenets of iʿjāz
al-Qurʾān, a major element that proves the authenticity, indeed miraculousness, of the Qurʾān is precisely its prediction of events that have, in the course
of time, come to pass.
The moral component of the khuṭbahs of Nahj al-balāghah is clear, but what
makes them emotionally compelling is the literary power of the discourse—its
eloquence or rhetoric. As they are taken to be the words of ʿAlī, they thereby
demonstrate or perform, through their persuasive properties in leading the
hearts of the believers toward virtue and salvation, his legitimate leadership of
the Ummah. In ‘performing’ ʿAlī’s rhetorical powers, the khuṭbah in which he
describes the bat (al-khuffāsh) establishes his literary and religious authority:
From one of his (peace upon him) sermons in which he mentions the
marvel (badīʿ) of the creature, the bat:
Praise of Allāh and Declaring Him Free of Human Attributes
Praise be to Allāh Whose true essence is beyond what words can describe
and before Whose greatness men’s minds fall short, so that they can find
no way to comprehend the magnitude of His sovereign power.
He, Allāh, the Clear Truth, is truer and clearer than what men’s eyes
can see: their minds cannot delimit Him so that He could be likened
to anything; nor can their imaginations grasp Him so that He could be
compared to anything. He created creation without any model, without
the advice of an adviser or the help of a helper. Thus, His creation was
completed by His command [alone] and it obeyed: it complied with
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His [orders] without resistance and submitted to His will without
contending.
The Physiology of the Bat
One of the delights He has produced and the marvels of His creation,
which reveal to us the mysteries of His wisdom, is the bat: for the sunlight
that releases all other creatures [from their lairs to go out into the world],
confines them, while the darkness that confines all other creatures, releases them; and how their eyes are too weak to reach the light of the sun
by which to be guided on their way and to discern objects in the clear
light of day. [Allāh] prevents them with the dazzling brilliance of the sunlight from discerning the different shades of light, and He conceals them
in their hiding places, [preventing them] from going out into the clear
daylight. So, during the day they lower their eyelids to cover their eyes.
[The bats] make the night a lantern by which they are guided in seeking
their sustenance. For the black of night does not prevent them from seeing nor from proceeding into the utmost darkness. Then, when the sun
throws off its veil and the bright morning light appears, and the morning
sunshine enters the holes of the lizards, [the bats] shut their eyelids over
their eyes, content with their night’s catch of food. So, praise be to Allāh
who made the night for them a daytime and a livelihood and the daytime
a time of stillness and rest. And Who made for them wings of flesh with
which, when they need to, they rise in flight. Their wings look like they’re
made of pieces of ears, without feathers or quills, except that you can
clearly see where the veins are. They have two wings, which are neither
so thin that they tear, nor so thick that they weigh the bats down. They fly
with their young clinging to them for protection. Thus, their young alight
where they alight and rise when they rise, and do not let go of [their parents] until their bodies are strong and their wings can bear them in flight,
and they know how to catch food and fend for themselves. Praise be to
the Creator of all things, without equal, free from all others beside Him.22
The description of the bat is one of several passages in the khuṭbahs of a genre
termed ʿajāʾib al-makhlūqāt (wonders of creation), which include, for example,
descriptions of the peacock, the ant, the locust, and the formation or structure
22 Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Nahj al-balāghah, 271-3.
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of the earth.23 The reader is drawn to believe in Allāh through witnessing the
marvelous ingenuity of His creation, but, especially in the age of rhetoric, to believe as well in the nearly unsurpassable eloquence of ʿAlī through witnessing
his mastery of language in the elegant use of parallelism and antithesis (ṭibāq),
the precision of his descriptions, and the aptness of his similes.24 The author is
not merely conveying information about the bat. Rather, he is proving the existence of Allāh through His performative powers of material creation, while at
the same time demonstrating his own verbal performative powers in linguistically ‘re-creating’ the bat by demonstrating—by verbal imitation—Allāh’s creative power. In a sense we have a case of ekphrasis (defined as a verbal work of
art that portrays a non-verbal work of art), where the non-verbal work of art is
Allāh’s creature, the bat, and the verbal imitation is ʿAlī’s descriptive passage.25
Examples of the curious interplay between the High ʿAbbāsid poetry and
the prose khuṭbahs in Nahj al-balāghah are the ‘descriptions’ of Allāh, in which
we see the badīʿ-type formulations of the unimaginable majesty of the caliph
now transferred to ‘describe’ Allāh Himself. In terms of literary and theological
production, however, the line is not a straight one: for although by the time of
the compilation of Nahj al-balāghah, the verbal formulations for expressing
divine transcendence are most likely derived from poetic formulations of caliphal praise which, in turn, are derivatives of the theological formulations of
the 3rd/9th century Muʿtazilah and Mutakallimūn (‘speculative theologians’).26
Thus, we read in a panegyric by Abū Tammām to the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Ma‌ʾmūn:
God is most Great! Now there has come the greatest one
about whose essence fancies fly, but then are baffled by it.
Whose might describers cannot circumscribe,
except to say his might is God-inspired.
Who by his bounty banished dearth from his lands,
till poverty became an oddity,
23 Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Nahj al-balāghah, 294-7 (peacock); 335-6 (ant); 336-7 (locust); 403-5
(formation of the earth).
24 The use of similes is particularly striking in the peacock (al-ṭāwūs) passage, al-Sharīf
al-Raḍī, Nahj al-balāghah, 294-7.
25 On the application of theoretical concepts of ekphrasis to Arabic poetry, and especially
with regard to the idea that descriptive passages have goals other than mere verbal imitation, see Akiko Motoyoshi Sumi, Description in Classical Arabic Poetry: Waṣf, Ekphrasis,
and Interarts Theory (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2004). This discussion should be extended to descriptive passages in Arabic prose literature as well.
26 See Stetkevych, Abū Tammām, 5-19; and Stetkevych, “Toward a Redefinition of ‘badīʿ ’
Poetry.”
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Who fostered orphans in their fathers’ place
until we wished that we were orphans, too.
He submits to God and rules a nation
whose proud masters submit to him.27
Although the poet is very explicit about the caliph’s submission to Allāh, the
image and diction of the failure of minds and words to apprehend and express
the caliph’s greatness are precisely those we see in the prelude of the khuṭbah
describing the bat (above) and in the following opening passage of the first
khuṭbah:
Praise be to Allāh, Whose praise speakers[’ words] cannot reach; Whose
blessings counters cannot count; Whose due [worship] no human efforts
can fulfill; Whom the highest aspirations cannot reach; Whom the profoundest intellects cannot fathom; Whose description exceeds all [spatial] limits, existing adjectives, measurable time, and extended duration.28
So, too, Abū Tammām’s passage praising the caliph’s awesome majesty and unequalled munificence finds a counterpart in the description of Allāh in the renowned Khuṭbat al-ashbāḥ (‘Sermon of the Apparitions’) of Nahj al-balāghah.
Not only do we find parallels in the concepts expressed, but, more strikingly,
we find a shared means of expression in both the High ʿAbbāsid badīʿ-style caliphal panegyric and the descriptions of Allāh in this and the khuṭbahs quoted
above. One common element is the distinctive discourse of the Mutakallimūn,
which made its way into classical Arabic poetry and literary prose, where in
rhetoric it was termed al-madhhab al-kalāmī (‘the method of Kalām’, ‘of speculative theology’); another is the striking (badīʿ) use of metaphor:
Praise be to Allāh Whose [wealth] is not increased by withholding and
avarice nor diminished by giving and generosity, though everyone else
who gives is thereby diminished and anyone else who withholds, besides Him, is held blameworthy. He is the bestower of unique blessings,
of recurring profits and shares. To His dependent creatures [mankind],
He guarantees a livelihood and ordains provisions. He clears the path
for those that desire to reach Him and those that seek His presence. He
27 Stetkevych, Abū Tammām, 115. Abū Tammām, Dīwān Abī Tammām bi-sharḥ al-Khaṭīb
al-Tibrīzī, 4 vols., ed. Muḥammad ʿAbduh ʿAẓẓām (al-Qāhirah: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1951) 3:152-3,
ll. 14-18.
28 Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Nahj al-balāghah, 23.
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is not more generous [in giving] what is requested than in what is not
requested. He is the first one, for Whom there is no anteriority, so that
anything could exist before Him; and He is the last one, for Whom there is
no posteriority, so that anything could exist after Him. He repels the eyes’
pupils from reaching or perceiving Him. Time[’s vicissitudes] do not affect Him so that His state could be altered, nor is He in a place so that His
location could change. Were He to give away [all] that the mines of the
mountains exhale (tanaffasat) and that the shells of the sea [reveal when
they] laugh (ḍaḥikat), of precious gems of pure silver and mined gold,
scattered pearls and the harvest of coral, it would have no effect on His
generosity, nor would it deplete His abundance and He would [still] have
a store of blessings that the demands of mankind can never exhaust, for
He is the bestower Whose [gifts] the pleas of supplicants cannot diminish and Whom importunate beggars never find stingy.29
The ‘mental gymnastics’ of al-madhhab al-kalāmi are particularly obvious in
the play on abstractions—anteriority, posteriority, and the dimensions—or
lack thereof—of time and space. The sort of metaphors that exemplify the
badīʿ-style are found in the personification of mountains as ‘exhaling’ and seashells ‘laughing’ or ‘smiling’ to reveal ‘pearls’. The latter is actually a complex
verbal play on the conventional description of the poet’s beloved, smiling or
laughing to reveal her pearl-like teeth. I am not concerned here with establishing the precise genesis or genealogy of such concepts and expressions, but
rather with pointing out the shared moral vision and the shared rhetorical
style that serves as the means of expression for that moral vision in both literary and religious discourses. In other words, both the genres we are examining here, the qaṣīdah-poetry of the caliphal court and the khuṭbah-oratory of
Nahj al-balāghah are parts of a broader moral and political, as well as literaryrhetorical, discourse.
