The Question of Being in Antara Ibn Shaddad Al-Absi's Mu'allaqa: A Hermeneutic Approach

Abstract

Antara Ibn Shaddad Al-Absi's Mu'allaqa is considered one of the most important texts of poetry in the pre-Islamic era. Because it is an open text on multiple perspectives and different interpretations, literary critics have paid attention to it, both ancient and modern, in order to explain and reveal the features of its structure and composition and discover its aesthetics, questions and poetic meanings. This study aims to read this poem an interpretative reading. This study benefits from "semiotics" in revealing the paths of meaning and producing the paths of meaning This hermeneutic approach ends up revealing one of the most fundamental questions of the text, which is the “The question of Being” that poets and philosophers took care of in all historical times. Moreover, this approach reveals the most important topics that branched from the main topic “The question of Being”: Incomplete existence, the coincidence of being and free existence, the end of being and the consciousness crisis, existence and the question of entitlement, the legacy of possibilities and potentials and the question of transit. Keywords: Being, Existence, Nihilism, Life, Death, Semiotics, Sign, Call, Capabilities, Presence, Freedom,