You said, “Who’s at the door?”
I said, “Your slave.”
You said, “What do you want?”
“To see you and bow.”
Rumi
Omar Khayyam, Hafiz Khorezmi, Muhammad Shemseddin Hafiz, Jalaluddin Rumi, Navoi, Abd al-Rahman Jami, Abu Abd Allah Rudaki – perhaps these names do not ring any bells with many people (except Khayyam). However, it is not for nothing that we have placed them in one row. These are one of the most prominent poets of the tantalizing and so distant East. The East that fills the air with its warm but so deceptive wind. The East that has given us great educators and scientists. The East that always beckons with its mystery and simplicity…
Konstantin Paustovsky spoke of such an immortal form of art as poetry in the following way, “It has one amazing property. It returns the original, virgin freshness to the word. The most banal and the most used words that have completely lost their figurative qualities for us, existing only as a word shell, begin to sparkle, jingle and become fragrant in poetry!”
Fight against prejudice and equality of people
Through poetic lines, we can find ourselves in the other part of the world in a second, feel the heat of the scorching Moroccan sun or the coolness of Siberia, imbue ourselves with the flavor of local residents or see the beauty of architecture. At the same time, poetry is also a unique chance, which makes it even more fragile and valuable, to convey our thoughts and draw people’s attention to what is far above momentary desires, what is far more valuable than today. This is an attempt to perpetuate the moral values bequeathed to us by the Almighty and ancestors. And the poetry of the East is something special, different from everything else. It is a fusion of passion, desire for justice and eternity, for the Creator’s satisfaction, for the unity with somebody who is above us. Once you pay attention to lines of Eastern sages, it is no longer possible to break away – your heart gets the breath of air it needed or an important instruction that brings you back to the path of truth, taking the veil off your bleary eyes. Oriental poetry has always been famous for its ability to heal a wounded soul seeking its moral guidance.
Poems showing the true face of Islam, the religion of Prophet Muhammad, occupied a special place in the poets’ work. One cannot help but appreciate the contribution that Muslim poetry has made to the world culture. Poets of Arab and Muslim East were at the forefront of the most educated people of that time, and their works continue to inspire modern people of art, being an inexhaustible embodiment of spirituality.
The distinguishing feature of poets of the Arab world was the fight against centuries-old prejudices and promotion of equality of all people given to them from their birth. Struggling against injustice and treachery, predation and bribery, those poems denounced idleness and called for an active struggle for happiness and justice, cruelly ridiculed tyrants and oppressors, as well as those who somehow contributed to that oppression.
Dig into your memory and you will find there the names of those people of art who praised the greatness and power of the Almighty, the image of the Prophet, and revealed the spiritual world of a true believer throughout their creative path in every stanza, in every word. They are Nizami Ganjavi, the author of the world-famous poem “Khamsa”, Muhammad Fizuli, who was called an unsurpassed master of love lyrics, who created ghazals, Alisher Navoi, Magtymguly, Ferdowsi and Hafiz, whose poetic ghazals brought him fame as one of the world’s greatest lyricists.
Ideal person – pure soul, free individual
Many poems by Eastern poets have survived to this day. They reveal the beauty of the spiritual world, courage and curiosity of the peoples of the Middle and Far East who lived in the interests of their time. Poetical works by Eastern poets are a passionate call to struggle for the freedom of the people and the freedom of the individual.
The uniqueness of the Oriental poetry is that these works express deep philosophical thoughts and reflect complex human feelings in a concise and perfect form. In their works, oriental poets glorify spirituality, humanity and independence of their fellow countrymen, their contemporaries. The ideal person depicted in poetic works of oriental artists is a free, friendly, Cheerful, wise and spiritual individual with pure soul and clear mind. The idea that moral and spiritual qualities do not depend on a person’s social status and environment is particularly emphasized in the works of oriental artists.
And some works by eastern poets criticize lack of spirituality that makes human life insignificant and empty.
The leitmotif of medieval poetry in the East is philosophical conversations that have excited the human soul for centuries. These are questions about life and death, search for one’s place within society and meaning of their existence, sadness caused by the position of educated people in society.
The fascinating, multifaceted and diverse oriental poetry of the Middle Ages attracts modern readers not only with its deep philosophical meaning, but also with its love of life…
Qasida, panegyric and rubai are the most popular genres of Arab poetry
The poetic work of Arab tribes had definitely a special impact on the formation of specific forms of Islamic poetry. Their language had the least contact with the Hellenistic world, which was a decisive factor in the creation of a fundamentally different culture, including the poetic one.
The first genre we would like to mention is qasida. It formed the basis of a whole system of poetic forms in Islamic countries. It is a small poem in 15-200 lines, which consists of three parts. The first one, lyrical, is the starting point for creating works about love that praise the joys of life. The second part, as a rule, is dedicated to describing the difficulties of the protagonist’s life in the desert. This is where the description characteristic of celebrating heroism and piety came from. The third part of qasida is imbued with sadness about the abandoned region, which led to the creation of another genre of mourning and ridicule. The qasida genre remained intact until the middle of the 19th century, when the influence of European literature increased.