The effect of the attribution to ʿAlī of discourse that exhibits an extraordinary mastery of the 2nd/8th-3rd/9th century rhetorical features is two-fold:
first, it retrojects High ʿAbbāsid literary aesthetics and ideas back to the first
generation of Islam and, second, in doing so it validates and authenticates contemporary ʿAbbāsid ideas and forms of expression as the perpetuation of an
originary Arab-Islamic discourse.
Other passages in Nahj al-balāghah possess a near-universal resonance.
The moving istisqāʾ (prayer for rain) remains rhetorically effective and
evocative in our own day as its powerful fertility archetypes of death and
29 Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Nahj al-balāghah, 160-1.
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rebirth—drought and sterility versus rain and prosperity—find counterparts
in the Anglo-American poet T. S. Eliot’s (1888-1965) The Waste Land (1922),
and the two together reverberate in the Iraqi Modernist poet Badr Shākir
al-Sayyāb’s (1926-1964) Madīnah bilā Maṭar (City without Rain).30 For both
Arab and European civilizations these images and symbols are rooted in ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean fertility myths and rituals.31
Istisqāʾ (Plea for Rain)
And from one of his khuṭbahs (peace upon him) on the prayer for rain
O God, the tops of our crops have dried up and our land has turned to
dust. Our beasts are thirsty: they lie motionless in their folds and moan
like bereft mothers moaning for their young; they are tired of going to
and fro to pasture and of yearning for their water-holes! O God, have
mercy on the groans of those that groan, on the yearning of those that
yearn. O God, have mercy on their helplessness as they head out to pasture and their moaning as they lie in their folds! O God, we come out to
[pray to] You when the [drought]-years like journey-jaded she-camels return to us and clouds that promise rain betray us. You are the hope of the
afflicted and the beggars’ contentment. We call upon you when mankind
has despaired, the rain-clouds have been held back, and our [camel]
herds have perished, that You not blame us for our deeds nor punish us
for our offenses.
Spread your mercy over us in the bursting rain-clouds, the abundant
springtime, the delightful meadows, with a heavy downpour by which
You revive what has died and restore what has passed away. O God, [grant
us] a rain from You that revives and quenches, full and widespread, sweet
and blessed, wholesome and restoring to the pasturelands; a [rain that
makes] the plants grow, the branches bear fruit and the leaves turn green;
by which You refresh the weary among Your servants and revive the dead
from Your towns! O God, [grant us] a rain from You by which our highlands will be refreshed and our lowlands flow with water, and our land
be fertile; by which our herds will multiply, our outlying lands be soaked
with dew; and to which we have recourse for our forenoon draughts, from
30 On these themes and motifs as they occur in al-Sayyāb’s closer appropriation and reconfiguration of Eliot, see Hussein Noor Kadhim, “Rewriting The Waste Land: Badr Shākir
al-Sayyāb’s ‘Fī al-Maghrib al-ʿArabī’,” Journal of Arabic Literature 30 (1999): 128-70.
31 See, for example, Theodor Gaster, Thespis: Ritual, Myth, and Drama in the Ancient Middle
East (New York: Norton and Co., 1977).
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Your vast blessing and bountiful gifts, [which are bestowed] upon Your
creatures whose stores are exhausted or upon Your neglected wild beasts.
Send down upon us a soaking rain, flowing like abundant milk, pouring, whose showers contend with other showers and whose drops urge
on other drops; whose lightening is not false, whose horizon-spreading
clouds are not rainless; whose white clouds are not wispy and scattered
clouds and whose lights rains do not bring cold winds, until the droughtstricken flourish in the lush pasture it produces and the destitute are
revived by its blessing. [We implore] You to send down rain after [Your
servants] have suffered drought and to spread Your mercy [over us], for
You are the Benefactor to whom our praise is due.32
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
…….
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
32 Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Nahj al-balāghah, 222-4.
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Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
…….33
Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, City without Rain
…….
Thunderclouds pealing and flashing without rain.
We spent year after year after year watching over them,
And a wind like a hurricane neither passed like a hurricane
nor died down—we sleep and wake in fear of it.
…….
Our maidens are sorrowful and bewildered around Ishtar
Little by little, the moisture recedes from her face,
And branch after branch, the grapevine withers.
Slow is our death, sneaked between light and darkness,
…….
Are [the toothless lion’s eyes] two windows onto the realm of that black
world:
There, where every year he bears his fiery wound,
The wound of the spinning world, of its redeemer,
Its rescuer who, every year, comes back from there with flowers
And with rains—his hands wound us, so we wake up to his hands?
But years have passed, so many that we did not count
Without rain … not even a drop
And without flowers … not even a single bloom
And without fruit—As if our trimmed palm trees were idols we erected
Beneath which to wither and die
…….
And we are searching for you, [Ishtar], in the darkness, for two breasts,
for a nipple,
O you whose chest is the great horizon and whose breasts are the clouds
33
Eliot, T. S., The Waste Land, ed. Michael North (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 1-21,
ll. 327-56.
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You have heard our sobbing and saw how we are dying…. Water us!
…….
In an eternity of listening between the thunder-claps
We heard, not the murmur of the palm-trees under the pouring clouds
Nor what the wind whispered when the high-crowned trees got wet,
But the beating of hands and feet
And loud laughter and the sigh of a little girl who seized with her right
hand
A moon, fluttering like a butterfly, or a star … A gift of the rain-laden
cloud,
Upon tremors of water, a single rain-drop that a breeze whispered
So that we would know that Babylon would be washed of her sins.34
If we add to Eliot and al-Sayyāb a further comparison, this time from the
Arabic poetic tradition, we can elicit another dimension of meaning from ʿAlī’s
moving istisqāʾ. Although storm-scenes are known from pre-Islamic poetry—
most notably the one that seals the Muʿallaqah of Imruʾ al-Qays—a striking
counterpart to ʿAlī’s istisqāʾ occurs in a qaṣīdah by the Umayyad poet al-Akhṭal
(d. before 96/715) for his Umayyad liege-lords, in which the image of the poetsupplicant’s parched exhausted camels is followed by a benediction or prayer
for rain (istisqāʾ) for his Umayyad lord.
So emaciated are [our she-camels] their sunken eyes are like
the last remaining rain-water in hollow rocks
Or like exhausted wells.
The white camels’ eyes are hollow,
their girth ropes are doubled over
So gaunt are they from hardship and exertion.
…….
May God water a land, the best of whose people is Khālid,
With a cloud whose spouts disgorge abundant rain.
When the East Wind cuts through its crotches
Its water-laden lower parts flow like milk.
34 Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, Dīwān, 2 vols. (Bayrūt: Dār al-ʿAwdah, 1995) 2:33-8, ll. 20-3; 31-5;
38-47; 70-2; 83-91.
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When the wind shakes it, it drags its trains,
Like the ponderous gait of newly-calved she camels
tending their young.35
Especially evocative in both the Umayyad qaṣīdah and the Nahj al-balāghah
istisqāʾ is the description of the rain through the Bedouin (as opposed to Ancient
Near Eastern agrarian) imagery of the rain-revived meadows, camel-herds,
and abundant milk. Yet, however compelling the imagery, what al-Akhṭal’s full
qaṣīdah makes clear is that this blessing is invoked for the hoped-for justice of
his powerful, righteous, and munificent Umayyad overlords in procuring the
blood-wite for the poet’s slain kinsmen.36
In other words, there is a clear political and moral dimension, in which
fertility is the reward for virtue and justice and drought the punishment for
sin and oppression. This is evident in Eliot’s Waste Land, which draws on the
Fisher King of the Celtic Grail Legend, the (morally) wounded king who brings
drought and sterility upon his domain, as well as Ancient Near Eastern elements, to chronicle and condemn the moral and political decline of post-World
War I Europe; and in al-Sayyāb’s Madīnah bilā Maṭar which uses fertility ritual
images of death and rebirth in ancient Babylon as a metaphor for a call or hope
for revolution to overthrow oppressive regimes in post-World War II Iraq.
When we turn once more to ʿAlī’s istisqāʾ, we find that on the surface it reads
simply as a moving prayer for rain in time of drought, with the moral aspect just
barely mentioned: ‘We call upon you […] that You not blame us for our deeds
nor punish us for our offenses’. However, when compared with the other poetic
and religious images and understandings of drought and rainfall, such as those
in al-Akhṭal, Eliot, and al-Sayyāb, and, further, when read in the context of both
ʿAlī’s and al-Raḍī’s profound yearnings and disappointments, ʿAlī’s istisqāʾ can
be read as well as an impassioned plea for justice and for ʿAlid restoration.
