We come to the last major cultural element that brings us up to the time—and the phenomenon—of Muhammad. This is a particularly difficult element for Americans to understand because it’s so unlike us. (1) Every culture has at least one form of art. (2) Nomads are handicapped by needing to carry around anything they own, so (3) Arabians in the desert needed an art form that took no space. We’d understand if they fell in love with music or dance, but actually they fell in love with rhetoric and poetry.
Not only did they fall in love with poetry, but they seem to have created a high-register literary language just for the art form. Its grammar was that of the Arabs of Central and North Arabia, but it had a richer vocabulary than usual. They fell in love with this language. Those who could speak it fell in love with it, and those who could sort-of understand it were so entranced by the art that they redoubled their efforts to become fluent.
In a nutshell, poetry apparently made this branch of North Arabian language into the dominant tongue of the peninsula. I say “apparently” because I am trusting one really good source for this idea: it’s a major theme of Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s Arabs: a 3000 Year History. His argument is persuasive and detailed; it is based on consulting many original documents. He persuaded me, but my short essay here can only pass on the main points and conclusions. But everyone agrees that poetry in pre-Islamic nomadic Arabic was a very big deal.
There were other reasons that North Arabic might become the dominant tongue, since both caravans and military maneuvers were dominated by Bedouins. Nothing is ever as simple as just “popularity.” However, take the current phenomenon of American teenagers learning Japanese. It’s clearly due to Japan’s dominance in animation, an art form much loved by young Americans. Imagine if Mexico had pulled off the same feat, making several generations of young people fall “weeaboo-crazy” in love with its language and culture. We already have a really high percentage of Spanish-speakers in the US, and while they are concentrated in some regions, you can find Spanish culture enclaves in every city and state. What would it take to start to flip the language dominance toward Spanish? a few generations. That seems to be what happened in Arabia. Nomads lived mostly in the central region, but they lived all through and around the cities and roads of other regions. If you really wanted to learn Bedouin Arabic, it was easy to find speakers to interact with, and you probably needed to learn it anyway for your job.
We see one tip that this process was still actively going on during Muhammad’s lifetime, in that he was sent to live with a Bedouin family when he was learning to speak. It’s presented as so common that the tribes came into the town looking for babies, who were advertised in some way.. In other words, many families in Mecca were sending their sons out to nomad camps in early life, specifically to gain language and culture, so the slots were filled up. It was healthier to grow up with open air, staying away from epidemics. But just as wealthy English-speaking families have sent kids to boarding school to obtain the right accent, so did the Meccans. And Bedouin = the right accent.
Where did the language of poetry develop? Mackintosh-Smith suggests that it caught on partly among nomads and partly in the court of al-Hirah, the Arabic city in Iraq. The Lakhmid dynasty ruled a tribe of South Arabians who had migrated north a few centuries earlier, and they were under Persian influence. Their capital city imitated some Persian culture including the arts, but their domain extended from southern Iraq into eastern Arabia, so they were neighbors of the nomads. Somehow, in this mixture, Classical Arabic was born. Mackintosh-Smith says that it was always a literary language, never a mother tongue. But its foundational layer was nomadic North Arabian, mutually comprehensible across many dialects and perhaps incorporating features of all of them.
Early pre-Islamic Arabic poetry was always recited. It was during this same time that Nabataean writing was spreading in North-Central Arabia, but we have no records that anyone used it to write down these poems. It wasn’t even thought of, since the art form was recitation. It used both meter and rhyme, which helped with memorization (moon and….June? yep). Semitic languages rhyme easily, since whole classes of words have the same vowels. Instead of avoiding it, they embraced it. But since it was easy to do, the art really lived in other aspects of the verse.
One main feature of this literary language was its rich vocabulary. It collected words from neighboring languages, borrowing them as synonyms:
“Multiple synonyms include 80 for ‘honey,’ 200 for ‘beard,’ 500 for ‘lion,’ 800 for ‘sword,’ and 1000 for ‘camel.’ The last figure seems if anything rather low: an old saw among Arabists that says every Arabic word means three things—itself, its opposite, and a camel—is not entirely untrue.”
