The elegiac motifs of the opening section in the qas??da serve to establish a point of contact, both literary and emotional between the poet and his audience. This opening signal is what announces the qas??da and what launches it on a symbolic and psychological level. Recent scholars have spoken of the “oracular” nature of the abandoned campsite where the poet is able to evoke his poetic voice. However it is not just a matter of igniting emotions or memories. It is also more than just finding a way to mark the beginning of the poetic act; it is a matter of pointing to poetic craft and specifying genre. The implicit significance of the scene of the abandoned campsite to the poetic act is one that both the poet and his audience are aware of. This is how the convention of the elegiac prelude in the Arabic qas??da becomes a convention, carrying emotional and literary associations that function on a level that is a metonymic and allusive rather than narrative or sequential. This paper aims to look at Abbasid qas??da openings and examine the way Abbasid poets like Bashsh?r, Ab? Tamm?m and Al-Mutanabb? reflected upon the convention of the elegiac prelude. They closely examined the motifs of loss, ruin, and memory in this opening section, manipulating them in a manner that explains their function in the archetypal qas??da. They replaced common motifs with new ones that could still serve the same purpose thus uncovering the underlying psychological and symbolic connection between the sections of a qas??da. In other words, the Abbasid poets revealed the poetic function of the elegiac prelude in initiating the poetic act, deliberately employing traditional nas?b motifs in their openings but at the same time explaining them, transforming them and commenting on their function. Although not openly meta-poetic, this process of revision and interpretation is still motivated by what I would call a meta-poetic approach to tradition. Muh?dath poets are no longer writing within the poetic tradition, but rather trying to step outside that tradition to reflect upon it and change it.

Scholars of Andalusian Arabic poetry have noted the widespread phenomenon of Andalusian poets composing mu‘aradat (contrafactions or imitations using the same rhyme and meter) of the works of the master poets of the Abbasid era. Arabic literary scholarship to date has not explored the nature of the poetics of such imitations, that is, the way the later poet draws on the base poem while at the same time trying to produce an original literary work. My study aims to investigate this issue through a close examination of one pair of poems: the Abbasid master-poet al-Mutanabbi’s (d.354/965) famous panegyric ode “You Have Enough Sickness” and an imitation of it by the Andalusian poet, Ibn Khafajah (d. 421/1030). Employing speech act theory, the paper shows that the later poet intentionally distinguishes his imitation and differentiates it from the base ode in order to respond to his own political context. He must make his poem a successful performative statement by: 1) being appropriate with a convention that is understood and accepted by speakers and recipients; 2) being compatible with an accepted conventional procedure; and 3) and being proportional to the situation/circumstances. The paper will argue that, in light of speech act theory, that the structural and thematic differences between the two odes can be understood as each poet’s response to his particular political and poetic circumstance and, further, that if each poet had not made the choices he did, the poems would not have been successful performative statements. Al-Mutanabbi’s poem is a panegyric to the black slave ruler of Ikhshidid Egypt, al-Kafur. The paper will show that the success of this poem as a performative statement lies largely in al-Mutanabbi’s ability to reformulate conventional Arab praise motifs to suit such a ruler. Ibn Khafajah’s poem, by contrast, is a poem of praise and consolation for the death of friends to the Andalusian amir Ibn Zuhr. Although explicitly invoking al-Mutanabbi’s poem through the imitation, these differing circumstances require that the later poet reconceive the poetic themes and structures of the base ode and, in doing so, guarantee both: 1) that it will be performatively successful and 2) that it will be poetically original.

The poet Bashsh?r ibn Burd lived in a time of major political uncertainty when the Umayyad rule (7th-8th C.) was in decline and the ‘Abbasids (8th-13th C.) were gaining ascendancy. While he is presumably from Persian descent (as most classical sources indicate), he has written Arabic poetry and boasted about his Persian ancestors at a time of Arabo-Islamic rule. For that reason Bashsh?r holds a peculiar position in the Arabic literary tradition not only as one of the major Arabic poets of his time, but also as a very controversial figure. Most Arab critics and biographers of the ‘Abb?sid empire, read his insistence on mentioning his Persian origins in his poetry as a clear rejection of Arabo-Islamic rule. But Bashsh?r’s story does not quite end there. The image constructed for him to reflect Arabo-Islamic hegemony became part of the European colonial project now directed against Arabs and Muslims. My argument, which draws on both post-colonial theory and translation theory, has many sides. First of all, the hostility of the Arab biographers of the ‘Abb?sid empire toward Bashsh?r is what European scholars, biographers and translators construed to be representative of the intolerance of Arab and Muslim society in general. Moreover, Bashsh?r’s controversial status in the Arabic literary tradition lies in his choice of identifying with both Arab and Persian cultures at the same time. And finally, by attempting to trace the construction of Bashsh?r’s image and its ideological and political implications through a thorough study of selections from Bashsh?r’s poetry, English translations of his poetry, and the historical and bibliographical material about him, I would like to argue that the failure to understand Bashsh?r’s position in both “West” and “East” is due to an essentialist view of identity that cannot attach him to one without assuming him to reject the other, and that this conception of identity is characteristic of any imperial conquest.

The first of the two d?w?ns of the blind Syrian poet and litterateur, Ab? al-A?l?´ al-Ma?arr? (973-1058 CE), Saqt? al-Zand (“The Sparks of the Firestick”), consists, I argue, largely of poems written in response to particular social, political and poetic obligations and challenges—in stark contrast to the self-imposed strictures of his second d?w?n, al-Luz?miyy?t (“Self-Imposed Compulsions”). To understand the poetics of Saqt? al-Zand, I have relied on performance and speech act theory, along the lines proposed by Austin and Searle, to interpret the variations in qas??dah-structure and themes of individual poems as meticulously formulated responses to their individual challenges and circumstances. Quite distinctive of al-Ma?arr?’s odes of praise is the frequent appearance of the middle journey section (rah??l), which had largely fallen into desuetude in the ‘Abb?sid era, and further, the nocturnal nature of these journeys. The present paper will examine, in light of performance theory and recent studies of qas??dah-structure, first, the shared features of al-Ma?arr?’s night journeys, and second, al-Ma?arri’s many manipulations of form and theme in particular poetic circumstances. For example, 1) Qas??dah no. 14 in which a night rah??l allows the poet to introduce constellations of stars to suggest the cosmic power of the ?Alaw? patron; 2) Qas??dah no. 15, in which the qas??dah-form is wrenched out of shape in a poem of praise and consolation to a fellow poet who has just been dismissed by his patron. Here there is a confusion and inversion of roles and themes, whereby the addressee of the poem, rather than the poet, undertakes a night journey rah??l, and the night-crossing represents the retreat of a poet who has failed to obtain his patron’s bounty--rather than the journey of the poet to the court of a munificent patron; and 3) Qas??dah no. 51, a highly lyrical (rather than martial-heroic) and very short praise poem in which there is no concluding third part (the mad?h? or praise section), but rather the praise is implied in, or folded into, the imagery and diction of the night-journey rah??l. The paper will conclude by addressing the vexed issue of whether al-Ma?arr?’s pronounced preference for the night rah??l is the result of his own blindness or of the structural and expressive possibilities of the metaphor of a night followed by morning to the poet’s hardship and deprivation followed by the ease and bounty that await him at the patron’s court.