HANDS AT WORK 

Penelope at Mecca   

"Spider and Fly" (detail). A weaving from the pattern-book
of the author's great aunt Laura Todd Burnell (1913–1999)

Six weeks ago, I attended an Islamic art history conference at the University of York, and presented some research from the project I'm blogging here. A lot of my talk was about epic simile, which—much the way Homer likens battlefield exploits to humble trades like spinning and fishing and numerous agricultural tasks—is the main context for representations of craft production in early Arabic poetry. And in the Q&A, the question came up: Is this coincidence, or is it a sign of Homer's reception and influence in Arabia of the Late Antique?
      "I call it uncanny" was my first response, and this was inspired. The rest of my answer came out in a jumble that I'd like to reorganize here.

There is dynamism and pathos in repetitive manual labor, and through the magic of simile they are transferred to heroic gestae, playing on a social antithesis that anyone can appreciate. For these effects to be exploited in more than one literary tradition isn't cause for wonder, nor proof of influence. One example I love from Arabic poetry is the verse by Zuhayr (meter: basīṭ):

      They fan their horses out on every battlefield,
          like sparks thrown out at a blacksmith’s blow.

In the matter of textiles, one major difference between archaic Greek and Arabic tradition is the silence about domestic weaving that prevails in early Arabic poetry (as discussed in my previous installment). Meanwhile, the aristocratic heroines of Greek myth are consummate weavers, and this is too well known to call for examples.
      For contrast, let me mention a couple of reports gleaned by al-Suyuti from Ibn ‘Asakir's History of Damascus, in which noblewomen are found spinning in their homes. "You, a governor's wife, are spinning?" she's asked in one version (no. 4345 in al-Tabarani), to which the woman responds: "I heard my father say: The Prophet, God's blessings and peace be upon him, said: 'Lengthen your thread and increase your reward. It chases Satan away, and causes ruminative thoughts to dissipate' (wa-yudhhibu ḥadīth al-nafs)." The hadith is beautiful, the report is charming, and I bring them up in order to underline the corresponding lack of praise for weaving in classical Arabic tradition, where it is consistently derogated as the work of enslaved people. And that is not at all how it was in archaic Greece.
      Consider also this hadith: "Tailoring is excellent work for pious men, and spinning is excellent work for pious women." The craft that comes between spinning and tailoring is conspicuously left out. Although the hadith is judged noncanonical by most authorities, it is highly characteristic and symptomatic of tradition, where I wager that no aristocratic Arab woman can be found working at a loom.

Detail of a terracotta oil flask painted by the Amasis Painter,
ca. 550–530 BCE. Metropolitan Museum of Art

Now for the uncanny. There is a Quranic verse that proclaims the sanctity of treaties, and rules out their dissolution once they are made. This is Sūrat al-Naḥl (The Bee) 16:92, and in making this injunction it resorts to an allegory that seems to come from Homer's Odyssey. Here let me quote the translation of Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, slightly modified:

Be not like she who unravelleth her thread (ka-llatī naqaḍat ghazlahā), after she hath made it strong, to thin filaments, making your oaths a deceit between you because of one nation being more numerous than (another) nation. God only trieth you thereby, and He will explain to you on the Day of Resurrection that wherein ye differed.

As summarized by Ibn Kathir, there are two schools of commentary on the verse. One is that the woman in question is an ad hoc metaphor for anyone who would "unravel" an agreement after swearing to it, and Ibn Kathir takes this view. The other is that there was a madwoman at Mecca who used to undo her threads after having spun them tight (al-Farra’ says her name was Rayta), and that the Quran's first hearers would have recognized the verse's reference to this individual.
      As to the meaning of ghazl, Ibn Kathir has no comment, but Ibn al-Jawzi reports conflicting views. Majority opinion, he says, understands ghazl as nothing more than thread spun from cotton, wool, or hair. Then, there are those who take it for rope. And then he cites Ibn Qutayba's view that this woman would spin her thread, then weave it, and then unravel that weaving, reducing it to filaments. This is the interpretation one might have suspected all along—namely, that the madwoman's "thread" is a metonymy for her weaving, and that, rather than untwisting strands of thread, some woven thing is what she would unravel after having made it tight. Bringing us at last to Penelope's famous unweaving of the shroud on Ithaca, seemingly transplanted to Mecca of the seventh century CE.

