The Poets and the Scholars: A Reflection
Imruʾ al-Qays opens his Muʿallaqah with that plaintive summons which succeeding generations have echoed, as though he left no doorway into poetry that he himself had not already unbolted, no path to the ode that he had not already levelled:
“Stay, let us weep over the memory of a beloved and a dwelling
At Saqṭ al-Lawā between al-Dukhūl and Ḥawmal.”
Ṭarafah ibn al-ʿAbd arrives and finds himself left with no choice but to halt, to weep and to invoke the traces of the campsite; he declares:
“For Khawlah there remain ruins at Barqah Thahmad,
Gleaming like the relics of a tattoo upon the back of a hand.”
It is as though, without council or consultation, the two poets had agreed that poetry is not truly poetry unless its author pauses at a desolate vestige, sheds tears there, extracts from the dust recollections, from the stones griefs, and from the deserted abodes poems in which mention of their one-time inhabitants is never absent.
Nor is Imruʾ al-Qays content with a single visit. He returns to the same malady, as though only by standing once more at the ruin can he hope for cure:
“My remedy is but a stream of flowing tears—
Yet what pickaxe is of use at a vanished trace?”
Labīd comes, and he too stands before the dwelling, questioning it, wringing sorrow out of it, as if all the poets had concurred that hearts mourn only when they halt at rubble, that eyes overflow only at the sight of relics, that language is found only in the soil that now blankets the homes of the beloved:
“Do you recognise the house, the ruins and the trampled ground?
They have added to the ailing heart another grief.
A house once inhabited by Asmāʾ—
And for you, in those days, it had been a homeland.”
Then Imruʾ al-Qays returns yet again, tireless in halting, tireless in weeping, tireless in summoning his two companions to what he had summoned them before:
“Turn aside to the ancient ruin, for we
Must weep for the dwellings as Ibn Khidhām wept.”
Here one cannot but ask: did the poets stop at these ruins because the ruins truly deserved lamentation, or did the ruins deserve lamentation only because the poets had grown accustomed to pausing over them? Did the poet come upon the ruin and find it sorrowful, or did he arrive already bearing his sorrow, lay it upon the threshold, and depart imagining that he had crafted something marvellous?
Some poets themselves became aware of this repetition and grew weary of it, until they began to complain that speech had exhausted its meanings, that a later poet presents only what an earlier one has already said, that the new ode is but an echo of an old one. Kaʿb ibn Zuhayr said:
“I see that we say nothing but regurgitated words,
Repeated anew from what we have said before.”
And the same has been ascribed to his father Zuhayr ibn Abī Sulmā:
“I see that we say nothing but a thing on loan,
A thing on loan from our own oft-repeated speech.”
If the poets detected the ailment and confessed that they spoke only what was recycled and reheated, why should we imagine that the ailment perished with the Jāhiliyyah and left behind no progeny to inherit its habit of repetition, to imitate it in word and deed?
Centuries have passed, states have changed, tribes have vanished, the dwellings over which Imruʾ al-Qays, Ṭarafah and Labīd wept have been effaced; yet the custom of halting at ruins remains alive, though the ruins have altered, the people who halt have changed, and the language of mourning has taken on other forms.
The strangest thing, perhaps, is that Abū Nuwās, having wearied of the poets’ lament over deserted abodes, deemed the best remedy for this ancient habit to be a counsel of ease. He mocked:
“Say to the one who stands weeping over a vanished trace:
What harm had there been had he sat down instead?”
What indeed would have harmed the poet had he sat rather than stood? What compels him to weep over a dwelling that has disappeared, when the very causes of weeping have disappeared with it and nothing remains save a mark contested by dust and wind? Yet the poets, it would seem, did not always possess the freedom to sit; the standing at the ruins was demanded by the ode itself, just as the weeping over them was a condition of admission into the realm of poetry.
Thirty-six years ago I attended a gathering of jurists and muftīs convened to consider the determination of the beginnings of the lunar months. One group clung to naked sighting of the moon, citing the Prophet’s saying, “Ṣūmū li-ruʾyatihi wa-afṭirū li-ruʾyatihi” (Fast when you see it and break the fast when you see it). A second group argued for reliance on astronomical science, holding that “seeing” in the ḥadīth means knowledge. A third upheld the unity of horizons; a fourth preferred their divergence. From there the discussions branched into conjunction, the possibility of sighting and every matter related thereto.