Mackintosh-Smith, 43
Classical Literary Arabic had so many specific words—like a different word for the space between each finger—that it was considered impossible for any one person to absorb all of it. That was a point of pride. If a man had mastered much of it and could recite poetry by the hour—and compose his own—he gained followers, like a rock band. There were poetry “salons,” comparable to the salons of Paris, with people traveling hundreds of miles to attend. In the northern Lakhmid and Ghassanid courts (set up to compete with each other, as well as doing so naturally), the rulers patronized (financially supported) poets as the later Medici and Sforza families would. (Mackintosh-Smith, 83) In Mecca, a popular feature of the annual pilgrimage was what we’d call a Poetry Slam, with prizes for the winners.
Poetry was not the only verbal art form. Arabs also cherished public speaking and prophecy. In the days before Islam, prophecy meant divination like the Oracle at Delphi, who also delivered messages in (Greek) verse. Prophecy of this type, in Arabic, used a particular rhymed prose style that was not used for any other type of speech. Like poetry, it was beautiful, and its beauty was part of its truth. As Keats wrote: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, and that is all…ye need to know.”
This is hard for an English-speaker to grasp; Keats wrote that line in English, but most of us don’t believe him. We love English and argue that it’s the best language ever (because it is). But we fully recognize that a florid speech whipping up emotions may be false at the core; we see English as conveying both truth and lies, and the measure of either is in the objective facts. In some way, Arabic loves its words so much that this doesn’t strike them. Rhetoric and poetry are real in themselves. The beauty and passion of the words are their own reality. The Quran was seen as its own testimonial to its truth, since it was rhetorically beautiful. It was its own miracle.
As hard as it is for me to understand this, I can see the evidence that it’s true. We’ve seen many times that when an Arabic speech or statement is translated into English, it sounds silly and overblown. In Arabic, it doesn’t, any more than a British gentleman looks overdressed sitting down to dinner at his own home in what we (Americans) would call a “tux.” It’s just how it’s done; in its context, it’s fitting. In that context, it’s effective.
The pre-Islamic poems were not written down until, during Islam’s golden years, a corps of scholars who were also in love with Arabic began to create its official literature. Two centuries later, they could count on the poems being recited without change. By that time, much more poetry was being written; Arabic poetry continued to be a living art form perhaps right through to the present with few gaps. Check out this modern poetry contest on Arabic television (see here to learn about a woman who competed), and this museum exhibit of modern poetry.
I’ll leave you with just a few lines in translation from Imru al-Qais, the first major Arabic poet. I’m linking to a great article about this early poetry at Aramcoexpats.com, and I’m lifting these few lines from the same. Imru al-Qais celebrated the beauty of women:
She turns away, and shows her smooth cheek, forbidding with a glancing eye,
Like that of a wild animal, with young, in the desert of Wajrah……Her curls creep upward to the top of her head;
And the plaits are lost in the twisted hair, and the hair falling loose…
He celebrated the severe weather of the desert:
But come, my friends, as we stand here mourning, do you see the lightning?
See its glittering, like the flash of two moving hands, amid the thick gathering clouds.Its glory shines like the lamps of a monk when he has dipped their wicks thick in oil.
I sat down with my companions and watched the lightning and the coming storm.
Other desert poets celebrated war: camels, horses, raiding, danger. If you want to read more, don’t miss both parts of the Aramcoexpats.com articles: Part 1 and Part 2.
Of these short excerpts, I like best the lightning-storm poem. A few months ago, I wrote a triolet with a similar theme, but without having seen Imru al-Qais’s lines! Enjoy:
The color that is you is strong and bright,
A desert tone—black coffee, or the sky—
When thunder strikes the dune, it paints with light
The color that is you. Is “strong and bright”
Enough to name it? Yes, I think on sight
I’ll know it. Red, gold, blue, or…? ”There,” I’ll cry,
“The color! That is you: it’s strong and bright,
A desert tone. Black coffee. Or….the sky?”