Detail of the Penelope Painter's namesake wine cup (L-R: Telemachos and Penelope),
ca. 450–400 BCE. Chiusi, Museo Archeologico Nazionale 63.564

Is it possible that Quran echoes Odyssey at 16:92? I guess that depends on your definition of "echo." My definition would include Sūrat al-Kahf (The Cave) 18:60-63, where a bit from the end of the Gilgamesh epic appears in transmuted form. This is where Gilgamesh loses the sea-plant that restores youth, converted in Alexander Romance tradition into a story about testing the Fountain of Youth by dipping dried fish in it, in which form it was re-transmuted (probably via the Syriac Song of Alexander of Pseudo-Jacob of Serugh) into a tale of Moses in Sūrat al-Kahf. This is what I call a legit echo, with an intertextual trail to back it up.

To my knowledge, no such trail leads from the poems of Homer to the Quran. I've seen a couple attempts to read Quran and Prophetic biography in generic terms of epic (1, 2), and these are interesting thought-experiments with nothing to say about true intertext. It's clearly not impossible for Greek Epic Cycle material to have made it to Arabia—in the form of travelers' tales, say—and the legend of a woman who unravels by night what she weaves by day has what they call "legs." By that I mean it's memorable, portable, and adaptable, and that's as far as I'm willing to go in endorsing the Homeric echo of Sūrat al-Naḥl 16:92, i.e., not very. My word for it remains "uncanny."

For purposes of Hands at Work, the most important takeaway is the Quran's avoidance of words for weaving. Sūrat al-Naḥl 16:80 eulogizes tents and the raw material they are made of (wool from sheep and camels, and hair of goats), but actual weaving is nowhere mentioned. Not even the spider of Sūrat al-‘Ankabūt (The Spider) 29:41 is said to weave her house, but ittakhadhat baytan: she "takes" it. This seems to parallel ghazlahā "her thread" at 16:92, where nasjahā "her weaving" would be the Penelopeian meaning, and in the view of Ibn Qutayba (who was no slouch) the true one.

 HANDS AT WORK 

Tent Weaving   

 

Woven panel of a Bedouin bayt mushatta (winter tent); wool and goat hair (detail).
Souq Al Qattara, Al Ain, Abu Dhabi. Photograph by Omar Al-Yammahi, 2015

In the poetic tradition of a tent-dwelling society, you would expect to hear a lot about domestic weaving. Modern ethnography tells us that several times a year, the women of the Bedouin household must weave a new tent panel, called a flīj, to replace one that's wearing out, and that a single flīj takes about three days. And yet descriptions of tent-weaving are vanishingly hard to find in the first three centuries of Arabic poetry.

Partly it's a matter of selection. The poetry that survives from the 6th to 8th centuries CE was recorded by latter-day scholars of Iraq, so our purview is limited to verse that didn’t clash with their ideals of taste and ideology—nor the ideals of the ruwāt, who were the generations of oral transmitters between the scholars and the early poets. If the invisibility of Bedouin women's labor (not just textile craft but cooking, childcare, and their other duties) wasn't imposed in these later periods, then it owes to the early period itself.

Weaving the goat-hair tent. Palestine. Source: Jahali Solidarity, 2020

Skill in tent-weaving was nothing for male poets to boast about. Consider the line by al-Samaw’al of the mid-6th century (meter: wāfir):

           Formidable is the house I raise, not of clay
               or wood, and formidable the glory I bring forth.

In the poet's disdain for permanent constructions, his pride in tent-dwelling is implicit. Bayt, the word for "house," really means "tent" (as well as "verse," which complicates things a little—or a lot, actually. At a glance, there is no way to tell if بيت الشعر means "verse of poetry" or "tent of goat hair"). In any case, al-Samaw’al claims no responsibility for the tent's manufacture, nor for setting it up and taking it down, all of which is women's work.

In classical parlance, the flīj is called falīja, as in a stray verse by the Umayyad-era poet ‘Umar ibn Laja’ (meter: wāfir):

           He went clothed in nothing but
               the worn out scrap of a falīja.