Part II: Dispossession
This brings us to the moral-religious component of Nahj al-balāghah: divine
election versus worldly hegemony. As he states in his introduction, al-Raḍī
35 Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, The Poetics of Islamic Legitimacy: Myth, Gender, and
Ceremony in the Classical Arabic Ode (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana
University Press, 2002), 125-6; Arabic: al-Akhṭal Abū Mālik Ghiyāth ibn Ghawth al-Taghlibī,
Shiʿr al-Akhṭal…. ṣanʿat al-Sukkarī …, 2nd prt., 2 vols., ed. Fakhr al-Dīn Qabāwah (Bayrūt:
Dār al-Āfāq al-Jadīdah, 1979) 1:25-30, ll. 37-8; 52-4.
36 See Stetkevych, Poetics of Islamic Legitimacy, 110-43.
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did not merely collect and compile all the known works attributed to ʿAlī
ibn Abī Ṭālib. Rather, he selected, edited, and ordered them in a careful curation process.37 My argument in the present essay is that al-Raḍī’s purpose
was not merely to preserve or edit ʿAlī’s words, but through this compilation
to establish ʿAlid legitimacy in the moral, if not necessarily political, leadership of the Islamic Ummah. That is, to establish that the true leaders of the
Ummah are not those who have achieved worldly dominion over the Ummah
and Dār al-Islām—the first three caliphs, the Umayyads and, by implication,
the ʿAbbāsids—but rather Allāh’s true elect, the ʿAlids, Ahl al-Bayt. If the rhetorical component is more related to ‘form’, the moral-religious component is
related to ‘content’ (although these are not so neatly separable). A key theme of
many khuṭbahs is the moral depravity of the ʿAlids’ enemies: they are not mere
political enemies from an opposing party, but rather they exhibit grave moral
failings that disqualify them from leadership of the Ummah or the allegiance
of believing Muslims.
The moral logic of this emphasis on the treachery and depravity of the
ʿAlids’ foes and rivals is two-fold: it serves as a foil for ʿAlid fidelity, loyalty,
and virtue on the one hand, and a justification (or excuse) for ʿAlid militarypolitical failure on the other: The ʿAlids didn’t fail to acquire the caliphate
through any fault of their own, but rather through preserving their virtue in
the face of the treachery of their opponents (above all, the first three caliphs,
Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, and ʿUthmān; ʿAlī’s opponents at the Battle of the Camel:
ʿĀʾishah, Ṭalḥah, al-Zubayr; and Muʿāwiyah and the Umayyads generally; as
well as the Khārijites, who rebelled against ʿAlī after al-Ṣiffīn and opposed him
at Nahrawān).38 For al-Raḍī, there can be no doubt that Ahl al-Bayt were and
are the rightful rulers of the Ummah and that Islamic history is therefore the
history of ʿAlid dispossession.39
The renowned al-Khuṭbah al-shiqshiqiyyah presents a full moral condemnation of all of these, beginning with those—that is all of the caliphs
except himself—who usurped the caliphate from him (ʿAlī). Further, just as
37 Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Nahj al-balāghah, 18, 22.
38 For a concise biography of ʿAlī, including the figures and events cited here and their
dates, Robert M. Gleave, “ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib” in: Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, ed. Kate
Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowson. Consulted online
on 02 September 2019 <http://dx.doi.org.proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_
COM_26324>.
The khuṭbahs on these topics are too numerous to list here. For a quick reference, refer
to the list with topics in al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Nahj al-balāghah, 65-75.
39 On this concept in the poetry of al-Raḍī, see Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, “Al-Sharīf
al-Raḍī and the Poetics of ʿAlid Legitimacy: Elegy for al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī on ʿĀshūrāʾ,
391 A.H.,” Journal of Arabic Literature 38 (2007): 293-323.
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he condemns his enemies (the party of ʿĀʾishah, Ṭalḥah, and al-Zubayr; the
Khārijites) as having broken their oaths of allegiance to him, and the Umayyads
(I presume) as indulging in luxury while oppressing the poor, he declares that
he would have abandoned his caliphate but for his honoring the allegiance of
his followers and the moral obligation to defend the downtrodden from the
oppression of the mighty and powerful.40
Furthermore, the spoken word, the performative speech act, of the oath
emerges as the foremost measure of a person’s moral worth. This extraordinary valuation of the word goes a long way in helping us to understand the
value and power of rhetoric in classical Islamic culture, in the doctrine of iʿjāz
al-Qurʾān, and in the title and intention of Nahj al-balāghah. In this respect, as
with the balāghah of the Qurʾān, the term means that the veracious utterance
is backed up by deeds.
Ultimately, it seems to me that the gist of Nahj al-balāghah, or at least of
my argument, is that the ‘winners’ of worldly dominion are not thereby true
Muslims nor the ones best suited, or appointed, to lead the Ummah to God,
true religion and salvation. In other words, worldly success is not proof of divine support or election, if those worldly gains (especially the caliphate) are
ill-gotten. Rather, as embodied in this very text, it is the words of ʿAlī that can
best lead the Islamic Ummah to true religion, God and salvation. He—and
his descendants—are therefore the legitimate leaders of the Islamic Ummah,
and their way or method (nahj) is not that of worldly military and political
power. Rather, they have abdicated that power in favor of the power of the
word: Nahj al-balāghah. Just as the rhetorical beauty and power of the Qurʾān
is the evidentiary miracle that proves the Prophethood of Muḥammad, the eloquence of Nahj al-balāghah is the proof of the election of ʿAlī and Ahl al-Bayt.
Somewhat ironically then, the ʿAlids’ political dispossession becomes proof of
their spiritual election.
Dispossession and vindication come together in those khuṭbahs that couple
condemnation of ʿAlī’s enemies and usurpers of his rights with predictions of
their worldly success and the concomitant corruption of Islam and oppression
of the Ummah, including, in some cases, their eventual downfall. Marwān ibn
al-Ḥakam (d. 65/685), who would go on to found the Marwānid branch of the
Umayyad caliphate, sided with Ṭalḥah and al-Zubayr at the Battle of the Camel
(Yawm al-Jamal, 36/656), even though after the murder of ʿUthmān he had declared his allegiance to ʿAlī. In Nahj al-balāghah, this treachery and moral depravity take the form of the betrayal of an oath and, by contrast, the caliph ʿAlī
40 Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Nahj al-balāghah, 39-45.
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embodies or performs the celebrated Arab-Islamic virtue of ḥilm, that is the
forbearance and mercy of the powerful toward the weak:
Among his words (Peace upon him) is what he said to Marwān ibn
al-Ḥakam in Basra:
They said: Marwān ibn al-Ḥakam was taken captive at the Battle of the
Camel (Yawm al-Jamal), so he asked al-Ḥasan and al-Ḥusayn (Peace
upon them) to intercede for him with the Commander of the Faithful
[ʿAlī] (Peace upon him). So, they spoke to [ʿAlī] concerning him, and he
granted his release. Then they asked him: ‘Did he pledge allegiance to
you, Commander of the Faithful?’ He (Peace upon him) replied: ‘Did he
not pledge his allegiance to me after the murder of Uthmān?! I have no
need of his allegiance! It’s a Jewish [treacherous, double-crossing] hand[shake]! If he pledged to me with his hand, he would betray me with his
ass. Surely his rule will last no longer than it takes for a dog to lick its nose.
He will be the father of the four chiefs and through him and his progeny
the Ummah will meet with a red [blood-soaked] day.’41
In another sermon, also against the Umayyads, composed after his defeat of the
Khārijites at the Battle of Nahrawān (38/658), ʿAlī condemns Umayyad fitnah
(sedition, discord, dissension), that is, against Allāh’s duly appointed Caliph,
ʿAlī himself. In it he describes and foretells the Umayyads’ moral depravity, corruption, and oppression of the Ummah, but also his own eventual vindication:
[….] Certainly, when dissensions arise, they are confusing, but when they
are over and done, their [lesson] is clear. They are unrecognizable when
they approach, but unmistakable when they retreat. They hover [over the
land] like the wind, hitting one country and missing another. Surely the
fitnah I fear most for you is that of the Banū Umayyah, for it is a blind,
dark fitnah: this affair [of theirs] encompassed the entire [Ummah], and
yet it singled out [Ahl al-Bayt] for misfortune; its affliction struck those
that discerned what it was and missed those that were blind to it. I swear
to Allāh, after I am gone, you will find the Banū Umayyah evil masters to
you, like a vicious old she-camel that bites the one who tries to milk her:
she bites with her mouth, strikes with her fore-leg, and kicks with her
hind-leg, and thus prevents him from obtaining her milk. They will not
stop until they have left only those of you that are beneficial to them or
not harmful, and their affliction will not cease until none of you [can]
41 Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Nahj al-balāghah, 128-9. See commentary.
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obtain anything from them but what a slave obtains from his master or
a servant from his lord. Their fitnah will come to you, terrifying and deformed, [like] dark Jāhilī nights, with no light for guidance nor any roadmark to show the way.
We, Ahl al-Bayt, are a refuge from this discord; we are not the ones who
sow it. Then Allāh will strip them away from you, as skin is stripped from
flesh, by [the hand of] one who will make them graze on humiliation,
drive them harshly, and water them [at a trough] filled to the brim [with
abuse], who will give them no [fodder] but the sword[’s blade] and no
saddle-pad but fear. And then Quraysh will be willing to give the whole
world and all that is in it, to see me, standing there with them—if only for
as long as it takes to slaughter a she-camel—to accept from them some of
[the allegiance] that I ask of them today, but they refuse to give!42
Perhaps the most important feature of those khuṭbahs that predict Umayyad
rule and tyranny is not that they re-enact the Qurʾānic predictions of future
events that are among the iʿjāz al-Qurʾān proofs of Muḥammad’s Prophethood,
but that they serve to cast the usurpation of the caliphate by the Umayyads
and others as part of a divine plan, a teleological Islamic history in which, as
numerous khuṭbahs in Nahj al-balāghah predict, Ahl al-Bayt will emerge in the
end victorious.