As far as medieval Arab poetry from the VII and early VIII centuries is concerned, there was more often panegyric. Poets give up the glorious nature of poetry, preferring to give precepts and exhortations.
There are other classical forms of Islamic poetry, too. They are kita, a poem with 8-12 lines, written to praise, shame or mourn; rubai – a short but very vivid statement of philosophical character; ghazal – a lyrical love song.
Already by the XI century, classical Arab literature had become a unique organic fusion of Muslim religious and secular motives. In the XI-XII centuries, during the general cultural heyday, such types as muwashshah and zajal appear in poetry. If muwashshah is a poem with 4-10 verses, then zajal is a “song” with 6-9 verses. Common features of the new Arab-Spanish poetry were their musicality and closeness to folk oral genre.
The stagnation of classics led to the heyday of folk art
Two centuries later, in the XIII-XIV centuries, there was a general decline and stagnation in classical forms of Arab literature. That was the period when folk genres flourished. For instance, one of them was dastan which was usually a literary paraphrase of plots and folk legends.
It is worth mentioning that along with the Arabic language, Farsi, or Persian, was also rich in literary and artistic traditions.
There is another interesting genre – mathnawi. It is quite a large poem in terms of volume. Nizami Ganjavi became the initiator of the ethical-philosophical mathnawi. And already in the XIII century there appeared a poem about the “Essence of all” by poet Rumi.
But let’s return to the rubai genre, so popular and beloved by many poetry lovers. Up until the X century this genre was part of purely oral folk art. The acknowledged master of rubai was a scholar of the XI century Omar Khayyam. The poetry of Omar Khayyam and Nizami Ganjavi became the peak of the humanistic branch of Islamic literature.
Diversity of genres and character conflict
Ghazal is a lyrical poem where two hemistiches of the first beyt rhyme with each other (a unit of a poem, one of the types of poetic verse), and then the same rhyme is preserved in all the second hemistiches of each subsequent beyt of the type “aa, ba, ca, da”. The first hemistich is called matlaa, and the last one is called maqtaa. In the last beyt of ghazals the author’s poetic name is often given.
Ghazal as a form of poetry began to take shape in the IX-X centuries and was reflected in the works of Persian classics: Nizami, Saadi, Hafiz, Khaqani and Jami. This form is also found in some Azerbaijani and Ottoman authors such as Fizuli, Saib Tabrizi, as well as the Uzbek poet Navoi and the Crimean khan Gazi II Giray.
Ghazal reached its final form in Hafiz’s work. It was him who established certain canons of ghazal. Ghazal’s character seeks to merge with his object of desire, overcome the abyss that separates them, but this contradiction is never resolved. This very feature gives ghazal the features of a compressed spring; this is the secret of its highest emotional, psychological and philosophical tension.
Kissa (Arabic – “circumstance”, “fact”, “legendary”) is a romantic genre form of prose, something between dastan and hikayat. There is everything here: adventures, fantastic plot moves, dynamism, originality of compositional techniques, poetry, brightness of the author’s poetic speech and entertaining.
Hikayat (Arabic – “narration”) is a bright small epic form. Hikayat emerged on the basis of plot motives of ancient Indian epics, finding its place in paraphrases of Arab and Iranian legends and stories. In the X century, Quranic motives began to appear in the hikayats.
Nesar is another genre of the Eastern poetry, which is a small work of prose with lyrical and pathetic content.
Latifa (Arabic – “joke”, “wit”) is a short story or anecdote of the oral and written literature of the peoples of the Near and Middle East, Central Asia. The most famous latifa is about Khoja Nasretdin, about Kamin and about Khakani.
Masal (“fable”) is a genre of didactic literature with a dramatic composition of an allegorical nature. As a rule, the main characters of masals are images of the animal world and things. The origins of this genre are ancient Indian “Panchatantra”, adopted by the Arabic “Kalila and Dimna”.
Tamsil (Arabic – “assimilation”) is a miniature allegorical genre, kind of masal. This genre, as a rule, was used by authors to depict life situations, social phenomena through conditional, allegorical images.
Nazira (Arabic – “answer”). This genre was used in the East for poetic contests. Nazira became popular in the XI century and was a means of literary struggle and competition. A poet using this form of poetry takes from his famous predecessor the well-known plot and images of the main characters of the poem, interpreting them in the right direction for himself. For instance, five poems by the great Uzbek poet Alisher Navoi – “The Confusion of the Righteous”, “Leyli and Majnun”, “Farhad and Shirin”, “Seven Planets” and “Iskandarov Wall” - are naziras, that is, in response to “Khamsa” (five poems) by the famous Azerbaijani poet Nizami, the poems by the Indo-Persian poet of the XIII century Khosrow “The Rise of the Lights” and by the Herat poet of the XV century Abd al-Rahman Jami “The Sacrifices of the Righteous”.
Ilmira Gafiyatullina
Photo: Creative Commons