ذكرى الرسول.. وهموم الأمة

Notes

1. Dhikrā means 'remembrance, memory', and also the anniversary on which something is commemorated. Here it is the anniversary of the Prophet Muhammad's birth, the Mawlid, celebrated in Rabīʿ al-Awwal; verse 12 speaks of the day that 'brings back the birth of the light of guidance'. The ummah is the worldwide community of Muslims. The title sets the joyful occasion against the griefs that, as the poem goes on to show, overshadow it. ↩
2. Banāt shiʿrī, 'the daughters of my poetry', is a classical metaphor for poems or verses. The poet extends it through the whole opening: the verses are maidens, brides sailing the sea, girls for whom he pays a bridal dowry (verses 8 and 9). The personification lets him say that his poems had hoped to be festive and were made sorrowful instead. ↩
3. Ṣabāyā al-ḥūr: the ḥūr are the maidens of Paradise described in the Qur'an (for example 44:54, 55:72), proverbial for purity and beauty. The verse adds that their souls quicken only for love, that is, the poems were meant to be pure songs of love for the Prophet. ↩
4. Al-Muṣṭafā, 'the Chosen One', is a common epithet of the Prophet Muhammad. The 'shore' continues the image of verse 4: the brides sailed the sea and have now landed at the commemoration of the Prophet. ↩
5. Shīma is the verb used in Arabic poetry for watching distant lightning in hope of rain. The verses outshine any gleam that such watchers ever looked for: a radiance that promises life-giving rain. ↩
6. Yufdayna bil-ḥadaq, literally 'to be ransomed with the pupils of the eyes'. To ransom someone with one's eyes or soul (fidāk nafsī, 'may my soul be your ransom') is an Arabic expression of the utmost love and devotion. The poet says his poems would deserve such love, were they not so full of sorrow. ↩
7. The mahr is the bridal gift that an Arab and Muslim husband gives his bride. Continuing the metaphor of the poems as brides, the poet says the only dowry he could give them was his grief. Yurmiḍunī, 'scorches me', comes from ramaḍ, the burning heat of sun-baked ground. In the second half, the evening twilight (shafaq), a traditional source of poetic inspiration, is set against the bitter reality that has inspired these poems instead. ↩
8. Ranaq in the lexicons means water that is clouded or muddied, and the translation follows this: the longing is troubled, mixed with passion (and perhaps with grief). If the word is taken in the sense of rawnaq, 'lustre, brilliance', the phrase would mean a longing that sparkles in love. ↩
9. Al-khalq wal-khuluq is a play on two words from the same root (jinās): khalq is creation and bodily form, and khuluq is moral character. The Prophet's light of guidance was born into the world of creation, and it shone in his character. The pairing echoes Qur'an 68:4, 'And truly you are of a mighty character (khuluq)'. ↩
10. The image is of a wounded animal that licks its own wound because no one else will heal it. The Arabic expression 'to lick one's wounds' means to nurse one's pain alone. The question is rhetorical: the poet asks for pardon for a sad poem on a festive day, since grieving in verse is the only remedy he has. ↩
11. Ijtirār is chewing the cud, as a camel brings up its food and chews it again. Figuratively it means going over the same memories and griefs again and again. For the poet, going back over his sorrow in these verses is the only 'treatment' available. ↩
12. The first half echoes a famous line of Ibn Rashīq al-Qayrawānī (d. c. 1063) mocking the petty kings of al-Andalus who took grand caliphal titles: 'titles of a kingdom out of place, like a cat that puffs itself up to mimic the lion's charge'. Here the poet turns it on the Muslims of today, whose heroic names and memories do not match their state. Al-yaqaq is brilliant white; al-jawn is black, though it is also one of the Arabic words with opposite meanings (aḍdād) and can mean white. The names sit on the Muslims as ill-fittingly as calling pure white 'black'. ↩
13. ʿĀkifīn means 'devoting oneself to, keeping to (a place of worship)'; it is the word for iʿtikāf, retreat in the mosque for worship. The Qur'an also uses it of those who sat devoted to idols and to the golden calf (7:138, 20:91). The irony is bitter: the Muslims worship the very causes of their humiliation. ↩
14. The Companions of the Cave (Aṣḥāb al-Kahf, Qur'an 18:9–26) are the young believers who slept in a cave for some three hundred years. The Muslims, the poet says, are like them, sleeping through centuries while their holy places are violated. The same verb, lam nufiq, 'we have not woken', returns in verse 92. ↩
