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- The earliest Arabic poems reveal distinctly different attitudes to the theme of love. The desert environment, the nomadic lifestyle, and the need for constant travel all contribute to a poetic vision that focuses on absence, departure, lack, and nostalgia.
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With a rich cultural heritage, Arabic poems about love have been treasured for centuries, resonating with readers across the globe. In this article, we delve into the world of Arabic love poetry, transcending language barriers by presenting translations of some of the most enchanting verses.
- Loubna Khalkhali
- “In spite of the tribe.”
- “Die on my chest.”
- “I forget about the sky”
- “Because my love for you…”
Oct 4, 2024 · Nizar Kabbani’s book “Arabian Love Poems” (1998), translated by Palestinian scholars Bassam Frangieh and Clementina R. Brown, takes readers on an emotional journey driven by the power of...
Feb 20, 2018 · With respect to imagery, this is a very back-to-basics, classicizing approach to depicting a lover, though encased in the modern structure of free verse rather than the old-school ghazal, or metered love poem.
- Overview
- Modern Arabic poetry
The theme of love has been present in the Arabic poetic tradition since the earliest poems committed to written form. The bulk of the love poetry that has been preserved was composed by male poets and expresses love and admiration for women. (Whatever early tradition there may have been of women’s poetry has not survived, although women have always played a major role in funeral rituals, including the composing and reciting of elegies, for which al-Khansāʾ and Laylā al-Akhyāliyyah are best known.) The examples of a homoerotic tradition of love poetry that have been preserved belong in the main to the later centuries of the classical period, beginning in the 9th century.
The earliest Arabic poems reveal distinctly different attitudes to the theme of love. The desert environment, the nomadic lifestyle, and the need for constant travel all contribute to a poetic vision that focuses on absence, departure, lack, and nostalgia. In the majority of poems the beloved is absent; memories of her belong to the past, and future encounters are dependent on the dictates of fate. During the Islamic period, this desert-inspired approach to love was adapted and transformed into a strand of love poetry called ʿUdhrī, named for the tribe to which the poet Jamīl, one of its best-known practitioners, belonged. In these poems the lover spends a lifetime of absence and longing, pining for the beloved who is tyrannical and cruel (aiming arrows at the heart and eye) and yet remains the object of worship and adoration. ʿUdhrī poetry belongs to a courtly love tradition, and indeed many scholars have suggested it as a precedent to the development of a similar strand in Western literatures during the Middle Ages. The early centuries of recorded Arabic poetry are replete with collections of poetry written by ʿUdhrī poets, all of whom are known by a name that incorporates their beloved’s: Jamīl Buthaynah, Majnūn Laylā, Kuthayyir ʿAzzah; the story of Majnūn in particular became the subject of folkloric narratives and other artistic media, such as miniature painting, drama, and song.
Alongside this attitude to love in early poetry, however, there is in the muʿallaqah of Imruʾ al-Qays a much different one, in which the poet’s persona is engaged in encounters with the fair sex that are considerably different:
One day I entered ʿUnayzah’s camel-litter:
“Damn you!” she protested, “you’ll force me to dismount.”
The litter kept swaying all the while. “You have hobbled my camel,
The penetration of poetry into the fabric of Arab-Islamic society in the premodern era was a major factor in the continuing vigour that the neoclassical school was to display well into the 20th century. Al-ʿAqqād’s criticism of an ode by Aḥmad Shawqī (see above Genres and themes: Panegyric) and the popularity of the odes of Badawī al-Jabal and Muḥammad al-Jawāhirī reflect a trend that retained its position alongside the new initiatives in imagery and mood fostered by romantic poets such as Khalīl Jubrān (more commonly known in the West as Khalil Gibran), Īliyyā Abū Māḍī, Abū al-Qāsim al-Shābbī, and ʿAlī Maḥmūd Ṭāhā.
The major break with tradition and, many critics would maintain, the onset of a genuine sense of modernity came in the aftermath of World War II. The quest for independence and the creation of the State of Israel were two political factors that, along with many others, stimulated a cry for a more “committed” approach to literature, with poetry fulfilling a central social function in such a context. The metrical experiments undertaken by the Iraqi poets Nāzik al-Malāʾikah and Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb in the 1940s, combined with the translation into Arabic of the Middle Eastern segments of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion and T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, were more aesthetically based stimuli to the development of an entirely new outlook on the form and content of the poem and the role of the poet.
The Palestinian people were a continuing source of inspiration for politically committed poets across the Arab world during the second half of the 20th century, especially for Palestinian poets. Tawfīq Zayyād, Fadwā Ṭūqān, Samīḥ al-Qāsim, and Rāshid Ḥusayn all addressed themselves to the injustices they saw in Palestinian daily life. But Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry, penned during a lengthy career that continued into the 21st century, best encapsulates the fate of his fellow Palestinians through vivid depictions of their losses, their defiance, and their aspirations. Other poets, such as the Iraqi ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī, expressed their commitment to the cause of revolutionary change on a broader canvas, a posture that led al-Bayātī (like so many other modern Arab poets) to a life of exile far from his homeland.
The 1950s in the cosmopolitan city of Beirut witnessed the creation of the poetry group Shiʿr (“Poetry”), whose magazine of the same name was an influential organ of change. At the core of this group were Yūsuf al-Khāl and Adonis (the pen name of ʿAlī Aḥmad Saʿīd), arguably the most influential figure in modern Arabic poetry. In its radical approach to poetic form (including the prose poem) and its experiments with language and imagery, this group was emblematic of the many new directions that Arabic poetry was to follow in the latter half of the 20th century. Poets such as the Lebanese Khalīl Ḥawī and the Egyptian Ṣalāḥ ʿAbd al-Ṣabūr, both as well acquainted with the classical canon of Arabic poetry as they were with recent trends in the West, left behind them divans that, like that of al-Sayyāb, are already acknowledged as 20th-century classics of Arabic poetry.
Oct 19, 2018 · An important part of the poetry, as with Hmedan’s, is how Ibn Sbayyil turns himself into a character (a lover, a chaser-of-women, a sometimes-desperate appreciator-of-women’s-forms, a spurned adorer).
Nizar Qabbani is considered one of the most prominent contemporary Arab poets. His work continues to be widely read and celebrated in the Arab world and beyond for its lyrical beauty, emotional depth, and unflinching exploration of love, loss, exile, and the complexities of Arab identity.
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