Political dispossession or disenfranchisement constitutes, as well, the most
powerful affective bond between al-Raḍī and his forebear ʿAlī. For the Imāmī
Shīʿah, and for al-Raḍī in particular, the belief in the righteousness and rightful political claims of the ʿAlids does not diminish the pain and humiliation of
the injustices they have suffered—above all ʿAlī’s loss of the caliphate and the
martyrdom of al-Ḥusayn. Nor does it extinguish embers of hope or belief in ultimate redress and vindication. For al-Raḍī, with his impeccable ʿAlid pedigree
and ultimately frustrated caliphal ambitions, all of this was intensely personal.
In a number of his poems, his sense of outrage and dispossession, or at least
entitlement, is palpable, and forges an affective bond between him and his
Ahl al-Bayt forebears. The cadences, diction, and rhetoric of dispossession that
emerge so forcefully in the khuṭbahs of ʿAlī in Nahj al-balāghah to express both
outrage and bereavement find their poetic counterparts in al-Raḍī’s very moving ʿĀshūrāʿ poem of 391/1000:
42 Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Nahj al-balāghah, 184-5. See commentary.
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There were funerals in Iraq that Umayyads in Syria
Counted among their feast-days.
They did not fear the Prophet’s wrath, but thought
That what the Prophet sowed was theirs to reap.
They sold the clear path of religion for pathless error,
And for righteousness they purchased the perils of transgression.
They have made of Allāh’s Messenger an enemy—
What an evil store they have laid by for Judgment Day!
The offspring of the Prophet [trampled by] their recalcitrant steeds;
On the heads of their lances the Prophet’s blood!
O woe is me for an ʿAlid band now subject to the [Banū] Umayyah
After ruling them with might.
They placed in their noses the nose-bits of disgrace;
About their necks they tied the neck-ropes of oppression.
[The Umayyads] claimed that religion allowed them to kill [the ʿAlids].
Isn’t this the religion they got from their forefathers?
Invoking their Jāhilī legacy [they slew them]
And slaked [with blood] the burning thirst of ancient rancor.
They usurped the affairs of those that were absent,
And imposed their will upon those who were present.
Allāh got to [the ʿAlids’] souls before you [Umayyads] could;
You obtained [nothing but] the sins of [slaying/defiling] their bodies.
If [the ʿAlids’] domed tents were pulled down,
Then surely the tent-pole of religion was toppled first.
The Caliphate has been wrested from its [true] people,
By those of the white [banners] [Umayyads]
and those of the black [banners] [ʿAbbāsids].
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Umayyad infidels have defiled its minbars,
Rapacious wolves, they mount the wooden [steps].43
‫شا ِم م ِنْ أعْيَادِه َا‬
ّ َ ‫ُأمَوِ ي ّة ٌ ب ِال‬
‫ق تَع ُ ُ ّدها‬
ِ ‫ك َان َْت م َآتِم ُ بالع ِرَا‬
١٩
،‫َت بَصَائ ِر َ دِينِهَا بِضَلالِها‬
ْ ‫ب َاع‬
٢١
َ ُ ‫ز َ ْرع‬
‫الن ّب ِ ِيّ مَظ َِن ّة ً لِ حِصَادِه َا‬
َ َ‫ما ر َاقَب َْت غَضَب‬
‫ و َق َ ْد غَد َا‬،ّ‫الن ّب ِ ِي‬
‫َت لِيَو ْ ِم م َع َادِه َا‬
ْ ‫ْس ما ذَخَر‬
َ ‫فَلَب ِئ‬
،‫صم َائِهَا‬
َ ‫خ‬
ُ ْ‫ل ال� ل�ه ِ م ِن‬
َ ‫ت رَسُو‬
ْ َ ‫جَعَل‬
‫َت ُأم ََي ّة َ بَعْد َ ع ِّز ِ ق ِيَادِه َا‬
ْ ‫تَبِع‬
،ٍ ‫و َا لَهْف َتاه ُ ل ِع ُصْ بَة ٍ عَلَو َِي ّة‬
٢٤
،‫س َو ّغَ قَتْلَه َا‬
َ ‫ن‬
َ ‫ن الد ِّي‬
ّ َ ‫ز َع َم َْت ب ِأ‬
٢٦
‫َت م َع َاطِبَ غَيِّها ب ِرَشَادِه َا‬
ْ ‫و َشَر‬
َ ُ ‫وَدَم‬
‫س صِع َادِه َا‬
ِ ‫الن ّب ِ ِيّ عَلى رُؤ ُو‬
َ ‫ل‬
،‫َاب مَطِيِّهَا‬
ِ ‫الن ّب ِ ِيّ عَلى صِع‬
ُ ‫ن َ ْس‬
٢٠
٢٢
٢٣
َ ‫ِلاط وَس ْ ِم‬
‫الضّ ي ِْم في أجْ يَادِه َا‬
َ ‫وَع‬
،‫ل في آنافِه َا‬
ِ ّ ّ ‫ت عِرَانَ ال ُذ‬
ْ َ ‫جَعَل‬
‫ل م ِنْ أَ حْ ق َادِه َا‬
ْ ‫شف‬
َ َ‫و‬
ِ ّ ِ ‫َت قَدِيم َ الغ‬
،‫طَلَب َْت ت ُر َاثَ الجاه ِل َِي ّة ِ عِنْد َه َا‬
٢٧
‫كسَب ْتُم ُ الآث َام َ في أجْ سَادِه َا‬
َ َ‫و‬
،‫حه َا‬
ِ ‫ال� ل�ه ُ سَابَقَك ُم ْ إلى أ ْرو َا‬
٢٩
‫ن ع َنْ أَ جْدادِه َا‬
ُ ‫ْس هَذ َا الد ِّي‬
َ ‫أَ و َلَي‬
‫ت عَلى ش ُ َهّادِه َا‬
ْ َ ‫َت بِمَا شَاء‬
ْ ‫و َقَض‬
‫َت بالأَ ْمر ِ ع َنْ غ َُي ّابِهَا‬
ْ ‫و َاسْ ت َأْ ث َر‬
‫ل عِمَادِه َا‬
َ ْ ‫ت عِمَاد ُ الد ِّي ِن قَب‬
ْ ّ‫خ َر‬
‫ ف َ َإن ّمَا‬، ُ‫ك الق ِبَاب‬
َ ْ ‫َت تِل‬
ْ ‫إ ْن قُوِ ّض‬
‫تَن ْز ُو ذِئَابُهُم ُ عَلى أعْوَادِه َا‬
،ٍ ‫ج ُأم ََي ّة‬
ُ ‫َت م َناب ِر َه َا عُلُو‬
ْ ‫َطمَس‬
‫شعْبِهَا بِبَيَاضِه َا وَسَوَادِه َا‬
َ ْ‫ع َن‬
ً ‫َت م َْزوِ ي ّة‬
ْ ‫ن الخ ِلاف َة َ أصْ بَح‬
َّ ‫إ‬
٢٥
٢٨
٣٠
٣١
٣٢
To a surprising degree al-Raḍī’s poetic depiction of the virtue and divine election of the ʿAlids as opposed to the Umayyads’ moral depravity, oppression, and
usurpation of ʿAlid rights echoes the language, images, rhetoric, and arguments
of the khuṭbahs of Nahj al-balāghah. In rhetorical terms we see, for example,
the use of antithesis (tibāq) to express the Umayyad overturning of legitimate
43 For a full translation and discussion of this poem, see Stetkevych, “Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī.” For
the text, see al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Dīwān, 2 vols., ed. and intro. Iḥsān ʿAbbās (Bayrūt: Dār Ṣādir,
1994) 1:360-4; ll. 19-32.
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Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī and Nahj al-balāghah
rule: ʿAlid funerals (a reference to the slaying of al-Ḥusayn at Karbalāʾ) have become Umayyad feast-days (19); error has replaced righteousness (21); the moral
universe is turned upside down as the ʿAlids who once ruled the Umayyads
are now subject to their rule (24). Graphic metaphors are especially affectively
powerful in conveying the ʿAlids’ subjection to the Umayyads: ‘the nose-bits of
disgrace’, ‘the neck-ropes of humiliation’ (25), and ‘rapacious wolves’ for the
Umayyads (32). Metonymy is found as well: ‘white’ [banners] for the Umayyads
and ‘black’ for the ʿAbbāsids (32). Al-madhhab al-kalāmī with its characteristic
verbal and mental twists is evident in the use of double antithesis (usurp x
impose, present x absent) to express the moral inversion of Umayyad rule (28).
As the allusion to the ʿAbbāsids’ black banners in the poem above suggests,
al-Raḍī is concerned not only with past outrages and grievances, but also with
the contemporary status of the ʿAlids, himself in particular. Both ambitious
and frustrated in his political aspirations, he shifted loyalties, for example from
the ʿAbbāsid caliphs to the Būyid emirs, in the hope of achieving the recognition and position to which he felt his talent and ʿAlid lineage entitled him. His
poetry is replete with references to his status and lineage, especially vis-à-vis
the reigning caliphs of his time, and his sense of grievance and injustice is palpable. He addresses the ʿAbbāsids, for example, demanding they relinquish the
Caliphate, for their lineage cannot compare with his:
Return the inheritance of Muḥammad, return it!
