تصبيرة

Notes

1. Taṣbīra, from ṣabr ('patience, endurance'), is something offered to help a person bear what has befallen him and hold firm: a word of solace that steadies the heart. In everyday Arabic it is also a small morsel that tides one over until the meal, so the title presents the poem as a modest comfort for the bereaved. The poem turns on this: it forbids weeping and commands patience, 'your provision' for the long road (verse 14). ↩
2. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin (1936/37–2004), founder and spiritual leader of the Palestinian movement Hamas, was paralysed in all four limbs from a boyhood injury and used a wheelchair; he was also nearly blind. On 22 March 2004 he was killed in Gaza by missiles fired from Israeli helicopters as he was wheeled home from the dawn prayer, on the orders of the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon. The poem was published ten days later. ↩
3. Maḍā means 'he went on, departed'; its verbal noun maḍāʾ also means the keenness of a blade, and a sword that 'goes' (maḍā) is one that cuts through. The phrase says at once that he passed on and that he cut through danger like a sharp sword (tawriya, double meaning). ↩
4. Fadaynāka, 'we would ransom you (with our lives)', is a conventional formula of devotion to a revered person. The poet turns it into a lament: the whole crowd of the living is not worth even the garment he wears. Since a martyr in Islamic practice is buried in the clothes in which he fell, 'the cloak you wear' may also point to the garment of martyrdom itself. ↩
5. Verses 4 to 6 form a series of rhetorical questions, each answering itself. The man was jihad, ransom (self-sacrifice) and faithfulness embodied; how can a ransom be offered for the very thing that is ransom? The offer of verse 3 is therefore both sincere and impossible. ↩
6. Maqām ('station') is used in the language of Islamic spirituality for the successive stages of the soul's journey towards God, such as repentance, patience, trust and contentment. The poet says he passed through all of them, ending in riḍā, contentment with God's will, which the second half of the verse expresses: literally, 'what He is pleased with pleases you'. ↩
7. Khātimat al-saʿd, 'the seal of felicity', recalls ḥusn al-khātima, 'a good end', the Muslim's hope of dying in a state pleasing to God. The poet makes martyrdom the seal of that happy end, and the choice may come from either side: the station chooses the man, or the man chooses the station. The verb iṣṭafā means to choose someone as one's elect. ↩
8. Tīh is a pathless desert where travellers lose their way; the word also means bewilderment. To be orphaned there is to lose one's guide exactly where one most needs him. For an Arabic reader the word may also recall al-Tīh, the forty years' wandering of the Children of Israel in the wilderness (Qur'an 5:26). ↩
9. From verse 10 the poet addresses his own heart, and the 'you' of verses 11 to 18 is read as that same heart, which stands for every believer bereaved by the sheikh's death. Muṣāb, 'calamity, blow', is the same word as in the verse before. The poet grants that this loss is worse than ordinary bereavement, then urges the heart to patience and to continue on his path. The 'you' can also be read as the sheikh's followers and his people, addressed directly. ↩
10. An allusion to Qur'an 9:111: 'God has purchased from the believers their lives and their wealth in exchange for Paradise.' Martyrdom is pictured as a transaction in which the believer 'buys' the eternal Gardens with his life. Aghlā, 'dearest', also means 'costliest', which prepares the image of the purchase; the English 'dearest' happens to hold both senses. ↩
11. Shammir, 'tuck up your garment' as one does before hard work or battle, stands in pointed contrast to shaqq al-juyūb, 'rending the collars', an ancient gesture of wailing grief that the Prophet (PBUH) forbade in a hadith: 'He is not one of us who strikes his cheeks and tears his collar.' Both images concern clothing: one garment is gathered up for action, the other torn in helpless mourning. ↩
12. Fadm is a dull, heavy-witted man; qaʿīd is one who sits, and so also one who is crippled and cannot rise. The poet denies both of the man who could not walk. Qaʿīd also recalls al-qāʿidūn, 'those who sit at home', the Qur'anic term for those who stay behind from striving in God's cause (Qur'an 4:95). That very verse excuses those who have an impairment, yet Yassin, confined to his chair, did not claim the excuse. ↩
13. Mustaḍʿafūn ('the downtrodden, those made weak') and mustakbirūn ('the arrogant, those who make themselves great') are a paired Qur'anic antithesis for oppressed and oppressor. 'Its' in these verses refers back to the people and their land, the 'expanse' of verse 21. ↩
14. The antithesis rests on the head: rafʿ al-hām, 'raising the head', is pride and dignity; naks, 'lowering, hanging' the head, is shame and defeat, as with the guilty 'hanging their heads' in Qur'an 32:12. The man who was killed dies proud, and his living killers are left humiliated. Literally the enemies are 'among those who lower it', and the pronoun may be taken as his head: they are the ones who sought to bring his head low, yet he died with it raised. ↩
15. Ariel Sharon, Prime Minister of Israel from 2001 to 2006. From the next verse the poet addresses him directly. ↩
16. The subject is taken to be the 'vengeance' (thaʾr, masculine in Arabic) of the previous verse, personified as a watcher that will not sleep, which answers the command that Sharon is not to sleep. It could also be read as the martyr himself, or his blood, which will not rest until avenged. Ghāʾilīn are those who kill by treachery and surprise (ghīla), a pointed word for an assassination from the air at dawn. ↩
17. Ajnāduhu, 'its soldiers', are the soldiers of the truth: the truth will be avenged by its own army, and those who rejoice today are its haters. Shāniʾ, 'one who hates', recalls Qur'an 108:3, 'Surely it is the one who hates you who is cut off', said of the enemies of the Prophet (PBUH). The echo promises that the loss will fall on the haters, not on what they hated. Tantashū, 'be drunk with glee', pictures the enemies' rejoicing as intoxication. Here the address turns from Sharon to his side as a whole. ↩
18. An echo of the Qur'anic punishments of the arrogant: 'We turned its highest part to its lowest' (Qur'an 11:82), and 'God came at their building from the foundations, and the roof fell down on them from above' (Qur'an 16:26). Yandakku, 'is crushed flat, levelled', also recalls Qur'an 89:21, when 'the earth is ground to dust'. The oppressors' lofty edifice will be overturned and levelled. ↩