And for every other component of the Bedouin tent, more loci could be cited. But if you find a mention of tent-weaving as technique or process in early Arabic poetry, then what you've found is precious and rare. Other textile crafts are mentioned with regularity—matweaving, for one—but with regard to domestic Bedouin weaving there seems almost to be a conspiracy of silence. This leads me to issue not a challenge but a plea. If you know of a reference to tent-weaving in the first three centuries of Arabic poetry, please let me know, either at my faculty email or writing dot gathering dot field at gmail dot com, and you'll be thanked by name in Hands at Work.

As a show of good faith, here is one reference I can show, in a pair of verses by the pre-Islamic warlord Durayd ibn al-Summa (meter: ṭawīl):

          "The cavalry have felled a knight!” they cried to each other.
               At this, I told ‘Abd Allah: “They’re the ones who are going down.”
           He called back to me that morning, as spears went for him
               the way a stretched weaving is struck by ṣayāṣī.

A ṣīṣa, pl. ṣayāṣī, is a weaving tool, and literally it is a "horn," and when you see one in the hand of a present-day Bedouin weaver you'll understand why:

Gazelle horn used in al-Sadu weaving, Kuwait. Photographs by Rana Al-Ogayyel, 2019

The meaning of the verses is that ‘Abd Allah came unhurt through the fight. The enemy's spears went at him without touching him, just as ṣayāṣī pass between warp threads and cause no harm. I believe the simile affords a glimpse of domestic weaving in the pre-Islamic period, and the fact that the fabric is horizontally "outstretched" (mumaddad) only strengthens my conviction. Because the Bedouin weave on ground looms, and not upright ones.

And that's how far you have to go for a peek at pre-Islamic Bedouin weaving. If you wonder why this matters, I guess I don't blame you, unless you've been researching textiles in Arabic poetry as obsessively as I have. And even then the stakes might not be well apparent. The silence surrounding domestic weaving in poetry of the pre- and early Islamic periods has been remarked on by no one that I know of. One thing that makes it hard to recognize is the nostalgic esteem in which it's held today, the institutional protection it receives (from Kuwait's Al Sadu Society, the House of Artisans in Abu Dhabi, the Sharjah Institute for Heritage, etc.), and its recognition by UNESCO, all of which make it seem that Bedouin weaving has been neglected only in recent times. The true history of the matter is unknown to me, but I do know it's more complicated than that.

I take seriously David Hume's age-old caution that causality and the answers to "why" questions aren't subject to logical proof. So when it comes to explaining why something is not, how much more caution is needed? But the mind is restless, and fumbles for answers, and in the book I'm writing I'll share mine. It's not the only silence in poetry to be made sense of.

 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 The 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 it's a collateral insight. My book is about the genealogy of weaving as a metaphor for poetry in Arabic, with much to say about the poetics of tashīm, which is not a trope so much as a technical achievement, observable in prose, poetry, and the verbal makeup of the Qur’an. And tashīm 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), "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:

I'm going to stop it there, actually. Dive into Ahmad Matlub's Dictionary of Rhetorical Terms if you want to explore the mysteries of tashim before Hands at Work 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 at this juncture, "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 in which seventy enslaved weavers were put to work. Perhaps weaving was for ‘Umar too practical and prosaic a craft to enlist in description of his own poetic art. In any case, I bring up ‘Umar 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 some 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 "sign 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.

 HANDS AT WORK 

The Poison Shirt 

 

Resist-dyed textile fragment; cotton (detail).
Yemen, 10th century CE. Metropolitan Museum of Art

Anyone who reads Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber will be struck by chapter 10's surmise that the deadly poison robes of mythology had a basis in chemical fact. Tetraarsenic tetrasulfide is a soft red mineral known as realgar (and sandarakē to the ancient Greeks), which like other compounds of arsenic would be excellent dyestuff if it weren't lethal to the touch. Not right away (as in the story of Medea's rampage at Corinth), but over time: Barber estimates it would take a month of wearing realgar next to the skin to kill a person, and this might be reflected in the protracted throes of Heracles, which went on long enough for him to avenge himself while still alive.

