political conflict:
The reevaluation and transformation of tribalism fostered the interest in preserving tribal lore as an object of tribal pride and as argumentative basis in the ongoing struggles for political power.38
Thus, battle lore emerged as tribal apologetics, a contested and disputed lore of immense political clout and relevance.
As the Abbasid dynasty (132–656/750–1258) set up court in Baghdad, and elite society began to be shaped by new social, cultural, and political structures, genealogy and tribal battle narratives gradually lost much of the political immediacy they had enjoyed during the Umayyad era (41–132/661–750), when tribes in Syria and Arabia jockeyed for preeminence and politics were largely expressed through tribal loyalties. This was when genealogy and battle narratives emerged as subjects to be studied and codified.
By the end of the second/eighth century, a large-scale, major collection of poetry with a commentary incorporating battle narratives was composed in the garrison town of Kufa by al-Mufaḍḍal al-Ḍabbī (d. 90/784). In this monumental collection, known as al-Mufaḍḍaliyyāt, the battle narratives are used as context for and commentary on the poems. Al-Mufaḍḍal’s approach to narrative as context for and commentary on poetry set the standard to be followed in subsequent centuries. Thus, when we encounter ʿAntarah’s poetry in the two collections of the fifth/eleventh century, it is presented predominantly in this form, with narrative as preface to the poem, and the poem with commentary interspersed after every two, sometimes three, verses.
Genealogy and battle narratives were of central concern for two antiquarian enthusiasts and expert philologists: Abū ʿUbaydah Maʿmar ibn al-Muthannā of Basra (ca. 210/825) and Hishām ibn al-Kalbī of Kufa (d. 204/819 or 206/821). Ibn al-Kalbī was the undisputed master of Arabian genealogy: his masterpiece was known as The Roll Call of Genealogy (Jamharat al-nasab).39 He also composed a work on the battle days of the Arabs that has not survived. The two key works on battle days composed by Abū ʿUbaydah have also been lost. The shorter of Abū ʿUbaydah’s two monographs is thought to have covered either 75 or 150 battle days, whereas his major work, Deaths of the Knights (Maqātil al-fursān), is thought to have contained narratives of either 1,200 or 1,600 battle days. Abū ʿUbaydah also composed a monumental collection of poetry, The Flytings of Jarīr and al-Farazdaq (Naqāʾiḍ Jarīr wa-l-Farazdaq), a series of high-profile public slanging matches expressed in poetry by two major Umayyad poets. In this work, Abū ʿUbaydah’s expertise on pre-Islamic battle days is evident: it is our primary source for the War of Dāḥis and al-Ghabrāʾ waged between the ʿAbs and Fazārah.40 The principles of organization of Abū ʿUbaydah’s battle-lore books is not known, but evidently he created a corpus of battle lore that became canonical.
The works of Abū ʿUbaydah and Ibn al-Kalbī were informed by, and helped shape, a wider intellectual, cultural, and religious process that developed over the course of the third/ninth century. In their quest for a pure, original Arabic to set the pristine (divine) Arabic of the Qurʾan against, the philologists of third/ninth century Iraq sought to imagine a correspondingly pure, original Arabia inhabited by noble warrior nomads. It is hard to think of a figure that could have met their requirements more completely than ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād, legendary warrior, chivalrous Arab, tragic lover, and composer of one of the poetic masterpieces of the Jāhiliyyah, “the Suspended Odes” (al-Muʿallaqāt).41 Yet we know almost nothing of how ʿAntarah’s poetry and its associated battle lore was collected. Glimpses of this process of discovery are afforded by four types of textual evidence:
1. The comments of al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/858–59), and the entries on ʿAntarah provided by Ibn Qutaybah (d. 276/889) and Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī (d. 356/967).