For neither the staff nor the [Prophet’s] mantle are yours!
Does blood like Fāṭimah’s flow in your veins,
Or do you have a grandfather like Muḥammad?44
ُ ‫ و َلا البُرْد‬، ْ ‫ْس الق َضِ يبُ �لَك ُم‬
َ ‫لَي‬
‫ح َمّ ٍد ج َ ُ ّد‬
َ ُ ‫أَ ْم ه َلْ �لَك ُم ْ كَم‬
،‫رُدّوا ت ُر َاثَ مُحَم ّ ٍد رُدّوا‬
،ٍ ‫كف َاطِمَة‬
َ ْ ‫ه َلْ ع َ َّرق َْت ف ِيك ُم‬
He closes a qaṣīdah to the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Qādir dated 382/992 declaring:
When men compete in glory there is no difference between us
At all: each of us is of the noblest origins—
44 Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Dīwān, 1:407.
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Except for the Caliphate: I am deprived of it
While you are crowned!45
ُ‫أَ ب َدا ً كِلان َا في المَع َالي مُعْرِق‬
ُ‫ و َأن ْتَ مُطَ َو ّق‬،‫ل مِنْهَا‬
ٌ ِ‫أَ نا عاط‬
،‫ُت‬
ٌ ‫ تَف َاو‬،ِ‫ يَوْم َ الفخ َار‬،‫م َا بَي ْنَنا‬
‫ فَإن ّني‬،َ‫إلا ّ الخ ِلاف َة َ م َي ّزَتْك‬
As for the Fātimids, he expresses his resentment that he should live in ignominy under the ʿAbbāsids in Baghdad, while in Egypt his kin hold sway:
I am clothed in humiliation in my enemies’ abodes,
While in Egypt rules an ʿAlid caliph,
Whose father is my father, whose master is my master,
While [in Baghdad] one distant [in kinship] oppresses me.
My blood is joined to his by the two lords of the people,
Muḥammad and ʿAlī.46
ّ‫و َبِمِصْر َ الخل َِيف َة ُ الع َلَو ُِي‬
‫ل في دِي َارِ الأعَادي‬
ّ َ ّ ‫ألب َُس ال ُذ‬
ّ‫س جَم ِيعا ً مُحَم ّدٌ وِعَل ِ ُي‬
ِ
‫ف ع ِْرقِي ب ِعِر ْقِه ِ سَي ِّدا الن ّا‬
َّ ‫ل‬
‫ي‬
ّ ُ ِ ‫ إذا ضام َني الب َعيد ُ القَص‬، َ‫ي‬
‫م َنْ أبُوه ُ أبي وَمَو ْلاه ُ مَو ْلا‬
My point here is that for al-Raḍī the connection to ʿAlī is not merely religious
and genealogical, rather he identifies deeply and personally with the tragedy
and dispossession of his ancestor as victim—of betrayal and treachery, as
one willing to sacrifice worldly dominion—the caliphate—for the sake of the
Ummah. Here, too, we can propose a further parallel between ʿAlī’s surrender of the worldly caliphate to devote himself to the moral guidance of the
Ummah, and al-Raḍī’s abandonment of caliphal aspirations in the mid390s/1000s to guide the Ummah through his compilation in 400/1010 of Nahj
al-balāghah.
45 Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Dīwān, 2:42. I read fikhār (VN Form III) for fakhār (VN Form I).
46 Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Dīwān, 2:576.
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Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī and Nahj al-balāghah
Part III: The Lyric Sensibility
This is the point at which we can link al-Raḍī’s compilation of Nahj al-balāghah
to his poetic production. In the Arabic poetic tradition, since pre-Islamic
times, the locus of loss and nostalgia, the poetic self as victim of betrayal and
treachery, is the nasīb. The major images of loss in this eminently lyric and
elegiac opening section of the classical Arabic qaṣīdah are the abandoned
Bedouin campsite where the poet once dwelt with his beloved and her tribe;
the description of the irretrievably lost beloved—her beauty, her fickleness,
her treachery—especially the breaking of promises; the scene of the tribe and
its women, the poet’s beloved among them, packing up and departing; and, of
course, the unrequited lover-poet’s heart-break and erotic suffering.
In the present study I would like to propose a metaphorical connection
between ʿAlid political loss and dispossession as explicitly expressed in the
khuṭbahs of Nahj al-balāghah and poems such as al-Raḍī’s ʿĀshūrāʾ qaṣīdah
and other poems cited above on the one hand and, on the other, the nostalgicelegiac lyricism of the nasīb section of the qaṣīdah, as well as other short poetic
forms, in al-Raḍī’s Dīwān. Moreover, might it be this intimate experience of
and identification with ʿAlid (including the poet’s father al-Sharīf al-Ṭāhir and
the poet himself) dispossession and tragedy that engendered al-Raḍī’s moving
lyricism? My goal in the present study is not so much prove this connection—
for how can one prove a metaphorical connection?—but rather to explore it.
A first example is the opening of the nasīb from a long qaṣīdah of fakhr, that
is, the poet’s boast, usually of himself, but in this case directed toward praising
his ʿAlid forefathers, and his father, al-Sharīf al-Ṭāhir, in particular:
1. He was true to his promises to the departed tribe,
but they betrayed him;
How often did they make a promise to the captive heart,
and then betray it?
2. It did not bother them that they
withheld abundant gifts,
Since they [always] gave little
and put off their giving.
3. Does a day go by without a side-glance,
then a tear,
Over the traces of an abode,
or a mount stopped there [for its rider to weep]?
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Stetkevych
4. Many a band of riders on their camel-saddles,
find their necks turned to look back
To youthful passion by a time long gone
and a familiar dwelling-place.
5. Then there is an impassioned lover,
his hand clasped to his heart,
Who out of ecstasy mounts a hill
and looks down [from it],
6. And one shedding tears, followed by a sigh [so deep]
It almost straightens out his curving ribs.
7. He fulfilled his due of moans of ardent longing,
then turned aside
At the abode of passion,
his heart athrob and trembling.
8. But moaning was of no avail;
until distance came between us
And [fate] shot at us
its well-trimmed and arrogant arrow.
9. As if the nights had sworn
a covenant
That the departed friends would never
meet again.47
‫و َكَم ْ و َع َدوا الق َل ْبَ المُع ََن ّى و َلم ْ يَف ُوا‬
،‫ و َأخْلَف ُوا‬، ِ‫و َفَى بِم َوَاعيدِ الخَليط‬
١
‫ف‬
ُ ّ ‫يٌ م ُو ََق‬
ّ ِ ‫ أ ْو مَط‬،ٍ‫عَلى رَس ْ ِم دار‬
ٌ ‫ل يَو ْ ٍم لَفْت َة ٌ ث ُم ّ عَبْرَة‬
ِ ّ ُ ‫أَ في ك‬
٣
َ ‫ن‬
‫ إذ م َن ّوا قليلا ً وَسَو َّفُوا‬، ‫ل‬
َ ِ‫م‬
ِ ‫الن ّي‬
‫و َما ضَرَّه ُ ْم أ ْن لم ْ يَج ُودوا بمُقْن ٍِع‬
‫ف‬
ُ َ ‫ ع َ ْهدٌ ق َديم ٌ و َمأْ ل‬،‫الصبا‬
ِّ ‫لِداعِ ي‬
،ْ‫ب عَلى الأكْ وَارِ يَثْنِي رِقابَهم‬
ٍ ْ‫وَرَك‬
ِ ّ‫الض‬
ُ ‫ج‬
‫ف‬
ُ ‫لوع تَث َ ّق‬
ُ ‫تَكاد ُ لها ع ُو‬
،ً ‫وَمُسْتَعْبِرٍ ق َ ْد أَ ت ْب َ َع ال َد ّ ْم َع ز َف ْرَة‬
‫ِف‬
ُ ‫وَم ِنْ طَر ٍَب يَعْلُو الي َفاعَ و َيُشْر‬
‫ُف‬
ُ ‫بِدارِ الجَو َى و َالق َل ْبُ يَهْف ُو و َيَرْج‬
٢
٤
،‫كفَّه‬
َ َ‫ج ٍد ق َ ْد أل ْزَم َ الق َل ْب‬
ِ ‫فم ِنْ وا‬
٥
‫ق و َان ْث َن َى‬
ِ ْ ‫شو‬
ّ َ ‫قض َى ما قض َى م ِنْ أَ ن ّة ال‬
٧
٦
47 Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Dīwān, 2:17.
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Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī and Nahj al-balāghah
‫ِف‬
ُ ‫وَحَت ّى رَم َان َا الأزْلَم ُالمُت َغ َ ْطر‬
‫ف‬
ُ ّ ‫ل م ُؤ َل‬
ٌ ْ ‫ب ِأ ْن لا ي ُر َى فيه َِنّ شَم‬
،‫ل البُعْد ُ بَي ْنَنَا‬
َ َ ‫ن حَت ّى ز َاي‬
ِ ْ‫و َلم ْ تُغ‬
َ ‫ن‬
،ً ‫الل ّيَالي ك َُنّ آليَْنَ ح َلْف َة‬
ّ ‫ك َأ‬
٨
٩
This opening passage reads initially and essentially as the nasībic prelude to
the classical Arabic qaṣīdah. It is only within the broader context of the poem
and Arab-Islamic history that a metaphorical or allegorical reading of the
erotic loss and irrevocable separation of lovers as ʿAlid political dispossession
emerges.