15. The reference is most likely to the posters put up in Hebron in 1997 by an Israeli woman, depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a pig, which caused widespread outrage; verse 30 speaks of hands that 'drew' slander, and verse 34 of 'drawings on paper'. ↩
16. This recalls a well-known hadith (reported by Abū Dāwūd) in which the Prophet foretold that the nations would fall upon the Muslims 'as diners fall upon a dish'. When asked whether this would be because the Muslims were few, he said: 'No, you will be many on that day, but you will be scum (ghuthāʾ) like the scum of a torrent.' Ghuthāʾ is the foam and debris that floodwater carries along: plentiful, but without weight. ↩
17. The verse plays on ʿudhr, which means both 'apology, pardon' and 'excuse'. ʿUdhran ilayka is an apology, 'I beg your pardon', yet the poet at once adds that there is no ʿudhr, no excuse, for the Muslims' stand. Ratq al-munfatiq, 'mending what is torn', is an old expression for repairing a rift or a breach; the Prophet is the one from whom the ummah hopes for such repair, by his example and his intercession. ↩
18. The Qur'an calls both the Prophet and the revelation 'light': 'There has come to you from God a light and a clear Book' (5:15), and 'We have sent down to you a clear light' (4:174). The plural arsalakum, 'sent you', is used out of reverence. The closing phrase, 'the light of God is never too narrow', means that it is enough for all mankind. ↩
19. 'They' are the Jews spoken of in verse 31. The words echo Qur'anic passages about those who broke the Sabbath and were turned into apes, and those whom God made 'apes and swine' (2:65, 5:60, 7:166). ↩
20. Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (d. 1057), the blind poet and philosopher of Maʿarrat al-Nuʿmān in Syria, is famous for his pessimism and his scorn for a world in which the order of things is turned upside down. 'An age of al-Maʿarrī' is an age as bleak as the one he described. His blindness also prepares for the image of the blind in the next verse. ↩
21. The verse sets ʿumy, the physically blind, against ʿamah, blindness of the heart or mind (compare Qur'an 2:15). The first half recalls al-Būṣīrī's famous line in the Burda: 'The eye may deny the light of the sun because of inflammation.' Such people deny the sun, which is plain to all, and take the white blotches of bahaq, a skin disorder like vitiligo, for the whiteness of beauty. In an age of overturned scales, a disease passes for purity. ↩
22. Al-Quds, the Arabic name of Jerusalem, means 'the Holy'. The poem's collection, 'For Your Eyes, O Jerusalem', takes its name from this devotion. ↩
23. This refers to the tunnels dug alongside and beneath the area of al-Aqsa Mosque, in particular the Western Wall tunnel, whose opening to the public in 1996 set off fierce clashes. Muslims widely feared that such excavations would weaken the foundations of the mosque. ↩
24. The Night Journey (al-Isrāʾ) is the Prophet's journey by night from Mecca to 'the Farthest Mosque' (al-Masjid al-Aqṣā) in Jerusalem (Qur'an 17:1). Masrā means the place to which the journey was made. From there, in the Ascension (al-Miʿrāj, literally 'ladder'), he rose through the heavens. The verb raqiya, 'rose', repeats the root of irtaqā, 'climbed', to stress the height. ↩
25. The qibla is the direction Muslims face in prayer. Jerusalem was the first qibla of Islam, before the Kaaba in Mecca. According to tradition, on the night of the Night Journey the Prophet led the earlier prophets in prayer at al-Aqsa. ↩
26. The imprecation repeats the verb: ḍayyaʿūhā, 'they let it be lost', and aḍāʿa Allāhu mulkahum, 'may God make them lose their kingdom'. The punishment mirrors the offence. 'They' are the rulers and negotiators whose peace settlements, the poet says, gave Jerusalem away. ↩
27. The Madrid Peace Conference (1991) and the Oslo Accords (1993) began the negotiated peace process between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. ↩
28. Stone-throwing was the emblem of the Palestinian Intifada (intifāḍa, literally ‘shaking off’) that began in 1987, whose young participants became known as ‘the children of the stones’. From here the poem turns to address the negotiators directly as ‘you’. ↩
29. The phrase echoes Qur'an 9:14, where God promises to 'heal the breasts of a believing people' by defeating their enemies. The breasts are pictured as cauldrons boiling with rage. ↩