2. The redactions and commentaries of the poetry of six pre-Islamic poets by two scholars from al-Andalus: Abū l-Ḥajjāj Yūsuf ibn Sulayman the Grammarian, known as al-Aʿlam al-Shantamarī (the man from Faro with the harelip) (d. 476/1083); and Abū Bakr ʿĀṣim ibn Ayyūb al-Baṭalyawsī (d. 494/1101), from Badajoz. Both philologists include ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād as one of the six pre-Islamic poets. Al-Shantamarī’s redaction includes twenty-seven poems, and he notes that the philologist al-Aṣmaʿī (d. 213/828 or 216/831), whom he identifies as the ultimate source for his own redaction, accepted without question the attribution of twenty-three of these.42 The redaction of al-Baṭalyawsī includes thirteen more poems than those commented upon by al-Shantamarī, i.e., forty poems in total. Al-Baṭalyawsī does not indicate the provenance of his collection, though he provides more variant readings in his commentary than does al-Shantamarī, and Abū ʿUbaydah looms largest among those scholars whose variant readings al-Baṭalyawsī does quote. Both scholars include, as prefaces to the poems and commentary, a number of poetry narratives (akhbār al-shiʿr) that seem to be descendants or retellings of apposite narratives from the battle-lore tradition.
3. The anthology of Abū Ghālib ibn Maymūn (d. 597/1201), The Ultimate Arab Poetry Collection (Muntahā l-ṭalab min ashʿār al-ʿArab), compiled in ten parts between 588/1192 and 589/1193. Ibn Maymūn offers versions of five poems by ʿAntarah, including the “Suspended Ode” (Muʿallaqah). One of these five poems (Poem 28) is only attested in The Epic of ʿAntar, and another (Poem 29) is a considerably enlarged version of a poem that we encounter in the other collections (i.e., Poem 5).43
4. The origins of The Epic of ʿAntar date from the fifth/eleventh and sixth/twelfth centuries. The two extant traditions of the Epic (Cairene and Levantine) contain a great deal of poetry. The Levantine tradition contains a version of Poem 28 in the current volume, one of the five poems by ʿAntarah included by Ibn Maymūn for inclusion in his anthology, thereby attesting to the emergence and development of the ʿAntar legend in the fifth/eleventh century.
Of by far the greatest relevance for the story of the discovery of ʿAntarah in the third/ninth century are text groups one and two, and I will confine my discussion to them. It is hard to know what to make of the passage from al-Jāḥiẓ, for his interest is not in ʿAntarah as such, but rather in the shortcomings of the assessments of those who prefer ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād over ʿUtaybah ibn al-Ḥārith ibn Shihāb. It would be foolhardy to extrapolate from this passage more than a passing indication that by the middle of the third/ninth century interest was being taken in the deeds of ʿAntarah, an inference that is corroborated by the entry on the poet included a decade or so later by Ibn Qutaybah in his Book of Poetry and Poets (Kitāb al-Shiʿr wa-l-shuʿarāʾ). That entry comes in two sections: biography and appreciation. The second section (Appendix §§1.8–13) concerns ʿAntarah’s originality (§§1.8–10) and provides several examples of some choice verses, one example of a verse in which ʿAntarah is criticized for going too far (§1.12), and one citation of some verses in which he boasts of his blackness (§1.13). The first section (§§1.1–7) initially discusses the uncertainty hovering over ʿAntarah’s lineage and proceeds to structure its points according to ʿAntarah’s life, from birth to death: his manumission and recognition by his father, his mother and color, his involvement in the War of Dāḥis and al-Ghabrāʾ, his emergence as a major poet with his “Golden Ode,” and his death.
In §1.2 Ibn Qutaybah quotes a sample of the verses of Poem 43 in the present volume that ʿAntarah declaims as he charges into battle on the day he wins his freedom. This quotation by Ibn Qutaybah is significant because these verses are not included in al-Shantamarī’s redaction of (al-Sijistānī’s? version of) al-Aṣmaʿī’s recension, though they are included as the final poem in al-Baṭalyawsī’s recension. This meager piece of evidence is an indication that al-Baṭalyawsī’s recension of poems not included in al-Aṣmaʿī’s redaction may in fact include materials that predate Ibn Qutaybah. Noteworthy are similarities between comments in Ibn Qutaybah and remarks provided by al-Shantamarī