In verses 1-2, the poetic tradition first guides the reader to read the 3ms
pronoun ‘he’ as a referent to the poet-lover persona who is the speaker of the
poem. However, a rhetorical-grammatical feature peculiar to Arabic poetics
(well-attested in the Qurʾān as well as poetry) is also at play here, that is, iltifāt
(lit. ‘transition’, ‘pronoun shift’), whereby the pronoun can change in person
(from ‘he’ to ‘I’, from ‘she’ to ‘you’ s.) and also in number and gender (singular,
dual, plural; masculine and feminine) without changing, at least at the surface level, the antecedent. The effect, nevertheless, is to allow, at least on the
allegorical or metaphorical level, a shifting of identities. Is ‘he’ in verse 1 the
generic persona of the poet-lover? a more autobiographical al-Raḍī? or perhaps his father or a forefather—al-Ḥusayn or ʿAlī? Likewise, ‘they,’ on the surface and according to Arabic poetic convention, is the tribe of the beloved,
but also, as a synecdoche of the whole for the part, the beloved herself. The
loyalty of the poet-lover and his beloved’s betrayal are poetic staples of both
ghazal love lyric and nasīb, and the ‘stinginess’ at this level is not of material
gifts, but the beloved’s withholding sexual favors from her unrequited and frustrated lover. In verse 2 the beloved’s ‘giving little’ and ‘postponing’ is both her
coquetry and virtue in the face of her lover’s ardent pleas. Thus, with the help
of the political context of the poem and the meticulous employ of iltifāt, the
erotic promises kept and betrayed, the withholding of favors, at the same time
express the personal and political betrayals suffered by Ahl al-Bayt, whether
we think al-Raḍī is referring primarily to himself, his father, or his forefathers
more generally.
The result is that the pain and suffering of Ahl al-Bayt, whose loyalty and
virtue was met with political betrayal and treachery, as so forcefully expressed
in the khuṭbahs of Nahj al-balāghah, is evoked here with the heightened emotional force of deeply felt erotic loyalty and betrayal. Ahl al-Bayt, like the betrayed lover of ghazal and nasīb, are innocent, indeed virtuous, victims. This
deep political encoding is a well-established feature of the Arabic poetic tradition, in which the very personal and intimately felt emotions evoked in the
preludic nasīb engage the reader affectively, even as they intimate larger social
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and political issues. Even in the Jāhiliyyah, the qaṣīdah’s opening nasīb section
could encode tribal or personal animosities, rivalries and discord, a phenomenon that reaches its climax in Kaʿb ibn Zuhayr’s famous poem of apology to
the Prophet Muḥammad, in which the beautiful, but treacherous and fickle
beloved of the nasīb must be taken to allude to the poet’s betrayal by his tribe,
the Banū Muzaynah, and not a love affair gone sour.48
In the poem at hand, the following verses (3-9) bring the reader to the most
tradition-honored theme of nasībic suffering: stopping to weep at the now ruined and deserted campsite, where once the poet-lover and his beloved had
dwelt. The motifs and diction of are those of the Arabic ‘poetics of nostalgia’:
glancing, then weeping at the ruined Bedouin campsite, longing for the irrevocable past, lost happiness and bygone youth, and unending separation.49
These are achieved in this moving qaṣīdah with great delicacy and charm, the
depth of passion balanced with the elegance of poetic expression. What is essential to the present study, however, is that the nasīb, here as in the qaṣīdah
tradition generally, concludes on a note of loss and despair. In this case,
al-Raḍī’s nasīb perfectly conveys the despair of ʿAlid political dispossession. At
the same time, the nasībic despair sets the stage for redemption—both emotional and political—in the ensuing fakhr section of the poem, in which, again,
as in many of the khuṭbahs of Nahj al-balāghah, the Ahl al-Bayt reclaim their
moral, if not political, authority over the Islamic Ummah.50 It is of further note
that in the Arabic tradition the same poetics of loss that is so exquisitely refined
48 See Stetkevych, Poetics of Islamic Legitimacy, on this phenomenon in Kaʿb (48-79); in
al-Mutanabbī (212-25); for a particularly charming case, see Abū Firās al-Ḥamdānī’s
poem, in Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, “Performative Poetics in ʿAbbāsid Poetry: A
Re-Reading of Abū Firās al-Ḥamdānī’s Rāʾiyyah: Arāka ʿaṣiyya al-damʿi,” Annals of the
Japan Association of Middle Eastern Studies 29.2 (2013): 107-44. Presumably, of course,
there are numerous nasībs that may have contained political allusions in their original
settings that are no longer detectable to us.
Interestingly, almost 100 years ago (1926), Ṭāhā Ḥusayn proposed that the Umayyad
period emergence and flowering in al-Ḥijāz, of both the explicit erotic (ibāḥī) ghazal
of the Meccan and Medinan aristocracy and the chaste ʿUdhrī ghazal of the outlying
Bedouin lands may be an expression of the political disenfranchisement of Arab lands
as the Umayyads made their caliphal seat in Shām (Greater Syria) and the opposition
(ʿAlid supporters) in Iraq. What is of interest to me in his suggestion is the metaphorical
connection this would imply between political status and poetic expression, in which
the contenders for hegemony exercise the full qaṣīdah form of praise, boast, invective
(madīḥ, fakhr, hijāʾ), etc., whereas the disenfranchised limit themselves to lyric ghazal.
Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, Ḥadīth al-Arbiʿāʾ, al-juzʿ al-awwal (al-Qāhirah: Dār al-Maʿārif, n.d.), 187-90.
49 On this quintessential theme of the Arabic poetic tradition, see Jaroslav Stetkevych, The
Zephyrs of Najd: The Poetics of Nostalgia in the Classical Arabic Nasīb, Chicago, 1993.
50 I hope to deal more extensively with this poem on another occasion.
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Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī and Nahj al-balāghah
in the nasīb is also employed in elegy (rithāʾ), so that it appears once more
in the ʿĀshūrāʾ poetry of lamentation for the slaying of al-Ḥusayn at Karbalāʾ
(10 Muḥarram 61/680).51
I don’t believe that there is any way to ‘prove’ a poet’s metaphorical or allegorical intent, but perhaps in a belated ‘Structuralist’ exercise, we can compare the elegiac naṣīb of this poem with the opening of a poem composed
by al-Raḍī in 380/690 on the occasion of his father’s release from prison in
Fars and reinstatement in his positions of amīr al-Ḥajj, naqīb al-ʿAlawiyyīn, and
al-qāʾim ʿalā al-maẓālim under the Būyids in Baghdād. We note that the celebratory air of the opening is achieved precisely by the inversion of the tropes
of the elegiac nasīb:
1. Look at the days—how they are returning!
At illustrious and noble [ranks/deeds]—how they increase!
2. And at fate, whose affection, after it was distant, has now returned,
So the thirsty are now quenched and [once dry] branches sprout
[green] leaves.
3. Blessings that have enraged his enemies
And left them shaking, burning with anger.
4. The water of youth has returned to the days,
Life is fresh [once more], and the nights are soft and tender.52
ُ ‫كي َْف تَز ِيد‬
َ ّ ِ‫وإلى المَع َال ِي الغُر‬
،ُ ‫كي َْف تَع ُود‬
َ ‫ُأنظُر ْ إلى الأي ّا ِم‬
١
،ِ ‫ن على العَد ُ ّوِ ب ِغَيْظِه‬
َ ْ‫ن ِعَمٌ طَلَع‬
٣
ُ ‫ و َأَ ْور َقَ ع ُود‬،ٌ‫ح َظمْآن‬
َ ‫فَارْتا‬
،ُ ‫ و َعاوَد َ ع َ ْطف َه‬،‫ن نَبَا‬
ِ ‫وإلى الز َّما‬
ٌ ّ ‫ْش غ‬
َ ،‫َض‬
ُ ‫والل ّيَال ِي غِيد‬
ُ ‫فالعَي‬
،‫ق َ ْد عَاوَد َ الأي ّام َ ماء ُ شَبابِها‬
ُ ‫ن يَمِيد‬
ِ ‫فَتَرَكْ ن َه ُ حَم ِر َ الجنََا‬
٢
٤
Far from the mood and tropes of defeat, despair, victimhood, and irrevocable
loss of the nasīb, here time and fate have reversed the (poetically) irreversible:
the long-lost days of youth have returned. Especially rhetorically effective is
the second hemistich of verse 4: with its near jinās (paronomasia, root-play)
on the almost synonymous ghaḍḍ (fresh, juicy, succulent—of a plant; young
and tender—of a girl or youth) and ghīd (pl. of aghyad, m /ghaydāʾ, f.) (supple,
51 See Stetkevych, “Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī,” 298-307; and on the shared tropes and images of naṣīb
and rithāʾ, Stetkevych, Abū Tammām, 315-32.
52 Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Dīwān, 1:310-2.
