ʿAbīd ibn al-Abraṣ Al Asadi ( was an Arab poet of the
Jahiliyya
In Islamic salvation history, the ''Jāhiliyyah'' (Age of Ignorance) is an era of pre-Islamic Arabia as a whole or only of the Hejaz leading up to the lifetime of Muhammad.
The Arabic expression (meaning literally “the age or condition of ig ...
(pre-Islamic period), thought to have lived in the first half of the sixth century CE.
Biography
Little is known about ibn al-Abraṣ;
Charles James Lyall provides an English survey of medieval stories of his life and times, but their reliability is generally doubtful.
Dīwāns of ʿAbīd Ibn al-Abraṣ, of Asad and ʿĀmir Ibn at-Tufail, of ʿĀmir Ibn Saʿsaʿah
', ed. and trans. by Charles James Lyall, E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series, 21 (Leiden: Brill, 1913). Ibn al-Abraṣ's tribe was the
Banū Asad. Legends about him have him as a contemporary (and victim) of the
Lakhmid
The Lakhmid kingdom ( ), also referred to as al-Manādhirah () or as Banū Lakhm (), was an Arab kingdom that was founded and ruled by the Lakhmid dynasty from to 602. Spanning Eastern Arabia and Sawad, Southern Mesopotamia, it existed as a d ...
king
al-Mundhir III ibn al-Nu'mān, who died in 554, and
Imru' al-Qays, likewise of the late fifth and earlier sixth centuries. Imru' al-Qays, whose father Hujr, king of
Kinda, was killed by the Banū Asad, is portrayed as a rival to ibn al-Abraṣ.
[F. Gabrieli, 'ʿAbīd b. al-Abraṣ', in ''Encyclopaedia of Islam'', ed. by P. Bearman and others, 2nd edn, 12 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005), s.v. .] Reinhard Weipert concluded that
He was one of the leading men of his tribe when they revolted against the supremacy of Ḥujr b. al-Ḥārith, the king of the Banū Kinda and father of the poet Imru' al-Qays (d. c.550), and killed him. There are many divergent versions of how this uprising took place, but it is an undoubted historical event, as ʿAbīd’s poems prove that he took part in it as a contemporary and rival of Imru' al-Qays and finally as his enemy, after the slaying of Ḥujr.[Reinhard Weipert, 'ʿAbīd b. al-Abraṣ', in ''Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE'', ed. by Kate Fleet and others (Leiden: Brill, 2007–), s.v. .]
Work and style
Abīd ibn al-Abraṣ's poetry is known largely from a single manuscript, acquired by the
British Museum
The British Museum is a Museum, public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human cu ...
in
Beirut
Beirut ( ; ) is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Lebanon. , Greater Beirut has a population of 2.5 million, just under half of Lebanon's population, which makes it the List of largest cities in the Levant region by populatio ...
in 1907 (now held in the British Library), where it is found along with an anonymous commentary from the
Kūfī school.
Thirty largely complete ''
qaṣīda''s attributed to ibn al-Abraṣ are known, alongside seventeen framentary poems.
Scholars agree that some items are unlikely to have been composed by ibn al-Abraṣ or to date from his era, for example a riddle-contest in which ibn al-Abraṣ poses riddles to Imru' al-Qays, who solves them.
[Pieter Smoor,]
The Weeping Wax Candle and Ma‘arrī's Wisdom-tooth: Night Thoughts and Riddles from the Gāmi‘ al-awzān
, ''Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft'', 138 (1988), 283-312. On the whole, however, "the very distinct archaism in the structure and the language of the ''dīwān'' is", in the words of
Francesco Gabrieli, "a strong argument for its authenticity".
Making reference to ibn al-Abraṣ's poems as numbered by Lyall, Gabrielli found that
the sententious mind of ʿAbīd is expressed not only in his nostalgia for the past, but also in his praise of himself and of his tribe (iv, vii, xxii, xxiv etc.) and in his virulent polemics against Imru' al-Ḳays and other, unknown, poets. The allusions to his poetical talent are especially noteworthy (x and xxiii): they show that he had a clear conscience of his inspiration and his artistic technique. The old Arab critics admired his descriptions of storms and desert tempests, but the modern reader appreciates most among all the poems of his dīwān his descriptions of animals, such as the famous scene of an eagle chasing a fox (i) and that of the fish in the sea (xxiii). In these poems and in other celebrated tableaux, ʿAbid appears as one of the most powerful poets of the ''djāhiliyya''.
As Gabrielli noted, ibn al-Abraṣ's ''qaṣīda'' on the eagle chasing the fox is particularly renowned.
It is a very rare example of a poem in the metre ''
basīṭ mukhallaʿ'':
Ibn Qutayba (d. 889) included it among the ''
Muʿallaqāt'';
Abū Zayd al-Qurashī's ''
Jamharat ashʿār al-ʿArab'' included it among the ''
mujamharāt'', while
al-Tibrīzī (d. 1109) reckoned it one of the best ten ''qaṣīda''s (in his ''Sharḥ al-qaṣāʿid al-ʿashr''.
Editions and studies
*
Dīwāns of ʿAbīd Ibn al-Abraṣ, of Asad and ʿĀmir Ibn at-Tufail, of ʿĀmir Ibn Saʿsaʿah', ed. and trans. by Charles James Lyall, E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series, 21 (Leiden: Brill, 1913).
* Francesco Gabrieli, "La poesia di ʿAbīd ibn al-Abraṣ", ''Rendiconti dell'Accademia d'Italia, scienze morali'' (1940), 240–51.
References
{{reflist
6th-century Arabic-language poets