Francisco de Zurbarán, The Death of Hercules (1634)
Oil on canvas, 136 x 167cm (53½" x 65¾"), Museo del Prado

A recent article by Teddy Fassberg on the "The Greek Death of Imru’ al-Qays" confirms that the poet's legendary assassination by poison robe (al-Jahiz calls it a shirt) derives from the death of Heracles. But other iterations of the motif in Arabic are independent of this tradition, e.g., the punitive "robes of fire" tailored in the Islamic afterlife for unbelievers to wear. Here I would like to share an original, unconventional example of poisoned cloth in Arabic poetry—the poetry of Jarir (d. ca. 110 A.H./728 CE), which is basically a 40-year torrent of invective against his contemporary poets. And invective is the main type of poetry that textile metaphor was used to describe.

Metaphors of weaponry would seem more appropriate to the purpose, and sure enough, spearheads, arrows, and flung stones—missiles that inflict damage from a distance—are common figures for the social injuries that abusive verse can do. For Jarir, these were either too tame or old hat; in any case, his metaphors draw on more intimate forms of harm, two in particular. One is poison, and the other is amputation of the nose (jad‘), brought together in these verses (meter: kāmil):

      I prepared for the poets a fatal poison,
         serving the last of them with the first draught,
      laying my branding-iron on al-Farazdaq,
         and docking al-Akhtal's nose while al-Ba‘ith yelps out loud. 

On the subject of facial mutilation, Hands at Work has a lot to say. It was characteristically an enslaved person's ordeal, and a slave's marking in the ancient Near East, including Greece which is how we got the word stigma. But poison is what's at issue here. Again and again, Jarir brags of forcing his rivals to drain cups of it. Exactly what kind of poison, I wish I knew, though it has little bearing on the metaphor. Poison is Jarir's figure for the efficacy of his poetry, i.e., its power to diminish the social capital of his rivals through abuse and taunting, and this metaphor is easy to understand. That weaving should be a figure for the same thing, indeed a traditional, conventional figure, is relatively counter-intuitive, and that is why Hands at Work had to be written.

The poison cloth of Jarir is woven from these two metaphors. Small wonder that it comes with facial mutilation bundled in, along with casual prejudice against metalworkers (so typical of nomadic societies of the Near East), making these verses a "quadfecta" of Arabic invective poetry (meter: kāmil):

      O son of blacksmiths, long have you tested me,
         and long have I pulled free where thongs are tied.
      What comes of my eternal return to al-Farazdaq? Be it known
         that what Mujashi‘ gets is nothing to celebrate.
      Mujashi‘'s nose has been docked by poems
         of poison whose weft was woven on the beam of a loom.

Does Jarir's toxic weave allude to the death of Imru’ al-Qays? If so, he doesn't make it obvious. It seems to result inadvertently from the cramming of three metapoetic images into a single line. But I'm not one to insist. The important thing here is that textile craft is very far from signifying pro-social artistry or aesthetic beauty. For Jarir, it is an instrument of deadly abuse, more like Clytemnestra's "net of Hades" than the fancy carpet Agamemnon walks in on. What makes a net admirable is its efficacy, and this is what Jarir boasts of in his poetry: its power to incapacitate the foe, leaving them unable to answer (meter: basīṭ):

      I repaired to the grave heaped over Marran
         when a delusional poet confronted me in anger.
      His hauteur had gone unchallenged, and amid his sons
         who were likewise haughty, he embroiled us in unrest.
      By us was the oppressor beat back and refuted, and led away
         in cuffs of leather that were stoutly plaited.

  

Now for three notes to the above. (1) I have a new book of poems out, and on pages 12-13 there is one called "The Poison Shirt" whose inspiration by Jarir is unmistakable.

  

(2) As someone who always credits my secondary sources, I am pleased to acknowledge a valuable article by Abdulkarim Yakoub and Samar Eskander, "al-Ṣinā‘a al-shi‘riyya fī mafhūm al-shu‘arā’ al-Umawiyyīn" (Poetic Craft as Understood by Poets of the Umayyad Era), appearing in Majallat Dirāsāt al-Lugha wa-Ādābihā (Syria) 12 (2014), 139-62, where the first two passages from Jarir are cited. The third is in Ibn Qutayba's Big Book of [Verses with Obscure] Meanings, where last installment's verse by Aws ibn Hajar also appears.

