CLASSICAL PERSPECTIVES

Beautifying and Uglifying the Homeland

In the premodern Muslim world, it was customary for a poet to praise his homeland. The definition of home, however, and the poet's relation to it, developed with the changing topography of organized social and political life. In a chapter titled “The Poet in the City” in his Poetique arabe, Jamal Eddine Bencheikh traces this development in the Arabic tradition from what he describes as a “biological” connection between the poet and his tribe to a less natural and more contrived relationship between the poet and the larger Islamic community, and after that to the select family or individuals (especially at the height of the Abbasid Empire) who claimed to be embodiments of the entire larger community. The pre-Islamic poet's relationship to his tribe was the direct source of the sociological, religious, moral and linguistic parameters of his role. These parameters were expanded and abstracted in the later period of the Islamic caliphate, becoming not necessarily more fragile, but of a more deliberate and complex politics.

Regardless of the nature of the poet's homeland, its praise utilized themes of nostalgia (ḥanīn), alienation and/or estrangement (ghurba), and lament (rithāʾ). Anthologies of al- ḥanīn ilā l-awṭān (yearning for the homeland) are replete with such motifs. Indeed, one finds in these anthologies chapters such as ḥubb al-waṭan (love of one's homeland), al-tagharrub (emigration), al-safar wa-l-ightirāb (travel and emigration), dhikr al-ayyām al-sālifa (remembering the past days), etc. The objects of nostalgia here are the family, tribe, clan, comrades, and beloved. There is usually an emphasis on the ties that bind the poet to his homeland, his youth, the land's milk, food, drinks, soil, rain, dew, and trees. The traveler or wanderer is sad, worried, distressed, sleepless, lonely, and filled with longing. These feelings are manifestations of the poet's rootedness, loyalty, and nobility. The longing for the homeland connects to the formulaic wuqūf ʿalā l-aṭlāl (the conventional scene of the ruined abodes) in the pre-Islamic qaṣīda which continued to be popular in later times. The ruined abode, the ṭalal, is the lost home, the reminder of times past.