تخميس «قل للمليحة في الخمار الأسود»

Notes

1. A takhmīs ('making fivefold') is a classical form in which a poet takes an earlier poem and places three new hemistichs, in the rhyme of his own choosing, before each of its verses, so that every stanza has five lines and ends with the borrowed verse. Here the first three stanzas embrace the three verses of the original; the stanzas that follow continue the story in the same form, each closing, like the original, on the same rhyme in -di. ↩
2. Miskīn al-Dārimī (Rabīʿa ibn ʿĀmir, d. c. 89/708) was a poet of the Umayyad period. According to a well-known anecdote, a merchant from Iraq brought black veils (khimār, a head-covering) to Medina and could not sell them. Miskīn, who had given up poetry for a life of devotion, composed these lines for him, and they were set to music and sung. Every woman in the city then wanted a black veil, and the merchant sold his whole stock. The lines, which tell of an ascetic undone by a woman in a black veil at the mosque door, became proverbial. ↩
3. Khayāl, also ṭayf, is the phantom of the beloved that visits the lover at night, a central motif of classical Arabic love poetry. Here it comes to a man who had renounced love, and it returns later in the poem: it gleams before him as he prays, and he whispers to it behind the door. ↩
4. Al-mutahajjid is one who rises in the night for voluntary prayer (tahajjud) and gives up sleep for worship. The irony is that his sleep is now driven away not by devotion but by love. ↩
5. From here to the end of the third stanza, the second half of the second line and the whole of the third line of each stanza are Miskīn al-Dārimī's original verses: 'Tell the fair one in the black veil: what have you done to an ascetic, to worship devoted? He had tucked his robes up to pray, until, before him at the mosque door, you stood. Give him back his prayer and his fasting; do not kill him, by the faith of Muhammad!' ↩
6. Anākha rikābahu, 'he made his riding camels kneel', is the classical image of a traveller who has arrived and settled for good. The ḥaram is a sanctuary, a sacred precinct, above all the sanctuaries of Mecca and Medina. The ascetic has ended his journey and made his home in devotion. ↩
7. Tashmīr, tucking or rolling up one's robes, is what a man does when he sets about a task in earnest, and in the original context it also kept one's clothes clear of dust and impurity for prayer. The phrase has become an idiom for zeal and dedication. ↩
8. Hawā means both 'to fall' and 'to fall in love' (hawā is also the noun 'passion'). The heart that 'fell headlong' is at once a heart in love and a heart brought low from its former station. The same verb returns in stanza 8: 'he fell, broken-hearted, in his chains'. ↩
9. Shaykh rawā is a scholar or elder who transmits religious knowledge, especially the Prophet's traditions (ḥadīth). It may also point to the shaykh who recites healing verses (ruqya) over the afflicted. Neither his own devotion nor the learning or cures of the pious can help him. ↩
10. The miḥrāb is the niche in a mosque wall that marks the direction of prayer, and by extension a place of private worship. Hāma, 'to wander distraught', is the verb used of the classical lovers who roamed the desert maddened by love; here the lover wanders lost within the prayer-niche itself. In stanza 7 the phrase 'the prayer-niche of love' turns the image round: love has become his place of worship. ↩
11. Khalawāt are periods of seclusion given over to prayer and remembrance of God, a practice especially associated with Sufi devotion. ↩
12. Āya means a 'sign' or 'marvel', and also a 'verse' of the Qur'an. The man who can 'no longer recite a single verse' (stanza 5) was himself 'the āya of his age'. ↩
13. Lithām is a veil drawn over the lower part of the face. It stands here alongside the khimār, the head-veil of the original poem. ↩
14. Bi-ghayri ḥisāb, 'without reckoning', is a Qur'anic phrase used of God's bounty, which He gives 'without reckoning' (for example 2:212 and 39:10). Applied to a temptation that roams unchecked, it carries a sharp irony. ↩
15. The language of these lines is the language of the hereafter: 'everlasting torment' (al-ʿadhāb al-sarmad) and yaṣlā, 'to burn in' or 'to be roasted by' fire, a verb the Qur'an uses of the damned in Hell. The pious man who had worked to be saved from the fire of the next world now burns in the fire of love. The 'torment without end' he hopes to escape may be read as Hell itself, which he still fears, or as the endless torment of his passion, from which only she can save him; the Arabic holds both. ↩
16. Hāma al-taqiyyu fa-ḍāʿa fī hayamānihi: hāma is to wander distraught, maddened by love, and hayamān is that love-madness itself. Verb and noun share one root, as 'ran wild' and 'wildness' do here, and the pairing of taqī ('pious man') with them tells the whole story of the poem in a single phrase. ↩
17. Tasbīḥ is the glorification of God, especially the formula Subḥāna rabbiya l-ʿaẓīm, 'Glory be to my Lord, the Almighty', said softly while bowing (rukūʿ) in prayer. Sahā is the technical term for an oversight in prayer, for which the law prescribes the 'prostrations of forgetfulness' (sujūd al-sahw). The final line goes further: he has not merely made a slip in the prayer, he has forgotten the prayer itself. ↩