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Stetkevych
pliant—of a plant or branch; soft, delicate, tender—of a girl). Further, the Arab
reader will note that al-Raḍī has skillfully evoked a famous nasīb verse by Abū
Tammām, the ʿAbbāsid master-poet unrivalled in his metaphors personifying
abstractions, such as time and fate, life and death. However, the successorpoet, while employing the exact same expression: wa-al-ʿayshu ghaḍḍun, has
transformed it from a rhetorical question, whose nasībic answer is invariably
and necessarily negative:
Perhaps I’ll see you. Then shall I, beholding you, rejoice?
Will life be tender? Time a beardless youth?53
ٌ ّ ‫ْش غ‬
َ ‫َض‬
ُ ‫والز ّمانُ غُلام‬
ُ ‫والعَي‬
ٍ ‫ك ب ِغِبْطَة‬
ِ ‫ك فَه َل أرا‬
ِ ‫ولَق َد ْ أرا‬
into a joyous declaration of a near-miraculous occurrence that yet retains the
poignant emotions of the nasīb:
The water of youth has returned to the days,
Life is fresh [once more], and the nights are soft and tender.
ٌ ّ ‫ْش غ‬
َ ،‫َض‬
ُ ‫والل ّيَال ِي غِيد‬
ُ ‫فالعَي‬
،‫ق َ ْد عَاوَد َ الأي ّام َ ماء ُ شَبابِها‬
٤
A final example from the qaṣīdahs of al-Raḍī is the nasībic opening of an elegy
(rithāʾ) for al-Ḥusayn dated to Yawm ʿĀshūrāʾ, 395/1005:
1. You have forsaken one aggrieved, shown little mercy,
While in the [desert] sand, out of pity for his plight, strangers wring
their hands.
2. He pastures the nightly stars and ever-returning cares:
Whenever one departs from me, another comes [to drink].
3. Between the stars and tears he shares the glance
Of an eye, hurt and tearing, whose pupil never sleeps.
4. Sleep is not inviting to his eye, except as a pathway
To the ever-returning phantom [of his beloved].
5. I remembered you [pl.] as I remember youth when its time has passed;
It fulfilled its desire with me and will never return.
6. When they turn away from me to prevent my union with them,
I [yet] cling to the ends of hopes and promises.
53 Stetkevych, Abū Tammām, 114; Arabic text: Abū Tammām, Dīwān, 3:151.
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Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī and Nahj al-balāghah
7.O sight, the like* of which the eye will never see again,
Of an abode in the sands of the long curving dune!
*[lit. ‘sister’]
8. It is an abode for which my ancient passion has not waned
Nor have my tears run dry.
9.I am so heart-broken, were any other to lose his heart* to such
sickness,
He would not want it back.
*[lit. ‘liver’]
10. Has no one before me ever parted from those he loves?
Has no other ardent lover ever bid the departing women farewell?
11. Each night a disease of care came back to visit me,
Until [I was so ill that] my sick-bed visitor returned.
Here the nasīb ends and the poet begins the lament for al-Ḥusayn on the Day
of Karbalāʾ:
12.I remembered the day that [al-Ḥusayn] the grandson of the People
of Hāshim [was slain],
Though it was hardly our only [battle-]day with the People of Ḥarb.
13.Thirsty [i.e., al-Ḥusayn], he longed for water, but before he could
reach it,
They gave him to drink [/to/] the sharp edges of cold blades.
…..54
َ ُ ‫تُق َلِّب ُه‬
ِ‫ل أَ يْدِي الأَ باعِد‬
ِ ‫بالر ّ ْم‬
ِ‫ل الع َوَائِد‬
ٍ ‫و َراءَك َ ع َنْ شا‬
ِ ‫ك قَلي‬
١
ِ‫بِمَطْر ُوفَة ٍ إن ْسانُها غَي ْر ُ راقِد‬
َ َ‫تَو َزّعَ بَيْن‬
ُ ‫الن ّج ِم وال َد ّم ِْع َطر ْف ُه‬
٣
ِ‫ْس ب ِعائِد‬
َ ‫ق َض َى وَطَرا ً م ِن ّي و َلَي‬
،ِ ‫الصبا بَعْد َ ع َ ْهدِه‬
ِّ َ ‫ذَكَر ْتُك ُم ُ ذِك ْر‬
ِ‫م َض َى صادِر ٌ ع َن ِ ّي ب ِآخَر َ وارِد‬
ِ‫ل المُعاوِد‬
ِ ‫ْف الخيََا‬
ِ ‫ق إلى َطي‬
ٌ ‫َطرِ ي‬
ِ‫اف المُن َى و َالمَواعِد‬
ِ َ ‫عَلِقْتُ ب ِأَ طْ ر‬
َ َ ‫ي ُر َاعِ ي نُجوم‬
‫ ك ُ َل ّما‬،َّ‫ل والهَم‬
ِ ْ ‫الل ّي‬
ُ ‫ْض إلا ّ ل ِأن ّه‬
ُ ‫طب ِيها الغُم‬
ّ َ َ ‫وَم َا ي‬
ُ ‫إذا جانَب ُوني جانِبا ً م ِنْ وِصالِهِم‬
٢
٤
٥
٦
54 Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Dīwān, 1:364-5.
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ِ‫ل الل ِّو َى المُت َقاوِد‬
ِ ‫إلى الد ّارِ م ِن ر َ ْم‬
‫فَيَا نَظْرَة ً لا تَنْظ ُر ُ الع َيْنُ ُأخْ تَها‬
٧
‫و َلي كَبِدٌ مَقْروح َة ٌ لَو ْ أَ ضاع َها‬
٩
ِ‫ ولا دَمْعي علَيْها بِ جامِد‬،‫إليها‬
‫ص‬
ٍ ِ ‫شو ْقي الق َديم ُ بناق‬
َ ‫هي َ الد ّار ُ لا‬
ِ ‫جد‬
ِ ‫و َلا ش ََي ّ َع الأَ ظْ عانَ مِثْل ِي ب ِوا‬
، ٌ‫أَ م َا فار َقَ الأَ حْ بابَ قَبْل ِي م ُفارِق‬
١٠
ِ ‫حد‬
ِ ‫ْب ب ِوا‬
ٍ ‫ل حَر‬
ِ ‫وما يَوْم ُنا م ِنْ آ‬
‫ل هاش ِ ٍم‬
ِ ‫سب ْطِ م ِنْ آ‬
ِّ ‫تَذ َك ّر ْتُ يَوْم َ ال‬
١٢
ِ ‫شد‬
ِ ‫س ْق ِم غَيْر ِي ما بَغاها بِنا‬
ّ ُ ‫ن ال‬
َ ِ‫م‬
‫بِق َلْبِي َ حَت ّى عاد َني مِن ْه ُ عائِدِي‬
ِ‫ق الب َوارِد‬
ِ ‫ُبابات الر ِّقا‬
ِ ‫سقَوْه ُ ذ‬
َ
ْ‫ن اله َ ِ ّم لَم ْ ي َز َل‬
َ ِ ‫ت َأَ وَّبَنِي داء ٌ م‬
ُ ‫ل د ُونَه‬
َ ‫و َظا ٍم يُر ِي ُغ الماء َ ق َ ْد حِي‬
٨
١١
١٣
As with the first example (above) of the boast ( fakhr) for himself, his father,
and the Ahl al-Bayt in general, this poem, although it is an elegy, nevertheless
opens with a nasīb that features a full repertoire of the traditional motifs of the
erotic suffering of the poet-lover separated from his beloved and yearning for
the lost past and the abandoned campsite of the lovers’ union. Once more, the
Arabic poetic convention of pronoun-shift (iltifāt) renders the antecedents of
the pronouns ambiguous or unstable, thereby allowing for more than one level
of interpretation. On the surface, the 2ms ‘you’ of verse 1 reads conventionally
as the beloved who has forsaken the poet-lover (it is an Arabic poetic conventional to refer to the female beloved in the masc. as well as fem.) and therefore
the 3ms ‘he’, cruelly treated and discarded, the object of the pity of strangers,
is the poet-lover persona. In verse 2, the poet slips into the first person ‘me’,
thereby identifying the poetic persona with the ensuing 3ms ‘he’. Verses 2 and
3 introduce the elegant motif of the poet kept awake at night by ever-returning
cares. It is paired here with the nightly stars to evoke yet another lyrical motif,
that of the wakeful poet pastoring his herd of stars (rāʿī al-nujūm) in the pasture of the night sky.55 This image, too, can have a certain ambiguity: on one
level, what keeps the poet awake is his erotic suffering and longing for the lost
beloved, but at another level, the ‘cares’ can be political—especially the incessant call of unavenged blood.56 Additionally—and essentially—the image of
55 The motif of rāʿī al-nujūm (pastor of the stars) is treated extensively in Ch. 4, “Meadows in
the Sky” of J. Stetkevych, Zephyrs of Najd, 135-67.
56 See the pre-Islamic examples of al-Muhalhil ibn Rabīʿah and Imruʾ al-Qays as discussed
in Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the
Poetics of Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 216-21, 270-3.
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247
the sleepless poet is a metapoetic one, and what the poet is doing, above all,
in his sleepless nights is composing verse. Verse 4 briefly introduces sleep, but
merely to note that its only attraction for the poet is not rest and repose, but
rather the hope that he may see a dream-vision of his lost beloved—a motif
termed ṭayf al-khayāl (phantom of the beloved).
At verse 5, al-Raḍī shifts the 3ms ‘he’ to 1s ‘I’ for the remainder of the nasīb.
