Texts of Islam

Arabian Poetry: The Moallakát: The Poem of Zohair

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This is an excerpt from a pre-Islamic Arabic qasida (formal ode), translated by W. A. Clouston for his 1881 anthology *Arabian Poetry*, likely the celebrated Mu'allaqat poem of Zuhayr ibn Abi Sulma. The poem opens in the traditional mode of nostalgia for an abandoned campsite associated with a lost beloved, then shifts to praise two tribal chieftains who brokered peace between the warring tribes of Abs and Dhobyan — settling blood feuds through a tribute of one hundred camels. Its central and most striking passage personifies war as a monstrous, pregnant she-camel who gives birth to "Distress and Ruin," framing tribal conflict not as glorious but as catastrophically self-destructive. The poem closes with a sequence of gnomic aphorisms on reputation, cowardice, generosity, and mortality, including the memorable claim that "half of man is his tongue, and the other half is his heart." The distinctive perspective throughout is deeply moral and pragmatic: the poet treats peacemaking as the highest form of nobility, explicitly warns that God records hidden treachery, and reflects with the weariness of old age — he claims to have lived eighty years — on the futility of avoidance and the certainty of death.

Arabian Poetry: The Moallakát: The Poem of Zohair

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