Texts of Islam

Arabian Poetry: Extracts From The Lay of the Himyarites: The Poet ’Omar

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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 — 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 — stolen meetings, a shared cloak in a rainstorm, enforced separations, poetic laments — 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 — either heroically at sea during the Arab siege of Constantinople, or quietly in old age — leaving his biography as romantically unresolved as his verse.

Arabian Poetry: Extracts From The Lay of the Himyarites: The Poet ’Omar

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