The Ghazal

Imru’l-Qays, who died around 540, was and is the most widely admired of the pre-Islamic or Jahili poets.  Here is an extract from the nasib of his Mu’allaqa, (a poem which was honoured by being suspended in the enclosure of the Ka’ba):

A little further on in the nasib, Imru’l-Qays provides a somewhat atomistic evocation of the woman’s beauty:

Imru’l-Qays was a boastful amatory predator and a truly great poet.  We are to understand that he won the lady’s favours with a gift of the meat of his riding-camel.  Jahili poets scorned unfulfilled or platonic love  and looked back on fleshly couplings.  As Hugh Kennedy has noted, Jahili poets did not see lost or unattainable love as spiritually improving: ‘It was bad news’.  Jahili sex was always contemplated in retrospect, for love is irretrievably lost, and dahr, or fate, has separated the poet from his beloved and often he laments his grey hairs.  If the woman can return, it is only as a tayf al-khayal, a ghost.  There can be no real consolation for lost love and the finest qasidas are intensely bleak.  (A later poet of the Umayyad period, Waddah contraposed the composition of love poetry and the fear of death.)

The art historian Richard Ettinghausen, drawing upon his reading of early Arabic ghazals, was able to construct a composite portrait of the ideal woman: ‘In these love lyrics one reads that the ideal Arab woman must be so stout that she nearly falls asleep: that she must be clumsy when rising and lose her breath when moving quickly; that her breasts should be full and rounded, her waist slender and graceful, her belly lean, her hips sloping and her buttocks so fleshy as to impede her passage through a door . . . her eyes are those of a gazelle’.  (The Arabic root GH. Z. L. generates words that denote not only dalliance and love poetry, but also and spinning and gazelle.  It was common for a poet to compare his beloved to a gazelle.)  The literary scholar Andras Hamori noted that the Jahili ideal was ‘always the same woman; all pampered softness, languor, plenitude’.  The ninth-century essayist al-Jahiz in one of his pieces noted of one woman that she had two of the attributes of Paradise, ‘width and coolness’.

Early in the Islamic period the Caliph ‘Umar I issued a ban against the composition and recitation of love poetry, but he might just as well have legislated against the tides of the sea.  The ghazal, emancipated from the qasida, emerged as an independent lyric in the Umayyad period (661-750).  Though Jahili poetry continued to furnish formal models for the poets who came after, there was a sea-change in sensibility.  After 661 power moved from the Hejaz to Syria and to the political capital of the Umayyads, Damascus.  Medina, though now a political backwater, became for some decades the pleasure capital of the expanding Caliphate.  It was there that moneyed idlers who had been politically sidelined went to find singers, dancers and transvestite performers and perhaps also attend drinking parties and have affairs.  It was in this environment that Hijazi ghazals were produced, often composed to be sung at parties.  In contrast to the Jahili love poems, the Hijazi ones were more flirtatious; they were vaguer about the physical attributes of the beloved; and they were no longer presented as nostalgic retrospection, for the poets now lived in hope of future amorous conquests.  Though one gets the impression that the ideal woman of the Umayyad era was more slender than her pre-Islamic ancestor, nevertheless descriptions of the ideal woman in Umayyad poetry remain conventional and generalised, so that one would never be able to pick out the subject in a crowd.

‘Umar ibn Abi Rabi‘a (644-712 0r 721) was the most famous of the Hijazi love poets.  According to R.A. Nicholson, ‘his poetry was so seductive that it was regarded by devout Moslems as “the greatest crime ever committed against God”’.  ‘Umar was as boastful as Imru’l-Qays, but his poems were lighter, more flirtatious.

Some of ‘Umar’s poems celebrated the beauty of women who had arrived on the hajj and his assignations with them.  There were many more than one woman and his poems are as much in praise of himself and his conquests as they are of the women.   In this period love was too grand a thing to be expressed in prose.  But sometimes the Medinese ghazal seems like a literary game and it is even uncertain whether the poem in question was actually addressed to a real woman or whether it was just an exercise in wordplay, the literary display of fine sentiment.  Love has to be learnt and poetry teaches how to love. (The Duc de la Rochefoucauld once remarked that ‘No one would ever have fallen in love unless he had first read about it’.)

