Texts of Islam

Arabian Poetry: The Moallakát: The Poem of Antara

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This is an English translation of the *Mu'allaqa* of Antara ibn Shaddad, one of the seven celebrated pre-Islamic Arabic odes (the *Mu'allaqat*) composed around the 6th century CE and collected in W. A. Clouston's 1881 anthology of Arabian poetry. The poem follows the classical *qasida* structure, opening with a love lament for Abla — a woman of a rival or inaccessible tribe — as the poet halts at her abandoned dwelling and mourns her absence. The middle sections shift to extended nature imagery: elaborate comparisons of camels, ostriches, rain-drenched gardens, and buzzing flies develop with striking sensory precision, functioning less as decoration than as a sustained demonstration of the poet's descriptive powers. The poem then pivots sharply to martial *fakhr* (self-praise), where Antara boasts of his battlefield ferocity — slaying armored knights, piercing hauberks, leaving bodies to wolves and lions — with graphic, unambiguous violence presented as proof of the valor that makes him worthy of Abla's love. A distinctive tension runs throughout: Antara, historically a warrior of mixed Arab-African descent who had to fight to prove his noble standing, frames both his love and his heroism as acts of self-assertion against those who would deny him. Readers drawn to pre-Islamic Arabic literature, heroic poetry in the tradition of the Iliad, or early lyric forms that braid erotic longing with martial identity will find this a canonical and rewarding example.

Arabian Poetry: The Moallakát: The Poem of Antara

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