Good neighbor

These verses were composed by al-‘Arji during his imprisonment
and made into a song (meter: wāfir):

      They have forsaken me. What a hero they forsake!
         One for days of battle and frontier outposts
      and fatal clashes, standing fast
         where heads of spears aim for my slaughter.
      Now daily I am hauled about in manacles,
         begging God's aid against wrongful restraint.
      As if respect and honor were not conferred through me,
         the scion of ‘Amr [who was a caliph's son]!

Muhammad ibn Zakariyya the bookbinder said: It was reported to me by Qa‘nab ibn al-Muhriz
al-Bahili that al-Asma‘i said:

Abu Hanifa had a neighbor in Kufa who could sing. He used come home drunk and singing to his room on an upper floor, from which Abu Hanifa enjoyed hearing his voice. And very often what he sang was:

      They have forsaken me. What a hero they forsake!
          One for days of battle and frontier outposts...

One night, this man crossed paths with the vice patrol, who seized him and put him in prison. Abu Hanifa missed hearing his voice that night, and made inquiries the next morning. On hearing the news, he called for his black robe and high peaked cap and put them on, and rode to see [the governor of Kufa, who was] ‘Isa ibn Musa. He told him, "I have a neighbor who was seized and imprisoned by the vice patrol yesterday, and virtue is all I know of him."
     "Bring out everyone detained yesterday by vice patrol, and let them greet Abu Hanifa," said ‘Isa. When the man was brought forth, Abu Hanifa called out, "That's him!"
      In private he said to his neighbor, "Young man, aren't you in the habit of singing every night:

      'They have forsaken me. What a hero they forsake'?

"Now tell me: have I forsaken you?"
     "By God, your honor, no," the young man said. "You've been kind and noble. May God reward you handsomely!"
     "You can go back to your singing," said Abu Hanifa. "It was congenial to me, and I see no harm in it."
     "I will!" the young hero said.

From the Book of Songs

Calligrapher unknown

  

   "And He taught Adam all the names…" The Noble Qur’an (2:31)

"In reality, it is not images of objects but schemata that ground our pure sensible concepts. No image of a triangle would ever be adequate to the concept of it... The schema of the triangle can never exist anywhere except in thought, and signifies a rule of the synthesis of the imagination with regard to pure shapes in space…. The concept of a dog signifies a rule in accordance with which my imagination can specify the shape of a four-footed animal in general, without being restricted to any simple particular shape…" Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (A 141/B 180), tr. Guyer and Wood

    

Rear cover of al-Muṣṭalaḥ al-naqdī fī «Naqd al-shi‘r»
(Literary-critical Vocabulary in the Naqd al-shi‘r of
Qudama ibn Ja‘far) by Idris al-Naquri. Casablanca:
Dar al-Nashr al-Maghribiyya, 1982.

 HANDS AT WORK 

Chevrons   

 

Resist-dyed textile fragment; cotton (detail). Yemen, ca. 9th century CE.  
The Textile Museum, Washington, D.C.  

It's worth repeating that texts are similar to textiles in many ways, and that no explanation of their likeness is wrong, least of all for artists, who can say what they feel. This overdetermination imposes the contrary of license onto historians. For historians, the surplus of analogies to be drawn between fiber art and language art should enforce skepticism, and the suspension of any connection that can't be demonstrated in the linguistic, poetic and material evidence of a given time and place, lest bare intuition substitute for cultural data.

I will demonstrate this principle using the fabric called musahham, that is, "arrow-patterned." This was a style of weaving practiced in Yemen that I identify with a description by Ibn Abi al-Isbaʻ: "On a robe that is musahham, each arrow points to the next, its specific color determined by the aptness of its pairing with the color of the arrows before and after it." This well describes the textile fragment conserved at George Washington University's Textile Museum under accession number 73.466:

   

Dimensions: 34.92 x 37.46 cm (13¾" x 14¾")

It also describes the the pattern called chevroned in English, from the French chevron meaning "rafter." Where two rafters meet under the ridge of a peaked roof, the angle of a chevron is formed. Herring-bone names it too, and in the textile vocabulary of English both terms are found. But the herring is a northern fish, and in traditional Arab architecture roofs are flat. So it is no wonder that in the textile vocabulary of Arabic, the head of an arrow (sahm) was made to serve instead.

Upon the medieval artifact's identification with the medieval description (unmade by anyone before this blog post, although I hinted at it on February 28) a different kind of scholar would dash into print. Naturally, I want full credit for identifying TM 73.466 as musahham weave, but for the purposes of Hands at Work, which is about the genealogy of weaving as a metaphor for poetry in Arabic, it's a collateral insight. Tashīm is not a metaphor, or any kind of figure of speech, but rather a syntactical achievement, observable in prose, poetry, and the verbal makeup of the Qur’an. And it is named after musahham weave. In al-Hatimi's Ornament of the Learned Gathering there is an uncelebrated passage that purports to give the origin of the poetic term:

     I said to ‘Ali ibn Harun al-Munajjim (d. 352 A.H./963 CE), "I've never
     seen a poet with better tashim than yours." "That's an idiom I came
     up with myself," he said. "Tell me about it," I said. The answer he gave
     described it uniquely, in terms borrowed from no one else:

Let me stop it there. You can dive into Ahmad Matlub's Dictionary of Rhetorical Terms if you're curious about the mysteries of tashim before my book comes out. The point here is that the poetic term's derivation from Arabic textile vocabulary is traceable to the first half of the 4th/10th century.
     "And so," an essentializing critic might say, "yet again we see that Arabic poetry is a form of weaving." They wouldn't be wrong, as long as they don't retroject poetic tashim into the pre- and early Islamic periods, when musahham was a word for textiles only. The earliest mention known to me is by ‘Umar ibn Abi Rabi‘a (d. 93/712), where he describes "buxom lasses in sheer wrappers and musahham mantles of resist-dyed weave." And no amount of sophistry can construe this as a metapoetic image.
      In fact, for all this poet's well-known delight in luxury garments, I have never found him to coin textile metaphors for his own versecraft. This owes at least partly to genre: early ghazal poetry (‘Umar's forte) is low on metapoetic self-reference relative to panegyric and invective poetry. It might also have something to do with the unique (and uniquely troubling) report that ‘Umar ran a shop at Mecca where seventy enslaved weavers were put to work. Perhaps weaving was too practical and prosaic a craft for ‘Umar to enlist in description of his own poetic art. Whatever the case, I bring him up as a caution against facile claims that Arabic poetry is always and everywhere represented as a form of weaving.