 ‘Udhrite poets also flourished in the Hijaz at roughly the same time as the Medinese school, but, whereas the latter were urban poets who celebrated sexual delight which either had been experienced or soon would be, the ‘Udhrites, ‘a people who when they love, die’, produced mournful poems about loved ones who were forever unattainable.  They were desert poets and their name derives from two poets of the Yemeni tribe of Banu ‘Udhra.  For an ‘Udhrite poet falling in love has proved to be a disaster, but yet it is a disaster that he can never wish to be without.  Death was the ultimate metaphor for unattainable love.  A hadith (a saying of the Prophet) circulated to the effect that ‘He who loves and remains chaste and conceals his secret and dies, dies a martyr’.  Passionate love (‘ishq) was presented as a sickness, or, more precisely, a form of madness.  (Socrates once remarked that the male libido ‘was like being chained to a lunatic’.)  The semi-legendary ‘Udhrite poet Qays ibn Mulawwah al-Majnun (the mad) may have lived in the seventh century.  It was recorded that Qays, thwarted in his love for Layla, a woman of another tribe, went mad and dwelt with the beasts of the desert.  In the desert he composed verses about Layla’s beauty and his abjection.  

Jamil ibn Ma‘mar (d.701) was perhaps the most famous of the historical ‘Udhrite poets.  He is said to have fallen desperately in love with a woman called Buthyna, but she rejected him because he had dishonoured her by naming her in his verses and she married someone else.  Nevertheless he continued to pursue until the scandal grew so great and Buthyna’s family were so hostile that he was forced to flee the Hijaz and find refuge in Egypt.

Much later, in the fourteenth century, Mughulta’i, a religious scholar based in Egypt, produced a dictionary of those deemed to have become martyrs for love.

Under the ‘Abbasids Baghdad, founded in 762, became the political capital.  The love poet al-‘Abbas ibn al-Ahnaf flourished under the patronage of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad.  Many of ‘Abbas’s poems were addressed to a certain Fauz (‘Success’).  She seems to have been a lady of tender sensibilities.

Perhaps Fauz was a lady of the court who too grand to be given her real name by the humble poet.  She was also known to al-‘Abbas as Zalum (‘Tyrant’), but not perhaps she was not really known at all.  Perhaps she was just a made-up woman, designed to be the object of elegant poetry.

Though Baghdad was the centre of government of the ‘Abbasids, Basra was the literary capital.  By the beginning of the second century A.H. Medina had lost its dissolute glitter and the jeunesse dorée and the singers moved on to Basra which became the base for pleasure expeditions into the desert.  The powerful and wealthy dynasty of Barmecide administrators, who possessed property in the region, were leading literary patrons.  In the Abbasid period Basra produced or at least nourished hundreds, or more likely thousands of poets.  Bashshar ibn Burd (c.718-784) was a Persian born in Basra.  He was blind from birth, so he was never able to see how spectacularly ugly he was.   (He was also known as al-Mara‘‘ath, ‘the Wattled’.)  He was rude and arrogant and his rudeness and arrogance fuelled his invectives and satires, but oddly women found him sexy.  He was a pioneer of badi‘, the ornate, metaphor-heavy, modern style of poetry that came fully into fashion a little later in the ninth century.

Bashshar was an expert in making enemies and the licentiousness of his verse attracted a lot of criticism from the pious, but it was a political satire that led to Bashshar’s being tortured and then sewn into a sack that was dumped in the Tigris.  

Abu Nuwas, born in Ahwaz around 755, was half Persian (on his mother’s side) and spent his youth in Basra and apparently it was there that he fell in love with Janan, a slave-singing girl.  The singing girl was an important feature of high society in Iraq.  The best of them were educated like geishas and sang from a repertoire of Arabic poetry that was commonly accompanied on the lute.  Abu Nuwas went to Baghdad in search of patronage and eventually became the cup companion of the Caliph al-‘Amin.  Later, he served as the cup companion of Harun al-Rashid (and as such features in several of the tales of The Thousand and One Nights).  Abu Nuwas composed wine poems, hunting poetry, satire, homosexual love poetry, heterosexual love poetry, satires and ascetic poetry.  He is best known for the wine poetry that shaded into erotic poetry, as the carousing poet often found himself fancying the bearer of the wine, or the singer in the background or one or other of his cup companions.  It is surprisingly difficult in the ‘Abbasid period to differentiate the homosexual poetry from the heterosexual, because of the conventions regarding pronouns in medieval poetry. Moreover, sometimes poets used male pronouns to refer to women, perhaps in order to protect their honour.  Besides writing homosexual poetry, Abu Nuwas wrote in praise of ghulumiyyat, young women who dressed as men.  By the time Abu Nuwas set up his stall, the ghazal had acquired its fixed cast of characters - the blamer, the jealous watcher, the go-between, and a few others.  Abu Nuwas delighted in parodying the stale conventions of the ghazal and he also produced mujuniyya (verses that were outright obscene).