   

(3) Previewing unpublished research like this is not without risk. An unethical competitor might follow the leads I have indicated, and steal into print with them before I'm through. But anyone tempted to make uncredited use of the material in these date-stamped blog posts may be assured that, like a second Jarir, I will dump poison all over you, and your career will be finished, and that will be that ©

 HANDS AT WORK 

A Poem Is a Mantle  
of Resist-Dyed Weave  

Resist-dyed textile fragment; cotton; with pseudo-Kufic script in gold leaf (detail).
Yemen, 9th-10th centuries CE. Cooper Hewitt Museum

In how many ways is a poem like a robe? Don't make me count them. Whatever answer works for you intuitively is probably fine. For instance, texts and woven things are alike the products of cumulative effort—a likeness with no basis in etymology, history of technology, or any domain but practical experience to prove that it is so. You could call it a truism, or an apothegm, or (why not) a universal truth.

In early Arabic poetry, the analogy is not so multivalent. It is under specific circumstances that Arab poets of the 6th-8th centuries CE compare their work to textile craft, and to a specific textile form. Let me tell you about it, after answering one "so what" question that makes this more than a matter of antiquarian curiosity.

Since the 9th century, Arabic prose writers have been eloquent about the ways in which poetry is a craft like weaving (nasj) or the ordering of pearls on a string (naẓm), to the point that nasj and naẓm became synonymous with poetry itself (shi‘r). I don't like to say this is "well known," but it is comparatively well studied since Abdelfattah Kilito's 1979 article. Meanwhile, what the poets actually said about their poetry, in their poetry—the boasts they made of it and the similes they coined for it—is mostly ignored, and a lot of important social information along with it. What effects did the
poets think they were accomplishing through their work? That information is available, if you read what they say about their poetry, and what they compare their poetry to.

Take fabrics. Early Arab poets mention different types of cloth imported from different places (Egypt, Syria, Persia), and very rarely Arabian homespun. But when they say their poem is like a robe, it is a specific type of weaving that they reference: a striped cotton mantle made in Yemen of resist-dyed weave (a forerunner of Indonesian ikat). In collections in the US and Canada there are examples dating to the 9th and 10th centuries, many with bands of pseudo-Kufic writing in gold leaf (as pictured here).

This style of weaving is mentioned in an enigmatic verse by Aws ibn Ḥajar, a poet of the mid-sixth century (meter: ṭawīl):

               When people rush at me in angry temper
                   I deck them out, marking them with fine, striped raiment
                       (kasawtuhumu min ḥabri bazzin mutaḥḥami).

I say the verse is "enigmatic" because it appeared in an anthology of enigmatic verses by Ibn Qutayba, who glossed it like this:
    "Mutaḥḥam (striped) is an epithet of the garment he makes out to be al-atḥamī, which is a variety of Yemeni mantle. 'I deck them out in the very best of that type of garment,' he says. But this is a similitude, meaning 'I besmirch them in verse, and [the effect] is as evident as if they went dressed in these garments.'"
      In other words, Aws is not talking about donations of fine clothes (as Geyer thought). What he says is that the object of his invective versecraft is marked out and made conspicuous, as if by an attention-getting robe. The atḥamī robe is defined by al-Aṣma‘ī as "a resist-dyed mantle of Yemen without embroidery," looking maybe like the ikat fragment pictured here.

But the true keyword of Aws's verse is ḥabr. Dedicated readers of early Arabic poetry are well acquainted with cognates of this word, which name the genre of Yemeni mantle that atḥamī weave belongs to. Historians of Islamic art know the stuff too (see Vera-Simone Schulz, "Crossroads of Cloth," for references), but between resist-dye weave as material artifact and poetic signifier the correlation has been made by exactly no one until this blog post. When it is laid out in Hands at Work, the reader will gain access to something rare, and that is the chance to envision early Arabic poetry as it was conceived and represented by the poets themselves.