The Anxiety of Remembrance

How a person would be remembered and commemorated was a source of considerable anxiety. Remembrance is unpredictable because after death it is entirely beyond a person’s control: it requires reciprocity.

When Mu‘awiya, the brother of al-Khansa’, died in battle, the responsi­bility for blood-vengeance fell to his brother Sakhr. Vituperative poetry (hija') attacking a killer was an accepted part of vendetta, and often sounded a call to combat. When urged to compose hija’, Sakhr declined out of a desire to protect himself from ‘foul speech’. It was not that Sakhr did not want to demean himself by stooping to conquer his foes. He did not want to provoke further poetic vilification in turn, and thus risk his renown. He wanted his act of revenge to speak for him, once and for all, and did not want to give his opponents an occasion to tarnish his remembrance.^[1123]

In the context of violence, I want to highlight three of the many possible responses to the predicament of remembrance that stand out: poetic vitu­peration (hija’); self-sacrifice in love (ghazal); the martyrdom in battle that was typical of the insurrection movement known as Kharijism.^[1124] In each response poetry was the battleground in which the struggle for remembrance was waged.

Hija’

Hija’, vituperation or lampoon, was the poetry of privation, a violent assault on person, community and memory. It was a weapon to be feared. Poets often described the tongue as a sword, and the damage inflicted by verbal insults as physical wounds. Therefore, glossectomy was a common punishment inflicted on poets for their invective. The vituperative poetry that survives from the pre- Islamic period represents an attack on an individual or a kin-group for failing to live up to the warrior ethic, an attempt to memorialise this failing in words for all eternity. During the Umayyad caliphate (661-750), one type of hija’ came to predominate the political stage: the poetic jousting competitions known in Arabic as naqidah, pl. naqa’id, ‘flyting’. A flyting usually involved two poets, though there were jousts in which three poets were involved, and the response did not necessitate a word-for-word rebuttal, simply that any rebuttals be cast in the same metre and have the same rhyme scheme as their targets. Parasitic, obscene, outrageous, entertaining and politically powerful, the flyting was hugely popular with elites and commonalty alike, and poets represented their clan, tribe and patronal group. What was at stake was the struggle to determine how these groups were to be spoken of, respected and memorialised. The greatest fear for an individual or group thus vilified was for an insult to become popular among children, for this was how maximal damage could be inflicted.^[1125]

Ghazal

The Umayyad caliphate witnessed the emergence of a genre of love poetry, known as the ghazal, a genre that has remained a feature of Arabic poetry to this day. The ghazal was an expression of public intimacy, a declaration of personal sentiment addressed to the object of one's devotion, but shared with an audience. In the most iconic type of ghazal, known as ‘Udhri because of its association with the Hejazi tribe of ‘Udhra, the lovers are unable to be together, yet, despite the unattainability of the object of his love, the male lover declares his intention to stay true even unto death.

This kind of ghazal poetry presents love as a sickness, an act of violence that tore the lover from his community, and required of him an act of self­sacrifice, cast as an act of martyrdom. In some of the most famous verses of Arabic love poetry, Jamil declares

People say, ‘Jamil go on a raid, fight the jihad!' but what jihad can I wage, if not for woman's sake? Talking to them brings me joy - every lover who dies in their midst is a martyr!^[1126]

This holy war can only be fought for love: to die of love is an act of martyrdom. Like the poet's love, martyrdom is an act of self-denial. It is a refusal to change, a death-wish, yes, but one that patiently waits for death - it does not anticipate death through taking one's life. The ‘Udhri ghazal was a poetry of denial, of violence directed at the self.

Kharijism

From their very inception in 661, Kharijite insurrectionists waged jihad on the battlefield for the soul of Islam and memorialised their martyrs in a proud poetry of threnody and vaunt. Theirs was no patient waiting for death to transport them to salvation. It was self-immolation through total war. Kharijism was a pietistic cult of annihilation. More a fissiparous series of sects than a concerted resistance movement, the cult fought to defend the integrity of the Muslim community through the extermination of all Muslims whom it deemed to be in violation of its rigourist creed of askesis and self­privation. Its aim was primordialist, in that it strove to recreate the purity of the community under Prophet Muhammad and the first two Rightly Guided Caliphs, Abu Bakr (r. 632-4) and ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab (r. 634-44). The purity of the community could only be restored by pursuing through martyrdom its soteriological fulfilment and its celestial realisation in paradise.

Kharijite poems voiced an ideology of complete annihilation, in expres­sions of death, alienation, suffering, sacrifice and renunciation. These poems strove to recast and remake the language of early Arabic poetry and the Qur'an, because other Muslims, the enemies of the Kharijites, had distorted language and the Qur'an for their own perversions of God's faith, their actions directed by self-serving interests rather than self­privation. Paradoxically, Kharijite martyrdom attempted the annihilation of communal identity, of poetry and of language - in other words, of remembrance.