30. Ramy al-jimār, the stoning of the pillars at Minā with small pebbles (jimār), is one of the rites of the Hajj. It commemorates Abraham’s rejection of Satan. The poem links the pilgrims’ pebbles with the stones of the Intifada: both are aimed at Satan. ↩
31. The Qur'an describes the shooting stars as missiles (rujūm) with which the devils are driven off when they try to eavesdrop on heaven (67:5, 37:6–10, 72:8–9). The shihāb is such a blazing meteor. The stones of the Intifada are thus likened to heavenly missiles against Satan. ↩
32. This refers to a miracle reported in the hadith: pebbles placed in the Prophet's palm were heard glorifying God (tasbīḥ al-ḥaṣā). In the next verse, the pebble that once glorified God in his hand cries 'God is greatest' (takbīr) as a child throws it. ↩
33. Rajman bihā, 'a stoning with them', is a verbal noun used as a command. The verse plays on fuliqat, 'split open', and al-falaq, 'daybreak', from the same root: dawn is pictured as the night being split. The enemy's skull being split would thus bring the dawn of liberation. Al-falaq also recalls Sura 113, 'Say: I seek refuge with the Lord of the daybreak'. ↩
34. Ribaq (singular ribqa) are the looped ropes in which lambs and kids are tied by the neck. In verse 58 the enemies are pictured as apes led on such ropes; in verse 100 the fighters are 'free of the halter', bound by no humiliating tie. ↩
35. The Palestinian (National) Authority was set up in 1994 under the Oslo Accords. The verse argues that it owes its existence to the Intifada, while its concessions have put the people’s neck in pawn. ↩
36. Min lisān al-ghayb, 'from the tongue of the Unseen', presents the curse as decreed from the hidden world, as if heaven itself pronounced it. Tabban lakum, 'perdition to you', echoes the Qur'anic curse of Sura 111, 'Perish the hands of Abū Lahab'. ↩
37. Ṣabūḥ and ghabūq are the morning and evening draughts familiar from classical Arabic poetry. Jerusalem is what the poet takes first thing each morning and last thing each evening: his constant sustenance. Naghghār is used of a vein that gushes blood and will not stop. ↩
38. Verses 67–68 draw on the hadith: 'The believers, in their mutual love, mercy and compassion, are like one body: when one member of it complains, the rest of the body responds with sleeplessness and fever' (al-Bukhārī and Muslim). 'One heart, most righteous and God-fearing' recalls the hadith qudsī: 'If the first and last of you… were upon the most God-fearing heart of a single man among you'. ↩
39. Yaktafūn, literally 'they will make do with', means that no battle will be needed: fear alone will kill them. Shafaq here means dread and apprehension; it is the same word that meant the evening twilight in verse 8. ↩
40. Ḥadīth al-ifk, 'the talk of the slander', is the name of the incident in which false rumours were spread about ʿĀʾisha, the Prophet's wife, until the Qur'an cleared her (24:11–20). The allusion makes the rumours that divide Muslims today a repetition of that first great slander. ↩
41. This recalls a hadith in which the Prophet foretold 'callers at the gates of Hell: whoever answers them, they cast him into it'. The 'sharp tongues' (al-alsun al-dhuluq) echo Qur'an 33:19, which speaks of hypocrites who 'lash you with sharp tongues'. ↩
42. Tabdīʿ is declaring someone a heretical innovator (mubtadiʿ); takfīr, in the second half, is declaring a fellow Muslim an unbeliever. Both are the weapons of sectarian quarrels. ↩
43. Qābīl is Cain, who killed his brother Abel (Qur'an 5:27–31). The hand that kills brotherhood among Muslims is pictured as descended from the first fratricide. ↩
44. 'Tearing at flesh' recalls Qur'an 49:12, which likens backbiting to eating the flesh of one's dead brother. 'Scrawling on paper' is slander and abuse in writing. ↩
45. The image echoes a famous line of the pre-Islamic poet ʿAdī ibn Zayd: 'If my throat were choked by anything but water, I would be like one choking who seeks water to wash it down.' Water is what one turns to when choking, so to choke on the water itself is to have no remedy left. The poet's brothers, to whom he turned for relief, have themselves choked him; hence the curse on the hands that did it. ↩
46. Ṣabr means both 'aloes', a proverbially bitter plant, and 'patience' (tawriya). The poet hoped for cool water from his brothers and found bitterness in his throat instead, and with it the need for patience. ↩
47. The verse echoes Qur'an 3:120: 'If good befalls you, it grieves them; and if harm befalls you, they rejoice at it.' The Qur'an says this of enemies; the poet says it of his brothers. ↩
48. This recalls the hadith: 'I was sent only to perfect noble character (makārim al-akhlāq).' ↩