Andalusia was something of a cultural backwater and its poets always trailed some distance behind eastern Islamic literary fashions.  The heyday of the Andalusian love lyric was in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.  The Dove’s Neck Ring: On Love and Lovers by Ibn Hazm (994-1064) is one of the most delightful masterpieces of Arabic literature. (A dove was often used to carry messages between lovers; on the other hand in poetry the cooing of a dove signified loss.)  Ibn Hazm’s treatise dealt with the signs of love, falling in love in a dream, falling in love with the description of a woman, love at first sight, flirtation, messages, secrecy, obedience to the beloved, the watcher, the slanderer, separation, death and the supreme virtue of continence.  In order to illustrate these topics he drew on his own experience and those of his acquaintances.  In particular he looked back on his greatest passion, which was for a slave-girl called Nu‘m.  But there were other affairs, apparently always with blondes.  Besides the reminiscences of his love affairs and those of his friends, Ibn Hazm’s arguments were illustrated with love lyrics, mostly of his own composition and, unfortunately, these are less interesting than his prose. ‘Love begins in joking, but it always ends in seriousness.’  Underlying all the concerns with flirtation and other matters of the heart in The Dove’s Neck Ring, there was a strain of sadness and an implicit lament for the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate, the destruction of the palace of Madinat al-Zahra and the sack of Cordova in 1013.  Ibn Hazm was a strange man and in one of his other treatises he denounced the production of love poetry as something that led the soul to dissipation, pleasure, deceit and the disparagement of religion. 

Ibn Zaydun (1003-70) is among the most famous poets of love in Arabic literature.  An aristocrat and ultimately a failed politician (but all political careers end in failure, as Enoch Powell observed), Ibn Zaydun had an ill-fated affair with Wallada.  Red-haired, blue eyed and free-spoken, she was the daughter of a former caliph of Cordova, and a poet in her own right and she had two of her own verses embroidered on the hems of her robe:

For a while Ibn Zaydun and Wallada met in secret and could imagine that their love was mutual, but she soon turned against him and preferred to marry an intellectually inferior, wealthy mediocrity called Ibn ‘Abdus and she then went on to denounce Ibn Zaydun as a thief and a sodomite.  (Wallada’s choice of husband reminds me of Maud Gonne’s decision to marry the portly and prosaic John MacBride in preference to the anguished and rather handsome poet W.B. Yeats.)  Ibn Zaydun composed a qasida in which he looked back on their assignations.  Its first lines are as follows:

Love for another woman or man is a portal which may lead one to God, as earthly love may segue into divine love.  As E.J.W. Gibb wrote in A History of Ottoman Poetry:

And how is the Self to be conquered?  By Love. By Love and by Love alone, can the dark shadow of Not-being be done away; by Love and by Love alone, can the soul of man win back to its Divine source and find its ultimate goal in reunion with the Truth.  And the first lessons of this Love, which is the keynote of Sufism and of all the literature it has inspired, may be, nay, must be learned through a merely human passion.  Than true love ‘there is no subtler master under heaven’.  

So it is necessary for the soul to be first awakened by earthly love.  Andalusia’s most famous Sufi Muhyi al-Din ibn al-‘Arabi set out on the hajj in 1201.  His pilgrimage inspired Tarjuman al-Ashwaq (The Interpreter of Desires).  This last consisted of a series of poems that was inspired by his encounter with ‘Ayn al-Shams Nizam, a Persian lady from a family of Sufis from Isfahan, who was noted for her beauty, asceticism and intelligence.  Since the poems in the Tarjuman had an overt erotic content, this attracted criticism from Ibn al-‘Arabi’s numerous enemies and consequently he was driven to produce a commentary on the poems that explained their true mystical meaning.  The following verses overtly deal with lost human loves:

In the commentary ‘they’ turn out not to be women, but Divine Ideas.  By ‘heart’ the perfect Muslim heart is meant.  And so on.  The poem turns out to be really about the obstacles on a person’s way to be united with God.  Doris Behrens Abouseif, in Beauty in Arabic Culture, summarises Ibn al-‘Arabi’s views on love in the following terms: ‘Beauty is powerful and attracts love and desire; the sympathy between humanity and the universe is based upon love (‘ishq)’.  Beauty is ‘a theophany, a manifestation of God’.

