{"collection":"Texts of Islam","full_text_available":false,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/sacred_texts_v1_isl_arp_arp149_htm/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/sacred_texts_v1_isl_arp_arp149_htm","id":"sacred_texts_v1_isl_arp_arp149_htm","license":"unknown_pending_legal_review","rights_basis":"sacred_texts_v1_preview_gate_primary_text_only; acquisition-method/ToS and compilation-copyright questions still open, not resolved by this gate","source":"sacred_texts_v1","source_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/isl/arp/arp149.htm","summary":"This is a biographical and critical essay excerpt from W. A. Clouston's 1881 anthology *Arabian Poetry*, drawing heavily on William Gifford Palgrave's *Essays on Eastern Questions* to profile the early Islamic Arab poet 'Omar the Mogheeree. The piece argues that the rise of Islam fundamentally transformed Arab poetry by replacing the harsh, contracted world of pre-Islamic tribal life with wealth, security, and leisure \u2014 conditions that gave birth to a new class of literary men and aristocratic pleasure-seekers. 'Omar exemplifies this new type: a nobleman of the powerful Koreyshi clan, grandson of the celebrated Aboo-Rabee'ah, who combined inherited wealth and proximity to caliphs with a talent for erotic verse and a scandalous personal life. The bulk of the essay narrates his prolonged, largely illicit courtship of the beautiful Zeynab \u2014 stolen meetings, a shared cloak in a rainstorm, enforced separations, poetic laments \u2014 which forms the biographical core of his surviving poetry. Palgrave renders 'Omar as an Arabian Don Juan or Ovid, a figure whose romantic exploits and their poetic immortalization were inseparable, making him simultaneously the \"envy and despair of rival poets.\" The essay closes with conflicting accounts of 'Omar's death \u2014 either heroically at sea during the Arab siege of Constantinople, or quietly in old age \u2014 leaving his biography as romantically unresolved as his verse.","tags":[],"text":null,"title":"Arabian Poetry: Extracts From The Lay of the Himyarites: The Poet \u2019Omar","tradition":"Texts of Islam","translated_text":null,"word_count":1834}