 

While renouncing essentialism is "best practice," it also means missing out on worthwhile intellectual adventures. Carl Schuster has very interesting things to say about chevron pattern as a primordial genealogical symbol ("a sort of female Tree of Jesse," he calls it), and where I read about chains of arrows as a means of celestial ascent in Neolithic rock art, I'm like "beam me up." Far, far be it from me to foreclose on the mystical semiotics of chevron pattern.

Nor do I presume to "intervene on" Art History as a discipline. I have much more to learn in this area than to teach. Having said that, let me also say that if historians of Islamic art realized how much information about material culture there is to be gained from early Arabic poetry—and only from early Arabic poetry—then they would spend more time reading it. They're definitely going to have to read Hands at Work.

Controversy of the sandals

          "You have gone grey before your time," they said.
               I said, "What greys my head is fear of earthquakes!
           Scalps whiten at the wrong you do to Taybah,
               and Radwa shakes, and the peaky mountains tremble."
           They said, "Black sandals are for Christians."
              "Then they follow the example of our Prophet,"
           I replied. "But the lot of you are clad in error,
               shod in what protects old ladies' feet.
           Red sandals are for women of the Maghreb,
               and in the East, yellow ones go with a trailing hem."
          "Ahmad in black sandals?" they protested.
               "This contrarian is sore confused."
          "What are the sandals that I wear among you?"
               I said. "Now put aside this fruitless strife."
          "But Ali dressed in yellow," they said.
               I said, "That Companion has naught to do with this."
           They said, "Oral and written tradition are in agreement:
               The Messenger's sandals were not the black of kohl,"
          "Pray tell," I asked, "what color were they, then?"
               Their answer to my question was "I do not know."
          "Do intelligent people deny what's well established,"
               I asked, "trespassing into what they're ignorant of?
           I marvel at such claims. They're based entirely
               on ways and means of tradition that are depraved.
           So many askers have I told about his sandals:
               'As to their blackness, my tradition is the road of roads.'"
          "Might you enlighten us," they said, "to this tradition?"
               I said, "Might I enlighten someone who's not a fool?
           Black was the color of the Messenger's sandals." To which,
               like ignorami who think they know a thing or two,
           they objected, and spoke against the truth in sight of God,
               and every mortal being from high to low.
           They broke the staff of Islam, rejecting sunna,
               and shredded centuries' worth of scholarly consensus.
           So I fought them until, fearing for their buttress,
               they slunk in shame and repentance to their homes.
           Helpless before the rampant lion of knowledge,
               they wrung their hands after their overthrow at mine.
           For I schooled them in the truth until they learned it,
               while they slept on it like idiots who drool.
           I schooled them in the truth until they learned it,
               whose education was a kitchen mule's.
           I schooled them in the truth until they learned it,
               who were no better trained than hyena pups.
           I schooled them in the truth until they learned it,
               and voided the vain humbug of their views.
           I strung pearls of truth and knowledge for safekeeping,
               and hung it round their necks devoid of truth,
           and guided them like lambs without a shepherd
               out of straying, clear of error, to the truth.

Verses 22-46 of a 131-verse invective poem (meter: ṭawīl)
by Muhammad Mahmud al-Turkuzi al-Shinqiti,
dated 1307 A.H. (1889-90 CE)

With thanks to Zekeria Ahmed Salem

No two hearts

Mujahid said: "'God does not put two hearts in one man's bosom' was revealed concerning a man of Quraysh who claimed to have two hearts, as a boast of of his mental abilities. He used to say, 'In my bosom, there are two hearts, and each one of them has more intellectual capacity than Muhammad.' This man was from the Banu Fihr."

Al-Wahidi, al-Qushayri, and others say: "This was revealed concerning Jamil ibn Ma‘mar al-Fihri, a man of prodigious memory for everything he heard. 'Anyone who can remember so many things must have two hearts,' said the Quraysh. 'I have two hearts,' he used to say, 'both of which have more intellectual capacity than Muhammad.'
     "Jamil ibn Ma‘mar was with the idolaters at the battle of Badr when they were put to flight. Abu Sufyan saw him mounted on an ass, with one sandal fastened to his hand and the other to his foot. 'How's the battle going?' he asked him. 'Our people have been put to flight,' Jamil said. 'So why do you have one sandal on your hand and the other on your foot?' asked Abu Sufyan. 'I thought they were both on my feet,' said Jamil. And so his absent-mindedness was discovered, for all that he had two hearts."

Al-Suhayli said: "Jamil ibn Ma‘mar al-Jumahi was the son of Ma‘mar ibn Habib ibn Wahb ibn Hudhafa ibn Jumah—Jumah who was also called Taym. He claimed to have two hearts, and it was concerning him that the Qur’anic verse was revealed. He is also mentioned in this verse of poetry (meter: ṭawīl):

                How will I abide in Medina, after
                    Jamil ibn Ma‘mar seeks it no more?"

From al-Qurtubi's Comprehensive Judgments of the Quran