Whether Ibn al-‘Arabi was writing poetry or prose, he expressed himself most obscurely.  The Egyptian Sufi poet Ibn al-Farid (1181-1235), known as the ‘Sultan of lovers’, was more popular though hardly less controversial, for the question whether his poems dealt with earthly or divine love was regularly debated.  Certainly he wrote some of his love poetry before he became a Sufi sheikh and it perhaps it was love and poetry that led him to Sufism.  Some of his shorter poems seem to have been composed to be sung at Sufi gatherings.  He composed verses that conformed precisely to the conventions and imagery of the pre-Islamic qasida, with the abandoned campsite in the desert, the retrospect on lost love, the ride across the desert and the concluding panegyric.  However, these poems were intended to be decoded and read for their latent spiritual content as the poet laments his separation from God and gives an account of his journey to find him once more.  One of his most famous poems begins as follows:

Here Layla is a woman’s name and, in legend at least also the name of Qays ibn Mullawah al-Majunun’s beloved, but layla is also the Arabic for ‘night’ and hence ‘Layla’ is perhaps here a metaphor for a Sufi ‘dark night of the soul’.  Layla frequently appears in Sufi poetry, though the significance of the name may vary.  For example a poem by the twentieth-century Sufi Sheikh Ahmad al-‘Alawi opens with these lines:

Though the form and imagery of the ghazal originated in Arabic culture, the ghazal is not restricted to Arabic, for it pervades Islamic culture and one finds many examples in Persian, Turkish, Urdu and other languages.  Persian ghazals were mostly composed by courtiers and, overtly at least, they were usually homoerotic.  In some cases this may have arisen from discretion, from the wish not to risk identifying the lady who is the true object of the poet’s passion, but in other cases references to such things as the beginning of a beard seem to leave no doubt that the beloved who is being addressed is a male.  One sometimes has the impression that the court poet’s true object of love was not a living breathing woman, but courtliness itself.  It was axiomatic that lower-class people could not fall in love, since they lacked the capacity for refined sentiment.  Love, like poetry, was something that had to be learned.  As Hafiz of Shiraz put it:

‘Only the bird of dawn can interpret the book of the rose;

For not all who read a page can understand its subtle sense.’

In the Persian ghazal each couplet is independent, so that the poem as a whole does not contain a developing argument but rather resembles a string of differently coloured beads.   The Persian garden replaced the Arabian desert and the imagery of the Persian poems was softer and more luxuriant.  Persian poets worked with a set of stock symbols, including the mole on the cheek, tresses of hair, the cypress tree, the narcissus, the tavern, the wine seller, the cup bearer, the nightingale and the rose.  In the case of the nightingale and the rose, the bird stands in for the poet who sings of his hopeless love for the rose and the rose, in full bloom, is complacently aware of her beauty, but ignorant of the fact that this will fade.

Muhammad Iqbal (1873-1938), the philosopher and political leader who wrote poetry in Urdu and Persian, criticised the traditional Persian ghazal in these terms: 

The butterfly imagination of the Persian flies half inebriated, as it were, from flower to flower and seems to be incapable of reviewing the garden as a whole.  For this reason his deepest thought and emotions find expression in disconnected verses, ghazal, which reveal all the subtlety of his artistic soul.   

Rather than commemorate sexual conquests, Persian ghazals express yearning and their address to the beloved is customarily humble.  Though overtly amorous in content, the verses are fraught with ambiguity and often carry Sufi or political messages.  Hafiz of Shiraz (1315?-1389?) is the most famous Persian composer of ghazals and remains the most popular.

