The Ode of Labīd son of Rabīʿah

The Muʿallaqah of Labīd son of Rabīʿah — The Mute Immortals — معلقة لبيد بن ربيعة الصم الخوالد

This Muʿallaqah is one of the longest and most majestic of the Muʿallaqāt and one of the most elegant examplars, due to its clarity and purity of form, of the three-part classical Arabic qaṣīdah.

Labīd himself is notable among the poets of the Muʿallaqāt, not only for his extraordinarily long life, but especially because he converted to Islam and lived well into the Islamic period.

As with other poets of this period, what is preserved of his life in the literary compendia bridges literary legend and history, in his case, Islamic history. His poetry, especially his Muʿallaqah, and life thus provide a compelling example of how Arab Islamic culture experienced and expressed the cultural transformation from the Jāhiliyyah to Islam.

As our Arab-Islamic tradition tells us, Labīd ibn Rabīʿah al-ʿĀmirī was born in 560 CE to a branch of the ʿĀmir ibn Ṣaʿṣaʿah. A poet and knight of the Jāhilī tribal aristocracy, he converted to Islam with a delegation of his tribe to the Prophet in Medina in the year 9/630.

During the caliphate of ʿUmar he settled in Kufa where he died in 40-42/660-662. Due to this long life, Labīd is counted among the master-poets of the Jāhiliyyah, but also among the poets who bridge the Jāhiliyyah and Islam.

However, in Labīd’s case, all his significant poetry is attributed to his pre-Islamic period and he is said to have foresworn poetry upon his conversion to Islam.

In the Arabic literary tradition Labīd’s life and poetry present and are presented as a moral bridge between the Jāhiliyyah and Islam. Of moral qualities, Labīd exhibits especially generosity, a virtue no doubt inherited from his father, Rabīʿah, whose unbounded magnanimity won him the sobriquet “Rabīʿ al-Muqtirīn” (Springtime of the Destitute). The survival of this Jāhilī virtue and its transformation into an Islamic one is nowhere so well expressed as in the anecdote recorded in the classical Arabic sources, such as Al-Shiʿr wa-al-Shuʿarāʾ (149) and Kitāb al-Aghānī (16:5730).

They relate that still during the Jāhiliyyah, Labīd swore an oath that whenever the East Wind blew, he would slaughter camels to feed the poor. Even after his conversion to Islam he honored this vow.

One day, when Labīd, now reduced to poverty, was living in Kufa, the East Wind blew. So, Walīd ibn ʿUqbah, the Umayyad governor, mounted the minbar of the mosque, delivered his sermon, and said to the worshippers, “Your kinsman Labīd ibn Rabīʿah swore an oath in the Jāhiliyyah to feed the people whenever the East Wind blows, and today is one of those days when the East Wind is blowing, so help your brother! I will be the first to do so.” Then he descended from the minbar and sent Labīd one hundred she-camels. Others followed, and thus Labīd’s oath was fulfilled.

This anecdote demonstrates the transformation of the Jāhilī form of camel-sacrifice for the destitute, that is putting up a slaughter-camel for maysir gambling (see his Muʿallaqah lines 73-77), which was forbidden by Islam, to Islamically sanctioned forms of giving alms to the poor. Another celebrated anecdote offers, in a parallel manner, a way to look at Jāhilī poetry as having provided in pre-Islamic times the moral guidance now embodied in the Qurʾān. In other words, pre-Islamic poetry is not so much condemned as abrogated and replaced. Although several lines and poems are said to be “the only line” or “only poem” from after his conversion, it is most often stressed that Labīd ceased composing poetry after his conversion to Islam. Al-Shiʿr wa-al-Shuʿarāʾ (149) and Kitāb al-Aghānī (16:5729), among other sources, report that the Caliph ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb once wrote to the governor of Kufa, al-Mughīrah ibn Shuʿbah, asking to hear some poetry of the Islamic period from the poets of the region. So al-Mughīrah asked Labīd to recite.

“Of what has been forgiven [i.e., Jāhilī]?” the poet asked. “No, of what you have composed since the coming of Islam,” al-Mughīrah replied. Labīd left, wrote down Sūrat al-Baqarah on a sheet of parchment, and then returned with it, saying, “God has given me this in place of poetry.”

The Muʿallaqah of Labīd is an ode that boasts or celebrates the virtues and glorious deeds of the poet himself and of his tribe. Labīd has done this in such a way that his poem has become the embodiment of the moral and ethical values of the tribal warrior aristocracy of the Jāhiliyyah in their noblest expression.

Translation 1: William Alexander Clouston (with alterations)
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Arabia...

Translation 2: James Charles Lyall (UK)
The Mo'allaqah of Lebīd, with the life of the poet as given in the Kitâb-el-Aghânî.
http://rapeutation.com/journasiasoc18...

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