Abstract
AbstractThis article considers the celebrated elegy by the classical 7th-century Arabic poet, Abu Dhuʾayb al-Hudhali — his ʿayniyya, which ends with ʿayn as a rhyming letter. Analyzing the poem's structure and comparing it with that of two poems composed by Abu Dhuʾayb's teacher, Saʿida b. Juʾayya al-Hudhali, leads to the conclusion that Saʿida's two poems were the main sources on which the pupil drew to create his poem. The sophisticated changes that Abu Dhuʾayb introduced in structure and content, however, made his poem more memorable than those of his teacher. The article raises another question, to which there is, as yet, no definitive answer: what was the true inspiration for Abu Dhuʾayb's poem? Was it the death of his sons, as is traditionally believed, or was it literary: to surpass his teacher in composing a more skillful poem?
Highlights
This article is written during a time when a deadly virus—COVID-19—is attacking the world, from west to east and north to south
About a millennium and half ago, a aggressive plague attacked Egypt. Among those killed by this ancient plague were the sons of Abu Dhuayb al-Hudhali, a Muslim poet (d. ca. 649 A.D.)
From the Hejaz region, in the west of the Arabian Peninsula, he, with other Muslims, migrated to Egypt after the country’s conquest in 641 A.D. His response to the catastrophic loss of all five of his sons in the same year, the story relates, was the composition of his famous elegy, a sixty-three-line poem said to be a requiem for them
Summary
This article is written during a time when a deadly virus—COVID-19—is attacking the world, from west to east and north to south. The sole structural difference between the poems of Saida and Abu Dhuayb is that the latter retains the same phrasing in the opening of each of his three paragraphs, whereas Saida alters it.
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