The effect of this is to create a more intimate, affective tone, while at the same
time evoking the memory of the lost past and shifting the addressee to the 2mp
‘you’. In the Arabic poetic tradition, this iltifāt shift still allows the pronoun,
through a synecdoche of whole for the part, to refer to the poet’s lost mistress.
In the context of Yawm ʿĀshūrāʾ and an elegy to al-Ḥusayn, however, Ahl alBayt, and especially the martyrs among them, intrude upon our consciousness.
As in our first example, the expression of loss is made passionate and intimate
through the image of lost youth and the themes of lost love and erotic longing
that accompany it in Arabic poetic tradition and sentiment. The further verses
delve deeper into the Arabic elegiac repertoire: on the surface verse 6 speaks of
the tribe of the beloved who come between her and the poet. ‘Clinging to the
ends of hopes and promises’ thus refers most immediately to the poet’s yearning for re-union with the beloved, but at the same time it alludes to ʿAlid hopes
for vindication and the restoration of their political rights.
Verses 7-8 invoke the motif of the ruined abode, again in a manner that
creates an instability of reference or an ambiguity, as it expresses altogether
equivocally the poet-lover’s yearning for the site of his erotic union with the
beloved and the ʿAlid poet’s passion and tears for the ancient tragedies of Ahl
al-Bayt. This constantly shifting ambiguity is not lessened by the poem’s explicit use of the motif of the ẓaʿn (the caravan of departing women, among
them the beloved, mounted in camel-howdahs). For it is followed in verse 11 by
a description of the poet ‘sick’ with cares that come to him by night, harking
back to verse 2, before reverting to the theme of memory (verse 5).
However, now, in verses 12-13, as the elegy (rithāʾ) section proper begins,
what the poet-persona ‘remembers’ is explicitly the thirsty death of al-Ḥusayn
and his followers, that is, the massacre at Karbalāʾ. Of note, too, is the intensified and distinctive badīʿ-style rhetoric as al-Raḍī opens the elegy proper.
In verse 12 he creates a pun (tawriyah) on Āl Ḥarb (‘the People of Ḥarb’—
as opposed to the ʿAlids, ‘the People of Hāshim’), a reference to Abū Sufyān
ibn Ḥarb, founder Sufyānid branch of the Umayyads, but equally meaning
‘the people of war’ (ḥarb). The wordplay continues in verse 13 where al-Raḍī
makes a grim play on the double transitivity of the verb saqā (‘to give s.o. s.th.
to drink’). Thirst plays a major role in the narratives of Karbalāʾ, where
al-Ḥusayn and his followers had been tactically cut off from the water of the
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Euphrates.57 This ambivalent verse reads simultaneously as both ‘they gave
him the cool sword-blades to drink’ (instead of refreshing water), and ‘they
gave him to the swords to drink’—the latter reinforced by the conventional
trope of the warrior quenching his sword’s thirst with enemy blood.
Two points deserve attention as we conclude our discussion of this and the
two previous poetry examples. First, the constantly shifting referents, achieved
partly through the subtle employ of iltifāt, whether on the surface or at a deeper level, to the beloved/s: the poet-lover’s lost mistress of the nasīb convention and, subtly suggested or alluded to throughout this nasīb, the martyred
al-Ḥusayn and the tragedy of Ahl al-Bayt. In this al-Raḍī has managed to bring
the universal human experiences of deeply felt loss, sorrow, and betrayal to
bear on the specific experience of ʿAlid suffering and dispossession. A second
point that is essential to this poem, and the Arabic poetic and metaphoric
conventions in general, is that what appear on the surface, at least to Western
readers, to be purely amorous-erotic lyrical motifs are closely associated with
the theme of unavenged blood and the obligation to avenge it. In this poem,
three of these come into play: first, the sleepless poet weeping through the
night—an image familiar from the blood-vengeance-elegy poetry of the Jāhilī
tradition. Second, related to this, is the motif of sickness—here explicitly the
heart-sickness of the betrayed lover, but in the Arabic tradition sickness often
serves as a metaphor for unavenged blood and the cure for this sickness is
achieving blood vengeance. Third is the image of thirsty death: in the poetic
and cultural idiom to die thirsty is to die unavenged.58 It can therefore be no
accident that the theme of thirst plays so prominent a role in the narratives of
Karbalāʾ and the poetry associated with it, nor that the descendant Ahl al-Bayt,
and the Shīʿah in general, look upon ʿAlid restoration as avenging the blood of
martyrs.
Conclusion
In all of this, it must be emphasized that al-Raḍī has not introduced new elements of diction, motif, trope, or rhetorical device into the classical ʿAbbāsid
nasīb or, for that matter, the qaṣīdah. Rather, the stylistic and thematic
57 On the sources for and narratives of the events at Karbalāʾ, see Najam I. Haider, “al-Ḥusayn
b. ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, ed. Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer,
Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowson. Consulted online on 02 September 2019
<http://dx.doi.org.proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_30572>.
58 See note 54, above.
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elements of his poetry are familiar from, or familiar variants of, those of his
masterful predecessors, notably Abū Tammām, al-Buḥturī, al-Mutanabbī, and
Abū Firās al-Ḥamdānī. His poetry does not display the rhetorical density and
complexity of the poetry of Abū Tammām, the greatest and most celebrated
proponent of the rhetorically intense badīʿ style, which is the hallmark of the
ʿAbbāsid court qaṣīdah, nor of the equally rhetorically intricate poetry of Abū
al-ʿAlā al-Maʿarrī’s (363/973-449/1058) Saqṭ al-zand (‘Sparks of the Fire-Stick’),
a collection of poems largely prior to 400/1010, which thus dates to almost the
same years as al-Raḍī’s Dīwān. Undoubtedly, the nonpareil—in the popularity, celebrity, and notoriety of his poetry—al-Mutanabbī was the most influential and admired precursor of al-Raḍī and his generation.59 The influence
of al-Mutanabbī’s grand heroics is perceptible in al-Raḍī’s’s madīḥ and fakhr,
as are the ease and fluidity of his style. But the lyric-elegiac prelude of the
qaṣīdah, the nasīb, with its abandoned campsite, separated lovers, erotic suffering, unrequited passion, and yearning, was not al-Mutanabbī’s strong suit.
Al-Raḍī’s poetry, as I see it, stands out in several specific ways: first, his extraordinary lyric-nasībic delicacy and intensity. The main poetic influences
would seem to me to be Umayyad period ʿUdhrī ghazal, the short lyrical genre
defined by the theme of the erotic suffering of unrequited love, as in the poetry of Qays ibn al-Mulawwaḥ (Majnūn Laylā), or Qays ibn al-Dharīḥ (Qays
Lubnā), Kuthayyir ʿAzzah, etc., but, moreover, the further lyrical development
of these themes and motifs in the context of the opening nasīb section of the
full qaṣīdah as well as in ghazal, in the hands of the ʿAbbāsid master-poets. Of
the latter, I would first point to Abū Tammam’s student and rival, al-Buḥturī,
and al-Mutanabbī’s rival at the Ḥamdānid court of Sayf al-Dawlah at Aleppo,
the emir’s nephew, Abū Firās al-Ḥamdānī (d. 357/968).
Among the most striking and moving examples of al-Raḍī’s lyrical power are,
on the one hand, his poems for ʿĀshūrāʾ, in which the Shīʿī rituals of mourning
the martyrdom of al-Ḥusayn at Karbalāʾ serve as a framework to explore the
poetics of loss and ʿAlid dispossession at both personal and political levels. On
the other hand, among his numerous monothematic lyrical poems of nasīb
and ghazal, are his lyrics on the Iraqi pilgrimage route, called al-Ḥijāziyyāt,
in which the traditional nasīb and ghazal place-names are replaced by those
of the Iraqi pilgrimage route, so that the nostalgic yearning for the beloved
and the places associated with her and her tribe now take on an evocative
metaphorical dimension.60 In the context of the present study, I would like to
59 On al-Mutanabbī’s influence on al-Raḍī, see ʿAbbās, al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, 167-92.
60 See, for example, the ʿayniyyah (1:657-8) and the mīmiyyah (2:273-5) in al-Sharīf al-Raḍī,
Dīwān. I hope in future work to study al-Raḍī’s lyrical poetry and its influence on
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propose that the combined delicacy and ardor of al-Raḍī’s lyrical gift, whether
the introductory nasīb sections of his full qaṣīdahs or his free-standing lyrical
Ḥijāziyyāt, reflect not merely al-Raḍī’s profound mastery of ʿilm al-balāghah, a
field that encompassed and analyzed all the most revered sources of the Arab
language—Qurʾān, Ḥadīth, and poetry, but are intimately connected with the
sense of loss, dispossession, and bereavement inherent in his ʿAlid heritage,
and inherent, too, in the rhetoric of dispossession expressed in many of the
khuṭbahs he has chosen to include in Nahj al-balāghah.
post-classical Arabic poetry, especially that of al-Ḥijāziyyāt on, for example, the mystical
poet ʿUmar Ibn al-Fāriḍ (d. 632/1235) (cf., his mīmiyyah) and the celebrated madīḥ nabawī
(praise poem to the Prophet), the Qaṣīdat al-Burdah of al-Būṣīrī (d. 694-96/1294-97).
On Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Sūfī ghazal and the nasīb of al-Būṣīrī’s Burdah, see Suzanne Pinckney
Stetkevych, The Mantle Odes: Praise Poems to the Prophet Muḥammad in the Arabic
Tradition (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), 88-95.
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