Though there are no gender markers in Persian, in the translation given above, the distinguished scholar and translator Dick Davis has chosen to present the nocturnal visitor as ‘she’, though the visitor may just as well have been a ‘he’, or, much less likely, a robotic ‘it’.   (Though Hafiz was married, his wife never appears in his verses.)  Wine features frequently in the poetry of Hafiz and others.  In many cases the intoxication that ‘wine’ brings should be read as a figure for Sufi ecstasy and many expert commentators on the verses of Hafiz have consistently interpreted them as Sufi allegories in which the Beloved is God, drunkenness is mystical ecstasy and so forth, others are more doubtful.  Dick Davis in his introduction to Faces of Love, a selection of translations of fourteenth-century Shirazi poetry, asked the question ‘How would a poem that talked about wine and lover look if it actually was about wine and a lover?’  Elsewhere, Davis has questioned the automatic interpretation of the poet’s drunkenness as an evocation of a mystical state and he has quoted Freud to the effect that ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’.  In some cases it does seem fairly clear that the poet is writing about earthly love and the sort of wine that one can obtain in an off-license.  But whether one chooses to read the poems of Hafiz and others in a mystical or a non-mystical sense, one should eschew trying to read anything autobiographical in their verses.  One will get nowhere if one tries to construct the life of a saintly Hafiz or a dipsomaniac Hafiz from his verses.  In many cases he and less talented poets were merely playing with accepted conventions and timeworn imagery.  Incidentally, Ayatollah Khomeini wrote erotic poetry in the manner of Hafiz (and naturally Khomeini was adamant that Hafiz composed only mystical verses.)

The ghazal is also a genre in Urdu and Punjabi literature.   They are commonly composed to be sung with a musical accompaniment.  Qawwali (deriving from the Arabic ‘qawwal’, a reciter) designates ghazals which carry a mystical meaning and which are sung at Sufi reunions, though qawwali songs are not restricted to the love themes of the ghazal, and, for example there may be songs in praise of the Prophet or songs about annihilation in the Divine.  Qawwali is particularly associated with the Chisti order in the Indian subcontinent.  In recent decades Bombay film music has drawn heavily on the themes and tunes of the Urdu ghazal as performed in qawwali, though the film music ignores any mystical message that may be latent in the love lyric.

In Naguib Mahfouz’s marvellous, dark novel Al-Liss wa’l-kilab (1961, English translation, The Thief and the Dogs, 1984), Sa‘id Mahran, a thief just released from jail, seeks bloody revenge on his associates who put him there.  But then, having murdered two of the wrong people, he is on the run from the police.  He holes up for a short while in a Sufi zawiya in Cairo.  He is awoken from his rest by the chanting of a dhikr ceremony and then the recitation of verses:

The lines are those of Ibn al-Farid and their melancholy theme prefigures Sa‘id Mahran’s imminent bloody end. 

In modern times the themes of ‘Udhrite and of Sufi love poetry have crossed over to the novel.  The Turkish word hüzün can be translated as ‘melancholy’ or as ‘nostalgia for what has been lost’.  In Istanbul: Memories of a City Orhan Pamuk has written about how the Sufi follower is suffused with hüzün, since ‘he suffers from grief, emptiness and inadequacy because he can never be close enough to Allah, because his apprehension of Allah is not deep enough’.  In The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk’s long novel, which is effectively the fictional companion to the non-fiction book, Kemal a young and wealthy businessman becomes erotically obsessed with a shop girl called Füsun.  (Her name means ‘Magic’).  Enslaved by passion, he steals everything he can that has been touched by her or is otherwise associated with her: cigarette butts, film posters, olive pits, handkerchiefs, ice cream cones . . .  The resulting collection is at once a visual encyclopedia of every day life in 1970s Istanbul and a chronicle of Kemal’s erotic abjection, as he loves and serves a woman who has married someone else.  Kemal, deranged by love, is a modern Majnun, but, since he succeeds in accumulating a vast collection of erotically charged everyday objects, we have come a long way from the bleak desert inhabited by the first of the great madmen for love, Qays ibn Muwallah. 

Citations

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, Julia Scott Meisami and Paul Starkey eds., 2 vols. (London, 1988) is an excellent guide to medieval and modern Arabic literature.  The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature, ed. Robert Irwin offers a wide range of translations (of varying merit) of Arabic poetry and prose.  Mahmood Jamal’s Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi (London 2009) covers a wider range of poetry than its title suggests, for the Urdu mystical poets all came later than Rumi.  Julie Scott Meisami’s Medieval Persian Court Poetry contains a penetrating chapter on the ghazal.  There is also a good chapter on love poetry by A. Hamori in The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: ‘Abbasid Belles-Lettres, Julia Ashtiany et al, eds. (Cambridge, 1990)