There is nothing in such debate, as debate, that warrants objection, for scientific questions are not resolved by wishfulness, nor are they solved merely by a desire to escape disagreement. What struck me, however, was that after that meeting I attended further local and international symposia and witnessed the selfsame questions raised, the same proofs rehearsed, the same opinions repeated, until I fancied I had never left the first gathering, that the intervening years were but the distance between two sittings, that only the faces had changed while the discourse remained where it was.
I was then informed that these assemblies have been recycling the same statements for nearly a century, that the old fiqh works contained these very issues and proofs, that researchers are still turning in the same circle—beginning where their predecessors began, ending where they ended, and then announcing that they have freshly investigated the matter!
At that moment I remembered the poets of the Jāhiliyyah: Imruʾ al-Qays calling his companions to halt, Ṭarafah describing Khawlah’s ruins, Labīd questioning the abode, Zuhayr lamenting borrowed speech, Kaʿb declaring that utterance is nothing but regurgitation. I said to myself: how like some jurists in their sessions are those pre-Islamic poets! Those halt at ruins, these halt at opinions; those weep over dwellings that have vanished, these recall issues long worn away; those recite the names of beloveds who have gone, these rehearse the names of scholars who have passed; those describe the traces of abodes, these describe the traces of disagreement. Both groups depart having performed what custom demands, having fulfilled the rites of standing and repetition imposed by heritage.
Yet there is a difference that may not be ignored. The poet could, in many cases, replace one ruin with another, one beloved with another, one tear with another, and nothing in his poem would change but a name or a place. The jurist, however, is dealing with matters that touch people’s lives—their worship and their transactions. It is not enough for him merely to repeat what the predecessors said and then imagine that repetition has fulfilled the task of inquiry, that preserving the disagreement has relieved him of studying its premises, its proofs and the reality of its application.
There is no blame in a jurist’s knowing the opinions of the early scholars, appreciating their efforts, returning to their books; ignorance of the legacy is not ijtihād, just as differing from the predecessors is not by itself proof of independence. The blame lies in turning knowledge into the guardianship of opinions, in making research the repetition of what has already been said, in convening conferences only to resurrect old disputes—without examining their evidences, without defining precisely the point of contention, without testing whether the opinions are still viable within a context whose circumstances, instruments and sciences have altered.
The jurist who parrots the words of those before him, adding no understanding, no verification, no clarification, resembles the poet who stands at the ruin and weeps because previous poets wept—not because he feels a new sorrow, not because he perceives in the dwelling a meaning unseen by others. And just as copious tears do not restore the inhabitants of the ruin, repeated utterances do not resolve the issue; disagreement does not become new knowledge merely by being presented at an international congress, printed in an elegant volume or delivered in a session chaired by eminent scholars.
After these long centuries of study, we are entitled to ask: how many issues have truly been re-examined, and how many have merely been re-narrated? How many conferences have led to a fresh clarification of a question, and how many have gone no further than gathering and arranging opinions, concluding with a recommendation hardly different from what was known before the conference convened? How many researchers enter a question asking: What is the weightier view in the light of the proofs and present data? And how many enter asking: How may I present the opinions already presented before me without departing from the familiar?
The point is not to forbid jurists from revisiting a matter; issues may renew themselves with changing circumstances, and new knowledge may require a reconsideration of settled judgements. But reconsideration is one thing and repetition of words another: the first opens a door, the second may do no more than stand before it, describing it again and again, praising what has already been said about it.
It would be as though poets remained for centuries halting at a single set of ruins, describing its stones, counting its cracks, measuring the distance between one house and another, then emerging before the people with new dīwāns, claiming they had opened for poetry horizons never opened before.
The poets themselves preceded us in confessing the plague of repetition. Zuhayr said:
“I see that we say nothing but a thing on loan,
A thing on loan from our own oft-repeated speech.”
His son Kaʿb echoed:
“I see that we say nothing but regurgitated words,
Repeated anew from what we have said before.”
Abū Nuwās, exasperated by the endless standing and weeping, found no more eloquent question for those who had wearied themselves and others:
“Say to the one who stands weeping over a vanished trace:
What harm had there been had he sat down instead?”
And I say to the one who remains standing before the same issue, repeating what the predecessors said, reproducing what they reproduced, imagining that prolonged standing before disagreement is itself a virtue: what harm would there be were you to sit awhile, review what you have gathered, reflect on what you have transmitted, and ask yourself: Am I truly searching for the truth, or merely performing an academic ritual I have inherited from others?