49. The words recall Qur'an 81:24, which says of the Prophet, in one of its canonical readings, that he is not 'suspected' (bi-ẓanīn) concerning the Unseen. The revelation comes to the Prophet beyond suspicion, and the guidance it brings is one and undivided. ↩
50. Qur'an 3:7 divides the verses of the Book into muḥkamāt, clear and firmly established verses that are 'the mother of the Book', and mutashābihāt, verses that are ambiguous or open to more than one meaning. It says that 'those in whose hearts is swerving (zaygh) follow what is ambiguous in it, seeking discord'. The poet uses the Qur'an's own words to condemn sectarian dispute. ↩
51. Qur'an 3:103: 'Hold fast (iʿtaṣimū), all together, to the rope of God, and do not be divided.' Muʿtaṣam, 'a refuge to hold fast to', comes from the same root. ↩
52. Al-Andalus is Muslim Spain, lost piece by piece until the fall of Granada in 1492. It is the classic Arabic symbol of a lost homeland. ↩
53. Raghām is fine dust. Raghima anfuhu, 'his nose was rubbed in the dust', is an Arabic idiom for being humiliated against one's will. ↩
54. Nafaq means a tunnel. The tunnel is most likely that of verse 42, whose opening in 1996 set off clashes that shook the peace process: peace has run aground there, undermined like the walls of al-Aqsa. The root n-f-q also gives nafaqa, 'to perish' (of an animal), and nifāq, 'hypocrisy', so the phrase may also hint that peace is dead, or hypocritical. ↩
55. The same letters can be read quwwādunā, ‘our leaders’, and qawwādunā, ‘our pimp, our procurer’, and both are meant (tawriya): the singular huwa, ‘he’, that follows points to the second. Min māʾ al-ināth suqiya, ‘he was given the water of women to drink’, is a taunt of effeminacy: a leader raised on ‘women’s water’ has none of the hardness that war and victory demand. ↩
56. Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, was founded in Gaza in 1987 at the start of the first Intifada. The name is an acronym and also a word, ḥamās, meaning 'zeal, fervour'. The verse echoes Qur'an 33:23: 'Among the believers are men who have been true to the covenant they made with God.' 'Would not spare their last breath' (lan yubqū ʿalā ramaq) means they would give their lives. ↩
57. A 'sword of wood' is proverbial for a weapon that is for show only. The second half turns it into a maxim: a sword never drawn from its sheath is no sword at all. ↩
58. The ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Qassām Brigades are the armed wing of Hamas. They are named after Sheikh ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Qassām (1882–1935), a Syrian-born preacher who led armed resistance in Palestine against the British Mandate and was killed in 1935. The name ʿIzz al-Dīn means 'the might of the religion'. ↩
59. Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ayyūbī (Saladin) recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187 and is the great symbol of its liberation. His name means 'the soundness of the religion', so the line also hopes for the religion's restoration. Fī al-ḥilaq, 'in their circles', most likely means their circles of study and fellowship; ḥalqa can also mean a ring of chain mail. ↩
60. Yaḥyā ʿAyyāsh (1966–1996), known as 'the Engineer', was a commander in the al-Qassām Brigades who planned many of its attacks. Israel killed him in Gaza in 1996. ↩
61. The verse plays on the name: ʿayyāsh, from ʿāsha, 'to live', means 'one who lives fully'. The poet tells him that he is still ʿayyāsh, still living, in the souls of his followers. ↩
62. Al-Qassām is the sheikh after whom the Brigades are named (note 58). ʿAbdallāh ʿAzzām (1941–1989) was a Palestinian Islamic scholar, prominent in the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union. Ḥasan al-Bannā (1906–1949) was the Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. ↩
63. This verse closely echoes a famous line from al-Būṣīrī's Burda, the best-known ode in praise of the Prophet: 'And all of them seek from the Messenger of God a handful from the sea, or a sip from the ceaseless rain.' There it is said of the earlier prophets; here it is said of these leaders, who all draw on the Prophet's example. ↩
64. A ṣaff is a rank or battle line. The phrase recalls Qur'an 61:4: 'God loves those who fight in His cause in a rank (ṣaff), as though they were a solid structure.' ↩
65. Such poems traditionally close with blessings on the Prophet, his family and his Companions, 'for as long as' something lasts in nature. 'The dawn breathes forth' echoes Qur'an 81:18, 'And by the dawn when it breathes'. ↩